Category Archives: Friday Flashback

Friday Flashback #99

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In Dec 2012, there’s a rumor that ICE is “going to Maya” that’s causing some concern. Nobody wants to lose ICE 🙂

Let’s flash back five years to Dec 2007 when, in something of an ironic counterpoint, there was concern that rampant speculation about Moondust (aka ICE) would result in disappointment and a negative backlash.

…looking at all the nonsense floating around on the forums about Moondust, I already can see the negative posts when people realize it doesn’t do feature XYZ…

…It’s not going to go well for Softimage at launch if Moondust doesn’t meet expectations, and at this point, I’d be willing to bet that it won’t…

…Although it’s fun to speculate about Moondust, the over excited anticipation can only lead to disappointment…

Looking back, I don’t think that ICE did disappoint. What do you think?

web.archive of page
xsibase-moondust

Friday Flashback #98

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3d.archive.9712.Sumatra.revisited-header

3d.archive.9712.Sumatra.revisitedWhat were they talking about 15 years ago on the SOFTIMAGE|3D discussion group? Well, for one thing, they were wondering about “Sumatra (codename)” and whether they’d lose the beloved spartan SOFTIMAGE|3D interface:

Aside from the possibility of losing certain favorite tools I am very concerned with what Sumatra’s design will be like. I really love the spartan modular SI interface. It’s elegant, clean and very responsive.

I agree about the Interface. I really don’t care if they change the “look” of the interface, do that goofy rounded thing with the buttons, as long as they keep the functionality and general layout: The menu cells along eachside of the four views.

My vote is to KEEP THE SPARTAN INTERFACE. 10-15 hrs/day, I really don’t want to be looking at colorful icons and layers of hidden functionality collapsed into an insufficient number of modules.

The answer back from Softimage makes for interesting reading (keep in mind that “Sumatra (codename)” wouldn’t be released for another couple of years):

Subject: RE: Sumatra… revisited
From: Dan Kraus
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 10:45:21 -0500

——————————————————————————–

>I think we should all think about it and be a little concerned that
>after SIGGRAPH SI has not even whispered the word ‘Sumatra.’

Although we’ve been coding hard since well before Siggraph ’96, we
haven’t spoken too much about it, except at the yearly Siggraph users’
group, because we want to be certain of our ship date before starting to
set concrete user expectations.

Sumatra is a complete replacement for the currently 3D product –
modelling, animation, rendering, particle, mental ray, etc, all
integrated into a single, seamless multi-threaded environment. We’re
coding Sumatra simultaneously both on IRIX and NT – there’s no ‘port’
involved this time, which also means that we get to take max advantage
of the hardware on both sides. Of course, there’s a lot of new tools –
performance, modelling/animation, etc – but our first priority is the
v3.7 toolset, to guarantee that you can use Sumatra for exactly the same
thing for which you use SI3D today.

Sumatra will actually be preceded by Twister – a standalone rendering
product which uses the Sumatra interface/architecture, and also
incorporates the next-gen of mental ray (v2.0). Twister is designed to
be used in tandem with SI3D, so you can start using/learning the new
interface as you’re comfortable, and integrate it into your current
workflow.

We currently expect Twister to ship in Q3 (Calendar) of ’98, and Sumatra
(Q4). This is behind our original target dates, but we want to be
completely certain that Sumatra is a true replacement for the current 3D
product. From the upgrade point of view, we’ll be treating Sumatra as
the release version of SI3D, which means users under maintenance will
recieve an automatic upgrade, just as you would to a point release or
service pack.

>>I wanna know what the interface will look like

Can’t blame you 😉 One of the most time-consuming tasks of the
Sumatra/Twister effort has actually been understanding and replicating
the existing user model. This extends way beyond pure interface issues,
and it’s taken us almost 2 years of work with our PM and internal
development teams (including several professional animators) to
guarantee that we understand why and how data is passed through Soft,
and propose an interface re-design which improves on what we have today.
We also have the benefit of having a true in-house production team (the
Softimage Content Group), who works closely with us on tool design,
putting things into immediate practice as soon as they’re coded.

Here’s a peek at a few of the key UI issues, and what’s happening:

Speed of Access – things like parent, cut etc are not available in all
the modules in Soft. One of the things you’ll notice when working with
Sumatra is that the right-hand panel provides you with all the general
controls you need – all the time.

Tools Organization – The Sumatra UI puts things in more sensible and
intuitive places, yet respecting where the most important controls (ex keyframe)
sit today.

Quick Selection Model – Sumatra has filters and presets which make life
much easier by not just making them ‘unselectable’ as is the case in
v3.7SP1, but actually letting you pre-select the type of objects you
want to grab. Makes repeated actions on a certain object type a whole
lot easier

Existing Workflow – The Sumatra UI has been designed with a constant
preoccupation (‘obsession’ is probably more accurate, actually 🙂 with
maintaining the existing workflow. Specifically, things like keeping all
the major tools two clicks away, providing contextual menus (ok, that’s
new :-), work-centric focus (manage your character, not the tools) – and
most of all, pure interface speed.

Please keep the comments coming, and keep an eye on our web page early next year – we’ll start rolling out the info as we draw closer to ship.

Cheers,
Dan

____________________________________________
Dan Kraus Softimage/Microsoft
Product Manager, 3D Montreal, Quebec

There was also a side-discussion of whether or not a context-sensitive UI would be a good thing; surprisingly (to me at least), opinion seemed to be split on that.

Friday Flashback #97

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I came across this SOFTIMAGE|3D photo in an article on rotoscoping. It shows ILM co-supervisor Tom Bertino working on one of ILM’s Flubber shots.
bertinoatwork

Once the background plate was scanned into ILM’s Silicon Graphics computers, the match movers went to work. “We’re able to bring up that clip in the computer in a Softimage 3-D environment,” says Bertino. “The matchmovers then took what’s seen on film and recreated it in primitive wireframe models.”
—Breaking the Mold:Physics of Jell-O Inspires CGI Stars of Flubber

A little more time on Google led me to some postings on vimeo from Philip Edward Alexy, who was the lead technical animator on Flubber.

First of all, sorry for the quality: this was ripped from a DVD copy of a D-beta tape.
As you can see, there is a heck of a lot more going on that you would think for this shot. As you see at the beginning, there is the Blob Flubber sitting in the matchmove representation of Robin William’s hand. Now keep in mind, back then, all of the matchmove stuff, both camera and object geometry, was HAND-ANIMATED. There was a crew of guys from the old practical ILM shop who transferred into the digital side: some of these guys worked on “Empire Strikes Back” and onwards, so they knew how cameras worked and were able to use this experience to do the one thing that made ILM stand out back then, properly reconstruct scene and camera information into the computer.
So we have the Blob sitting there, with what appears to be somesort of orthopedic back-brace and a black fuzzy alien sitting in its belly. Well, the “brace” is in fact the up-vector construct I had to develop because the Meta-Clay elements that made up the Blob Flubber where not spherical, they were shaped like overlapping mass of blobby M&Ms because when the client want to get away from the “pear-shaped” Flubber that spherical Meta-Clay created. BUT, Softimage3|D didn’t have up-vector constraint and (of if it it, it did not work well at all) when they were lined up on the cluster-deformed path spline that held them in place, they would start flipping randomly along the shortest axis. This was bad because it looked like the Flubber was having a seizure when animated. So I had to invent an up-vector constraint that worked consistently. So that’s what the “brace” is, which had to be, at times, key-framed to prevent the flipping.
So what’s that alien? Why it’s the Puppy Flubber rig, elements and geometry, all compressed, waiting for the moment Robin Williams sticks his fingers into the Blob Flubber. Presto-change-o, without any quick cutting or changing of the scene file because of the nature of Meta-Clay, the Puppy Flubber pops up, all ready and IK-rigged, and the Blob Flubber lines up inside the body part of the Puppy.

The puppy design, by Scott Leberecht, had to be envisioned with the tools at the time, which was Meta-Clay balls in Softimage 3|D. If you had ever used that tool, you would understand what a task it was to get the right shape, and then rig it so it could be animated.

At the time, it was the densest CGI structure ever made. There were about three hundred Meta-Clay elements, all spine/spline/cluster controlled. It took about two minutes just to refresh to the next frame. It took me about two months to build and rig.

A bit of test animation, to show that ILM could actually DO the Character Flubber, that ended up in the official Disney trailer.
Little bit of trivia: all those bubbles you see? They’re not part of the shader: those are all individual pieces of geometry that are parented to the rig. Sometimes, because they would fly out of the mesh depending of the pose, they had to be key-framed

This one shot took a year to do. Seriously.

Finally, in a Word document at ncca.bournemouth.ac.uk, I found this. It’s attributed to a no-longer existing page at Philip Edward Alexy’s web site.

“We had thought of doing something where we could use B-spline patches that we could shape animate over time. But, that wasn’t practical because Flubber changed so much within a sequence that it would have been too time-prohibitive to model all the different forms. Even when he was just a little blob he changed so much that to do it using patches, shape animation and lattices just wouldn’t work.”

“Since the Flubber character was composed almost entirely of metaballs, the animators could easily turn him into anything from a pair of lips to a tail-wagging puppy to a hip-shaking mambo dancer. In addition to Softimage, ILM developed several custom effects to turn a blob into everything that blobs could possibly become within the animators’ collective imagination. Several Flubber models were developed: the Basic Blob, a male and female Actor-Flubber, a Scare-Flubber, a Puppy-Flubber, a Fingers-Flubber, a Bubble-Flubber and several others – each more difficult to pronounce in rapid succession.”
— http://www.flyingsheep.org/work/resume/html/resume_pub_flub.html

Friday Flashback #92

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Softimage Awards and Recognitions circa 1996.
Note the Emmy award for the daytime soap “As the World Turns” 🙂

I didn’t expect to see the daytime soap opera As the World Turns on the list. And somewhat ironically (to me), if I google “Softimage as the world turns”, the first hit is an Autodesk jobs page.

I like the Google summary: “Your World. Your Future. undefined“

Friday Flashback #91

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The Yearning3D still images, created in 1993 by Char Davies using Softimage|3D on Silicon Graphics hardware. Char Davies was the Vice President of Visual Research at Softimage.

Char Davies, The Yearning, 1993.
3D digital still image.
Distinction Prix Ars Electronica 93 in the category Computer Graphics.

All of my work, including the paintings I made for many years before using 3D software, is concerned with communicating a particular vision of the world. I do not consider these images, The Drowning (Falling from One into the Other) and The Yearning, to be computer graphics or computer art, but rather art created through computer technology. I call them 3D still-images for they are essentially frames of 3D virtual worlds. They were made interactively with the 3D animation software SoftImage. In my research I am constantly pushing the software’s capacity as an intuitive and emotionally expressive instrument, for it is this capacity that I value most.
…
Interactive 3D software (and I should specify SoftImage because my creative method is dependent on it and was in fact born from it) enables me to virtually embody the metaphorical content of these images, bringing them across a threshold from the realm of dim intuition into a “real” world of light and three-dimensional form. By working extensively with simulated light and shadow in virtual 3D space, combining photo-realism and abstraction, solidity and transparency, volume and spatial ambiguity, I am able to integrate subjective and objective, metaphysical and physical realms, in a way that technique and content become synonomous.

Char Davies,The Drowning (Falling from One into the Other), 1993.
3D digital still image.
Distinction Prix Ars Electronica 93 in the category Computer Graphic.

Friday Flashback #90

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Trick question: when was Softimage 3D ported to Windows NT?
Answer: In version 3.0, Softimage 3D was available on Windows NT in early 1996, but Softimage 3D Extreme on Windows NT was available only in mid-1996, in version 3.5.

Here’s what I could cobble together as proof…

Microsoft Delivers High-End 3-D Animation Software for Microsoft Windows NTJan. 16, 1996

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 16, 1996 — Microsoft Corp. today began shipping a new version of its award-winning 3-D modeling and animation software, Microsoft® Softimage® 3D, for the Windows NT ™operating system. Softimage 3D 3.0 for Windows NT offers the same production-proven 3-D animation environment as Softimage 3D for Silicon Graphics® systems, while delivering workstation-class performance at approximately 50 percent of the overall system cost. With this breakthrough in price/performance, more animators now can take advantage of high-end 3-D animation software.

For more than nine years, Softimage has provided digital-media artists with an intuitive, creative, production-proven 3-D modeling and animation environment for creating characters and scenes for films, commercials, games, interactive multimedia titles and other productions. Softimage products have helped create many of the world’s most innovative, visual effects-rich productions, including films such as “Jurassic Park,” The “Mask,” “Jumanji” and “Casper” ; commercials such as the Shell Dancing Gas Pumps; and interactive games such as Virtua Fighter and Daytona. Softimage has pioneered many of the advanced animation techniques that are used throughout the industry, including inverse kinematics, spline-based modeling and animation, and motion-capture technology. In 1994, the company merged with Microsoft to help bring these 3-D animation capabilities to a broader audience.

“Today marks an important milestone in making high-end 3-D animation capabilities widely available,” said Daniel Langlois, senior director at Microsoft and founder of Softimage. “Because Windows NT offers the same high-performance graphics capabilities as UNIX® -based workstations and all of the benefits of a highly competitive ‘PC economy,’ many more content creators will be able to take advantage of high-end 3-D animation software. And these compelling price/performance figures will get even better over time.”

Softimage 3D comes to Windows NT
InfoWorld, 22 January 1996

Microsoft delivers high-end 3-D animation software for Microsoft Windows NT; Softimage 3D for Windows NT provides workstation-class capabilities and performance at approximately half the system cost.
REDMOND, Wash.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 16, 1996–

Microsoft Corp. today began shipping a new version of its award-winning 3-D modeling and animation software, Softimage(r) 3D, for the Windows NT(Windows New Technology) A 32-bit operating system from Microsoft for Intel x86 CPUs. NT is the core technology in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (see Windows). Available in separate client and server versions, it includes built-in networking and preemptive multitasking.

Softimage 3D 3.0 for Windows NT offers the same production-proven 3-D animation environment as Softimage 3D for Silicon Graphics(r) systems, while delivering workstation-class performance at approximately 50 percent of the overall system cost. With this breakthrough in price/performance, more animators now can take advantage of high-end 3-D animation software.

Product Overview: Softimage|3D Version 3.0 for Windows NT
January 1996

At its first release, however, Softimage 3D Extreme for Windows NT is not available. Softimage 3D Extreme offers additional features including Softimage Mental Ray distributed rendering, MetaClay for modeling organic shapes, and a particles system for creating fire, smoke and other effects. Softimage 3D Extreme for Windows NT is expected to be available by mid 1996.

SoftimageNT
January 1996, 3D Design magazine

The beta version of SoftImage’s NT has yet to implement some more advanced features, such as Mental Ray and Particle, but SoftImage promises to have them ready when the program ships this quarter.”

SoftimageNT-review-Jan-1996

Microsoft Introduces Major Upgrade to Softimage 3D
May 16, 1996

All major Softimage 3D features are now available on Intel® Pentium® Pro, Alpha and MIPS® RISC 4400-based systems for the Microsoft® Windows NT® operating system and the Silicon Graphics® platform.