Author Archives: xsisupport

Friday Flashback #8

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GDC 1997

Theme: STONE FREE – Create any game you think. Think what you want.
Stone free is a rebellious attitude of confidence and freedom

Create any game you think: Softimage has the capabilities help create any game you can think of
Think what you want: With Softimage you do not have to limit your imagination

GDC 2000

Themes:
Softimage Sumatra: Animation redefined
Softimage|3D 3.9: Production proven, 3D workhorse
XSI Viewer Tools: Art pathway for interactive media

GDC 2001

Theme: Innovate. Create. Collaborate.
Softimage games tools offering: Softimage provides a complete, open toolset for game creation that lets users pick and choose functionality to integrate with their existing pipelines and custom engines:

GDC 2004

Theme: Better Faster XSI

GDC 2006

Themes:
Characters at work, characters at play
Getting into characters: building performances for Next-Generation Productions.
All about being the leader in innovation

GDC 2007

Theme: Play Together

GDC 2008

Theme: ??? I don’t remember ???

Documentation moves to the Web for 2012

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The shrinking Softimage box set through the years (Softimage|3D, XSI 5, XSI 7, and finally, Softimage 2012).

One of the changes in the 2012 release is that both the User’s Guide and the SDK Guide have moved to the web. There’s no more compiled help files (chm). Everything is now web-based.

The Setup program doesn’t include the help files, but you can download them if you want a local copy.

The General preferences now include some Help Location settings to tell Softimage where to find the online help:

This is part of a wider initiative across all Autodesk products. Some of the potential benefits include:

  • A more dynamic and up-to-date resource (compared to a static copy of the docs shipped with the product). Content can be updated on an on-going basis between releases.
  • Documentation can be integrated with other online resources, such as the KB, blogs, and forums, so users can search across all available content.
  • Standardization of help systems and formats.
  • Reduction of application footprint.

A Syflex on ICE snippet

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During his Softimage 2012 demo at GDC, Mark Schoennagel has an amusing [to me at least] little bit where he uses Syflex to inflate and deflate a model. I recreated the effect but not the funny balloon noises that Mark makes while the doggie inflates and deflates.

The Syflex setup is pretty simple: I just pinned the tail and added a volume force.

JPGs that won’t load into Softimage

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I sometimes wondered why Rock Falcon always had a noIcon texture in my viewport, even though if I did a render region, I could see the texture was really there.
I assumed it was something about the software on my system, because Manny didn’t have the same problem even though he has the exact same hardware.

Then I read this post from Luc-Eric on the mailing list:

I discovered a bug in the standard jpeg library that causes a problem
with some formats of jpeg — probably progressive.
It uses a temp file to decompress them and in Windows that ends up
being a temp file in the root of the drive. If you’re under Vista or
some account with limited privileges that prevent writing to the root
of the drive, the jpegs won’t load.
via JPG Baseline / Progressive – Google Groups.

I did a quick check with Process Monitor, and I saw that Softimage was indeed trying to create a file in my C:\ driver, and getting ACCESS DENIED.
I checked Manny’s machine, and he can write to the C:\ drive because he has UAC disabled.

A little more about the interactive tool SDK

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Softimage 2012 includes several examples of custom tools built with the new interactive tool SDK. For example, there’s the Box Transform Tool:

The Box Transform Tool is a complex manipulator-style tool that uses highlighting, shortcut keys, context menus and on-screen controls.

Interactive tools are a new type of custom plugin, implemented in C++. You need to know OpenGL, because it is used for drawing and picking in the viewport. More here…

Getting the screen resolution

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This snippet uses WMI to get the screen resolution.

GetMonitorResolution();

function GetMonitorResolution()
{
       var wbemFlagReturnImmediately = 0x10;

       var Mode        = wbemFlagReturnImmediately;
       var Query       = "Select * from Win32_VideoController";
       var oWMIService = GetObject( "winmgmts:\\\\.\\root\\cimv2" );
       var oCollection = oWMIService.ExecQuery( Query, "WQL", Mode );

       var oItems = new Enumerator( oCollection );

       for ( ; !oItems.atEnd(); oItems.moveNext() ) {

               var oItem = oItems.item();

               // dump info
               LogMessage( "Resolution [x,y]: " +
				oItem.CurrentHorizontalResolution + ", " +
				oItem.CurrentVerticalResolution );
       }

       return;
}

For me, this script outputs the resolution of both monitors:

// INFO : Resolution [x,y]: 1280, 1024
// INFO : Resolution [x,y]: 1920, 1200

Credit: Matt Lind, on the XSI mailing list

PyQT ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found

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Several customers have hit this error when using PyQT with Softimage.

# INFO : Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "somefile.py", line X, in <module>
#     from PyQt4 import QtGui
# ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.

On Windows, Softimage 2011 includes four Qt DLLs in the %XSI_BINDIR% folder.

  • QtCore4.dll
  • QtGui4.dll
  • QtOpenGL4.dll
  • QtXml4.dll

We don’t use the Qt DLLs. I believe the idea was to ship the Qt dlls for plugins that use Qt, so that the dlls were already in place. So, you can rename the DLLs to .bak to avoid the error.

References:
conflict with QT DLLs inside Softimage 2011.5
Scripting – struggling to get pyQt to work

Area :: Blogs :: Introducing Softimage 2012 with ICE Modeling

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Note: There seems to be a technical glitch with the videos at the moment. They don’t load for me in IE or Firefox.

via Area :: Blogs :: Introducing Softimage 2012 with ICE Modeling.

Wow time flies. It was just back in October when we shipped 2011.5 and already we are announcing Softimage 2012. It should only be a few more weeks until we actually ship this too.

Until then here are a few videos made by Chinny and a big list of the features in the release.

Updating the modeling tools has been a pretty common request in the last couple of years. So rather than Softimage building a few new ones, we built the architecture for others to do it in ICE instead. This means while we can build new modeling tools using ICE, so can the community without waiting for us. ICE modeling can be fully procedural, including the ability to create topology from basically nothing… which was not possible before.

Also, for you TDs out there check out what’s new in the SDK. Really sweet stuff like being able to create your own custom manipulators, the OnCommand event and being able to create an undo complex.

Anyway here is the eye candy – enjoy!