SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

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Rork
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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Rork » 16 Sep 2013, 14:01

UT 2013 - Impressions

First of all, it was great to see and talk to some familiar faces from last year, and seeing a lot of new faces.
If I didn't talk to you, come back next year! :-)


The Uebertage was kicked off by Stephan Wörmann, the developer of the Octane4Softimage plugin.

Stephan showed us the integration of Octane inside Softimage, and the different locations inside Softimage where to find Octane related things.

With the help of basic demo scenes, Stephan showed us the integration of the Octane materials inside Softimage, and how the materials work.
A nice SSS node with only three basic sliders gave really good results quickly.
With a nice rendering stat window, you are able to see the RAM usage, rendering times etc. A good tool to keep your render times under control.

Octane supports a set of lighting methods, like path tracing, biased or lights. Depending on the method chosen the GI calculation will differ.
Octane will also see and use any GPU in you computer, and you can even select one or more and use them on the fly.
Interaction is very fast, any camera change will result in an immediate re-render. There's no renderregion support yet (a SI SDK bug), but the render preview window did just fine.

Of course the plugin supports the passes system, as well as one can output channels like UV's, Normals, ZDepth, Alpha etc.
Things like the sky system, animated textures, camera lens tone mappers are integrated and working great.
An interesting note was that Octane works with geo and emissive materials, that means the lights in Softimage will not work (yet).
So lighting comes from objects, so big objects mean soft shadows. IES lights are implemented and support any .ies profile out there.
A nice feature is the so called PMC modus, its is a rendering modus for getting rid of those nasty 'fireflies' often seen with biased renderers.

Some things, like full SI lights support, ICE and displacement are waiting to being implemented, but it will be there soon.
If you want to see some of his work done with the plugin, check out his Vimeo account or go to the Otcane website for a trial.



After a short break, next in line was Eric Mootz from Mootzoid.



No big new releases from Eric to be announced this year, but he had some nice things to give away again.

A video showed off the new emTools.

Eric showed off some new features of emTopolizer, and a related new tool called emRoads and emCar. This was something initially developed for the Polynoid Volkswagen job.
emRoads is a tool that will create roads based on curves, with all kind of neat functionality like automatic crossings, lane selection, direction, borders and ICE data.
So lanes with multiple directions, distribution of houses along the borders, changeable curves and geometry creation is all possible.
It's a tool that can eat away your time quickly ;-)

Another new tool based on the emTopolyzer is the Pointcloud2Geo. This tool can create geometry out of the basic emitter objects, or create one big mesh out of your emitted geometry.
All with UV's, vector shapes, LOD for the basic ICE shapes etc.
Cherry on the cake is that you export the endresult to cache, so you have instant playback.

A new tool Eric introduced is emReader for Modo. It's a simple tool to import .OBJ, Realflow and the emFile format.
A Maya version is in the works, as is a Softimage version. Eric generously offered the Softimage version for free. Modo/Maya users will pay a small fee for the tool.

Eric was also proud to show off his new website that is launching soon. Besides a complete new redesign, it also offers a more consistent tutorial corner.

There was a lot of work done for the upcoming emFluid plugin v5. Eric added a ICE based volume renderer that is really really fast.
The new version will of course work flawlessly with the shader from Holger Schönberger (also known for Royal Render and BA Shaders)

Some interesting things are the fact that basic sims and final sims will look exactly the same. Which can be an issue with other systems.
With volumetric displacement it's very easy to add complex detail to the sim. All of this can be exported to disk, and even be daisy chained to get even more detail!!
The shader also support geo shapes (and shape anim) as a container for e.g. clouds.
Several 3d noise types are supported, like Worly, Perlin etc.
Selfshadowing, lightsources are directly to be rendered in the viewport.

A nice example of the tool used in production is shown in the Playmobil video.
Nice detail: with the shader tool Holger wrote, it was possible to distribute and scale just a few sims to populate big scenes.



After Eric his presentation it was time to nourish the body with a very nice lunch, provided by Uebertage.



After lunch it was time for Rudiger Kaltenhauser and Marcos Lauterback from Glassworks to have their presentation on the G-Star commercial.

Starting off with showing moodboards and talking about their way of working on the start of a project, the commercial was dissected into pieces from the storyboard.
The start scene with the cotton was helped out by ICE wizard Tim Borgmann.

It was interesting to see some things change during production, like trying out multiple strand for a thread change into a single cylinder with displacement over time.
Also, the weaving sequence is based on real mechanical weaving, defined by the G-Star office. It all had to be real according to their ways of working with cloth and have that signature G-Star look.
The final bit of animation went through more than 100 different versions before being approved. Ouch...

Fun fact, the dog was created by scanning in a actual dog skeleton, which in the end became the official 'logo' for the company.
The project ran for roughly 6 months, and production took roughly 2 months with 5-6 people.



After another short break, Oliver Weingarten himself demo'd the Redshift renderer for Softimage.
Oliver started off with some slides explaining Redshift and the people behind it.

Redshift is a biased renderer with a brute force GI engine. It also uses photon mapping, Irradiance caching and pointclouds to create a final lighting solution.
At the moment Redshift is still in closed alpha, but already used in production. It also has a rapid development, with new features added almost daily.
A public beta will be here soon, including a bit more ICE support. Instances are already fully supported.
Oliver showed a test scene with thousands of bamboo trees ans grass patches, all rendering straight away.

Some nice examples of lighting and materials were shown, and the speed of the GPU based renderer is impressive. If these developments keep continuing for GPU based renderers, it might give some 'normal' renderers a run for their money. Especially when you run a smaller studio.

Also, Redshift fully supports the renderregion, so your workflow doesn't have to change much.
Pricing for the renderer at release is not set yet, but will be in the 'very reasonable' area.

A small demo video of Redshift for Softimage can be found here.



Again a short break.



Helge Mathee from Fabric Engine made a virtual presence this year.
Due to some circumstances that came up at the last minute, he wasn't able to make it in person.
But being a trooper, he made a excellent video about the latest developments with Splice for Softimage.

He showed us the power of Splice inside Softimage, but also a more important thing, the ability to transfer FE scripts between applications.
Helge showed one script that created procedural geometry the same way in Maya, Softimage and Nuke. All from the same base code.
Helge also showed a car rig that performed the same way in Softimage as Maya based on Spline assets.

No more brain damage to get stuff like this to work consistently over different applications....

Another very interesting thing concerning rigging was the spline manipulation setup for rigging

As this is all running on the FE core, it is very fast. And as all FE solutions, it runs the same code on Maya as Softimage.



Than it was time for the Tombola.
Thanks a bunch to the several parties giving away their things, there were some happy people taking away prices back home.
Even some of the presenters won a price.



Last one of the day to present their work was Polynoid.
They came to Siegen with a huge group, and like last year some nice work to show.
Progression of work for MTV/Idol, Nike Hypervenom, HALO, a nice gametrailer and work for Volkswagen (see emRoad and emCars) were shown with lots of styleframes, animatics and pre-renders.

Also, they announced they created a second company for production & animation called Woodblock
The reason was that they felt Polynoid drifted too far away from their roots.



This concluded the Uebertage 2103, and more than 40 people joined for food & drinks in the evening.
I don't have to tell you it was a lot of fun up till 3 in the morning.


So.... Be there next year! ;)
Last edited by Rork on 17 Sep 2013, 11:41, edited 2 times in total.
SI UI tutorials: Toolbar http://goo.gl/iYOL0l | Custom Layout http://goo.gl/6iP5xQ | RenderManager View http://goo.gl/b4ZkjQ
So long, and thanks for all the Fish!!

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Bullit » 17 Sep 2013, 02:55

Wonderful, Rork thanks.

cgcris
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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by cgcris » 17 Sep 2013, 11:18

Hey Rork,

Really nice to meet you in Siegen!

Great write up, would you mind if I post it in softimage.tv in the News section?. Would like to spread the word about uber tager a bit more!

The only error I see is the new production company of polynoid is called woodblock, I think this is their website http://woodblock.tv

Laters!
C

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by owei » 17 Sep 2013, 11:34

Hi there!

Thanks to all the presenters and attendees for making this such a great event!! I had a lot of fun!!

@Rob
Thanks Rob for putting this together!! Much appreciated..!! Great work!

@Cris
Great to have meat you in person! Hope you found it worth to take the trip over to Siegen ;)

@all
Stay tuned for the videos...Helge already put his presentation to the web!





cheers,
oli

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Rork » 17 Sep 2013, 11:36

Hi Chris,

Same here!

And no problem posting that on softimage.tv, it's good to see more stuff linked on the forums and blogs :-bd

And good find, it's a Freudian slip I guess... I fixed it and added the link.

cheers!

rob
SI UI tutorials: Toolbar http://goo.gl/iYOL0l | Custom Layout http://goo.gl/6iP5xQ | RenderManager View http://goo.gl/b4ZkjQ
So long, and thanks for all the Fish!!

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Hirazi Blue » 18 Sep 2013, 09:34

Content removed, see next posts
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by owei » 18 Sep 2013, 09:55

@hirazi
funny...look at the previous page..I already posted that video ;)

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Hirazi Blue » 18 Sep 2013, 10:41

No that's not funny, that's just plain stupid (of me) Image :ymblushing:
I already knew I was having a couple of very bad days.
Well now it's confirmed on the si-community as well!!!

Sorry... ;)
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

cgcris
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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by cgcris » 30 Sep 2013, 23:09

That took a while, but I finally got around it!

http://softimage.tv/

http://softimage.tv/softimage-ubertage- ... pressions/

Hope you are all well!!

Newcomer (<20 posts) alert: please use the URL tags - HB

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by owei » 01 Oct 2013, 08:42

Thanks Chris!! Cool!

Cheers,
Oli

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by Rork » 01 Oct 2013, 08:53

Woot! Very cool!

And thanks for mentioning the refcubes :D

cheers,

rob
SI UI tutorials: Toolbar http://goo.gl/iYOL0l | Custom Layout http://goo.gl/6iP5xQ | RenderManager View http://goo.gl/b4ZkjQ
So long, and thanks for all the Fish!!

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Re: SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2013, Friday, Sept 13th 2013

Post by steve22 » 26 Feb 2014, 11:28

Great works! Those images are really cool. Thanks for sharing..

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