Monthly Archives: December 2014

2014 year in review for the Softimage mailing list

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xsi_list_word_cloud_2014_01

1164 topics, 14274 posts, 460 different posters

42% of all activity on the list happened during a five-week period after the Softimage EOL announcement.
xsi_list_by_week_2014

Top 25 topics
* number of posts in bold

  1. SI and Houdini 250
  2. A germ of an idea. 220
  3. SoftImage Artists take on Maya @ Escape Studios 196
  4. new upgrade policy 177
  5. Autodesk webinar 163
  6. Maya feature request from Softimage users 155
  7. Survey – how would you do this? 154
  8. An Open Letter to Carl Bass 133
  9. Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement 126
  10. rigging in xsi vs maya 126
  11. Cinema 4D an option? 121
  12. humanize maya, SOFT top 5 117
  13. Open letter to Autodesk 113
  14. rumor, Soft dead within the next year 111
  15. YOUR TOP 5 109
  16. softimage to modo 103
  17. Redshift3D Render 100
  18. A confession 97
  19. Softimage transition webinar is starting in 10 minutes 96
  20. A more graceful retirement – my counter offer 90
  21. What use is ICE really? 89
  22. Maya strengts (anyone?) 82
  23. 28/03/2014 81
  24. Anyone in the SI list transitioning to MODO? -Please add your mail here 79
  25. Listening 78

Top 25 posters
* number of posts in bold

  1. Sebastien Sterling 611
  2. Jason S 429
  3. Emilio Hernandez 398
  4. Jordi Bares 330
  5. Angus Davidson 329
  6. Matt Lind 317
  7. Mirko Jankovic 303
  8. Leendert A. Hartog 276
  9. Raffaele Fragapane 273
  10. Eric Thivierge 260
  11. olivier jeannel 252
  12. Cristobal Infante 250
  13. Luc-Eric Rousseau 212
  14. Tim Crowson 203
  15. Francisco Criado 183
  16. Stephen Blair 180
  17. Nicolas Esposito 179
  18. Steven Caron 165
  19. Ognjen Vukovic 162
  20. Morten Bartholdy 158
  21. Eric Turman 142
  22. Perry Harovas 140
  23. Rob Chapman 137
  24. Paul Griswold 137
  25. Ed Manning 125
    adrian wyer 125

Friday Flashback #203

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The Hive Creates Festive Fun For Legoland
14/12/2000

construction

The commercial was created using SoftImage

3D animation house, The Hive, was commissioned by Cartoon Network Sponsorship & Promotions department to create a magical virtual advent calendar for the Windsor-based theme park, Legoland.

The commercial was created using SoftImage and airs throughout December on the Cartoon Network.

4th

The Hive’s brief was to create something bright and colourful that really screams Christmas to promote the fact that Legoland is opening its doors over the festive period for the first time.

The Hive worked closely with Cartoon Network Producer, Tracey Cleland, to create 24 different versions – one for each day of December leading up to Christmas day. Each commercial opens with an optical pan in which a Lego Santa welcomes the viewer to a winter landscape of snow-capped hills and trees. The viewer is then drawn to one of 24 Lego advent calendar boxes that open to reveal either a mystery prize or footage of one of Legoland’s Christmas attractions.
landscape

“To maximise efficiency we decided to produce a limited number of advent boxes which could change colour and date and be rotated to fill all the days required,” comments Adrian Wyer animator/compositor at The Hive. “The clever trick with this advert is that because every day is different the viewer is not left with the usual Christmas commercial fatigue.”

santa

The advent calendar commercial follows on the back of a ten second teaser created at the Hive that invited people to ‘Leg it to Legoland’. This aired on the Cartoon Network in November.

Credits
Producer: Tracey Cleland @ The Cartoon Network
Animation Company: The Hive
Post Producer: James Niklasson @ The Hive
Animator/Project Leader/Compositor: Adrian Wyer @ The Hive

Friday Flashback #201

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SOFIMAGE|3D screenshots for Motherdroid, from CG WORLD December 2000

Screenshots originally posted on softimage.jp:
UpA

Step3B

Step2A

Other screenshots I found on a blog:

MotherDroidA5BBA5C3A5C8A5A2A5C3A5D7

MotherDroidA5EFA5A4A5E4A1BCA5D5A5ECA1BCA5E0

Motherdroid-MEKARATE

And finally, the MEKARATE video that includes the MotherDroid.
Mekarate, directed and produced by Hiroyasu Shimo, was part of the SIGGRAPH 2003 Computer Animation Festival. It focuses on an inept office worker who is haunted by a self-destructive wish and plagued with anti-social behavior.

The late Emru Townsend wrote this about MEKARATE:

On the other hand, Hiroyasu Shimo’s Mekarate eschews nature entirely; an office worker nods off at his computer late at night, and has disquieting dreams—only to awaken to find that there are worse things happening in the waking world, with much more in store for him. Contemporary Japanese anime and cinema directors have a singular talent for depicting alienation, and this film practically reeks of it, amid all the horrific biomechanical creatures that torment the lead character. Distressing audio and a visual aesthetic that faithfully mimics a handheld video recording contribute to make Mekarate so disturbing you can’t look away.

Installing aaOcean

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Download
https://bitbucket.org/amaanakram/aaocean/downloads

Install for mental ray

  1. Extract the aaOcean download package.
  2. Create a new workgroup (or use the Softimage User location).
  3. Copy the aaOceanDataShader.dll and aaOceanShaderDefinition.dll from here: 
    aaOceanRev255\aaOcean\MentalRay\Softimage2014

    to 

    $MY_WORKGROUP\Application\Plugins
  4. Copy aaOceanDeformer.dll from here: 
    aaOceanRev255\aaOcean\Softimage\Softimage2014\

    to

    $MY_WORKGROUP\Application\Plugins\

$MY_WORKGROUP is just my workgroup location. For example:
C:\Users\StephenBlair\Documents\softimage\workgroups\aaOcean

Did you notice that the mental ray version of aaOcean doesn’t have a SPDL file? That’s because it has a shader definition plugin instead.
aaOcean

Install for Arnold

  1. Copy 
    aaOceanRev255\aaOcean\Arnold\Arnold-4.2.0.6-windows\Shader\aaOcean.dll

    to

    $WORKGROUP\Addons\SItoA\Application\Plugins\bin\nt-x86-64
  2. Copy 
    aaOcean\Arnold\Arnold-4.2.0.6-windows\SItoA\aaOcean.spdl

    to

    $WORKGROUP\Addons\SItoA\Application\spdl
  3. Copy 
    aaOceanRev255\aaOcean\Softimage\Softimage2014\aaOceanDeformer.dll

    to

    $WORKGROUP\Addons\SItoA\Application\Plugins

$MY_WORKGROUP is just my workgroup location. For example:
C:\Users\StephenBlair\Documents\softimage\workgroups\sitoa-3.2.0-2014