When I interviewed at Softimage back in 94, they gave me a media packet. I finally found dug up that packet recently, and found that it included a set of slides!
I guess I could have borrowed my parent’s slide projector, but instead I borrowed a scanner and transferred them to my computer.
MGM Lion – Boss Film Studio
Fruity Pebbles – Topix C Graphics Anim
Asterix in America – 94 Les Ed. A. Rene – Goscinny/Uderzo
Rain Forest – Zival, Houdek &Kurek
After last Friday’s flashback post, Len Krenzler posted a link to the Def Leppard “Let’s get rocked” video, which was done in 1992 with Softimage|3D:
Came across this old Def Leppard piece, it was on the Softimage3D demo
reel the first time I saw it. Modeling has come a long way since then
but it was quite impressive at the time.
Luc-Eric pointed out that at 1:14 of the vid, you can see Softimage Eddie (click through the screenshot below to see an animated gif of a node connection operation):
At other points in the video, you can see Softimage|3D:
Googling “def leppard” and “softimage” quickly led me to the Reboot series from MainFrame, where I found this bit of info:
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Ian Pearson flew out to Los Angeles, spending the next year sleeping on Chris Brough’s couch during which time Pearson, assisted by a couple of demo animators from Softimage, put together the Def Leppard promo ‘Let’s Get Rocked’. Not only did the video serve as a test of the new Softimage animation software and SGI hardware but the kid in the promo served as a prototype for Enzo. |
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There’s also a few interesting mentions of Softimage in the history of the Reboot series:
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In bringing the series to life technical issues dogged them every step of the way. Although the systems were sound, a combination of Silicon Graphics, Onyx and Indigo hardware, the software was not. Despite being open-ended, allowing them to add to existing programs and write their own programs in-house, the main package Softimage was tempermental and not designed to handle the information being thrown at it, unpredicably crashing at random intervals. During the first year of production ReBoot animators were hit with over 15,000 software bugs, sometimes losing entire profiles or erasing over three weeks’ worth of rendering. “We made every mistake possible,” says Dan Didio, who at the time was a programming executive for ABC and later, ReBoot’s story editor. “That’s the only way you’re going to learn, and we wound up thriving for it. We were charting new territory, which made it kind of fun. We didn’t understand the production problems at the time. ‘ReBoot Inc.’ were pushing programs further than ever before. We became pretty much a beta test site for computer software that was applied later on down the line.” |
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“When we started out, nobody had done what we were doing so there was nobody else’s lessons to learn from.”, says former Director of Communications Mairi Welman, “We were inventing the wheel. We made our mistakes, people worked obscene 18 hours days and slept under desks.” Some even slept in front of their workstations in sleeping bags to maximize time, “While things were rendering, they you would wake up, animate a little more, sleep some more.” Blair recalls. At the same time they had to keep their ABC liason sweet, “I started at ABC Childrens Television and the first show that I was assigned was ReBoot,” says Didio, “Nobody knows what’s going on, nobody knows how it’s been done. I remember stepping in on the first day, seeing the tests and how incredible it was and getting swept up in a lot of what happened.” Gavin Blair now freely admits that for the most part, “We were making it up as we went along.” |
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Back in 1994, the Softimage|3D product was known as “Creative Environment”.
Here’s something from a Creative Environment marketing brochure that was based on the phrase “Creating the 3D World”. Note the big Softimage/little Microsoft logo.
Click the image to get a more legible version…
Thanks to Hirazi Blue for suggesting this flashback.
The initial goal of project MoonDust was to develop a new particle simulation system for XSI. The existing particle system, which had been in XSI since v1.0, had reached its limits. It was a monolithic system that wasn’t flexible or customizable enough (eg available events and attributes hard coded into the system).
I never had to learn the old particle system. There weren’t that many support cases about it, and MoonDust was always just around the corner. I just remember the old particles as a jumbled forest of PPGs and parameters. See for yourself…here’s some screenshots of the old particle system:
It’s interesting to compare how things worked before:
and after:
However, the scope of the project eventually grew into the development of a procedural graph system.
Code names for Softimage release through the years.
Thanks to Luc-Eric for the suggestion and the information.
“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Hubble (reference models), Big Bang (handling large number of objects), Spliff (new shader IDE authoring environment) were projects that were developed independently of any release and then merged into a release when they were ready.
Moondust was the node-based particles project that grew into ICE.
Stardust and Apollo were projects that never came to fruition or were folded into other work.
Text version of the codename listing:
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Red Creates Cityscape for Kylie Minogue With Discreet Tools, Softimage XSI
(August 23, 2001)
“Can’t Get You Out of my Head,” the first single to be taken from Kylie’s forthcoming album, features the pop princess driving and strutting her stuff in a futuristic Manga-esque city. Pretty run of the mill stuff until you discover that the only things that were shot for real were Kylie, a handful of dancers and a static car. Black Dog tasked Soho-based visual communications facility Red, with creating the rest from scratch to designs developed by director Dawn Shadforth.
Red utilised the full gamut of its Discreet arsenal – 3ds max, fire, flame and inferno – to create and animate the backgrounds with some SoftImage XSI thrown in for good measure.
The video:
The full article from Digital Producer Magazine
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As I remember it, Eddie was one of the first Softimage products to have an HTML version of its documentation (the screenshot below is not from the first version that was ever converted, but a one a few years later). The Eddie doc team (Maryanne and Dominic) used a tool called Harlequin WebMaker to produce this [admittedly] primitive HTML doc, which included virtually no screenshots. In fairness, 1997 was just a few years removed from the no-website, print-only docs era 😉
The Eddie team may have asked me for help at some point, but somehow I got using WebMaker, maybe for the old DKit docs. Eventually I convinced the 3D team to let me convert their reference manual (a later version of that is shown below in a fancy new frameset). There was some resistance at first, because generating HTML was an unknown, un-scoped task with a lot of possible pitfalls. I convinced them by agreeing to take care of all the tedious labor involved. And there was a lot of tedious labor, more than you would think for such simple output, mostly because 1)you had to workaround a lot of limitations in the generator, 2) the source FrameMaker docs weren’t designed for HTML generation.
By the late 1990s, my HTML docs for Saaphire and the Softimage SDK looked like this. My menu tree was some JScript I downloaded from the web and adapted.
By 2000, the HTML user docs had improved markedly. At this point, the 3D doc team was using WebWorks Publisher (which had a fancy Java TOC/Index that won’t load into my IE8).
Finally, here’s a screenshot of the Object Models docs from just before the XSI 1.0 release. These docs were generated by a perl program that parsed XML markup embedded in comments in the source files, and then used XSLT to generate the HTML. When I set up that system, it was a requirement that the doc be embedded in the code. I used XML because I was a budding markup geek, and I wanted complete flexibility. It wasn’t my intention to have the devs edit the XML themselves. I figured I’d being doing most of that, but then I left Softimage and they got stuck editing XML markup.
If you’re curious, here’s what the XML looked like:
// <object id="Application" base="SIObject" introduced="1.0"> // // <description> // The Application object is the base class for the <object idref="XSIApplication"/> object. This object // provides some general information about the Application and <object idref="XSIApplication"/> provides // additional Softimage-specific methods and properties. Script writers normally do not deal with an instance // of Application; instead they use the global object called "Application", which is actually an instance // of XSIApplication. <br/> // // From Netview there is no global object available of type XSIApplication so normally the script creates // this object (by creating the COM object with ProgID "XSI.Application") and then calls // <object idref="SIObject.Application"/> on the returned object to retrieve an instance of XSIApplication. // This approach is demonstrated in the examples in for the XSIApplication object. // </description> // // <seealso> // <object idref="XSIApplication"/> // </seealso> // // <properties> // // <!-- property - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --> // <property id="Application.StatusBar"> // <description>Sets the status bar text using a <link idref="String"/> value.</description> // <examples> // <example> // <code lang="vbscript"><![CDATA[ // ' Change the display text in the status bar // Application.StatusBar = "Hello world" // ]]></code> // </example> // </examples> // </property> // // </properties>
Last week’s flashback post and its historically-inaccurate screenshot spawned an XSI list discussion that included this mention of Softimage Eddie. Softimage® Eddie was an award-winning video compositing, editing and processing tool that ran exclusively on Silicon Graphics® Indigo workstations. Required 64MB RAM for video, 128MB for film. Approximate retail price was $7,995 (U.S.).
So I thought I’d pull together some Eddie screenshots, but it wasn’t easy to find any. All I turned up was the logo, some Eddie icons, and some install screenshots.
Eventually I found something on the Fuel for the Mind CD (thanks to Miquel Campos 🙂 that showed the node-based UI, but the image quality is pretty poor.
Softimage Eddie – a professional post-production studio at your fingertips:
http://vimeo.com/29476029
And here’s the Eddie brochure:
Softimage|3D 3.8SP3 screenshot from November 1999.
Luc-Eric points out that this is probably a “fake”. The fancy logo and render region are the giveaways.
That screenshot is so old that it seemed only rifgt to run it through pixlr-o-matic:
Customer story from IBC 2000 featuring Toonx, SOFTIMAGE 3D, and XSI.
FUNNY BUSINESS: ComicHouse Keeps Them Laughing
by Michael Abraham
I used to sneak comic books into class. That’s right, I admit it. More often than not, secreted behind my in-class copy of Lord of the Flies or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would be the antics of Archie ‘n Jughead, the X-Men or, best of all, Mad Magazine. On occasion, while engrossed in my verboten reading, I would be discovered and scolded by teachers. It was worth it, of course, but I have to say that my regret today is more than palpable.
Don’t get me wrong. I feel no remorse for perusing comics when I was supposed to be studying the classics. No, my regret stems from the fact that, when my teachers told me comics wouldn’t pay the rent, I believed them. As it turns out, just as I was writing off all those panels of primary-colored excitement as the stuff of childhood, other people were planning a whole new world.
How’s this for timing? I graduated high school in 1984. In 1985, Hans Buying and Marcel Bosma – two aspiring comic strip artists living in Amsterdam – founded a cooperative especially for those underestimated and underappreciated comic strip artists and cartoonists. They called it ComicHouse.
Although Bosma elected to leave the company just a year after its inception, Buying worked hard to keep the dream alive. That faith has definitely paid off. Having recently moved to their new offices in Oosterbeek, ComicHouse is now the largest cartoon and animation agency in the Netherlands. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that Buying and ComicHouse actively promote and protect the interests of over 30 prominent cartoon artists. In addition, the ComicHouse studio produces unrivaled traditional and digital animation for television and movie commercials, CD-ROMs, PSAs, computer games and Internet applications.
“We do somewhere around 10 commercials, 10 multimedia productions and 150 cartoon productions a year,” Buying says casually. “We also work a great deal with the art buying departments of all the major advertising agencies. We’ve been doing so much of that, in fact, that I seriously considered changing my first name to ‘Art.’ My wife wouldn’t let me though. She was too attached to Hans.”
Puns aside, the funny business of comic strips has changed since Buying set up shop a decade and a half ago: “
“In the beginning, using traditional animation for commercial purposes had some definite drawbacks,” Buying remembers. “Perhaps the biggest problem was establishing some sort of believable interaction between animated characters and the live-action product you were trying to sell. When SOFTIMAGE|3D was initially introduced to us, we saw that we could model, stage, light and animate products in a way that was completely unthinkable in a traditional environment. Keeping the dialectics of progress in mind, we came to a quick conclusion: ComicHouse had to invest in the best talent and state-of-the-art technology. As a result, our animation production process has changed dramatically in order to adapt both to new developments in the industry and to the heightened expectations of our clients. Working with Toonz and SOFTIMAGE|XSI, ComicHouse is better prepared than ever to compete with the world’s best-equipped studios. Both systems allow a company like ours to cut back on production time and budgets, keeping us competitive with similar European and Asian studios.”
In 1990, Buying partnered with Miriam van Velthoven, who now handles the agency’s daily production schedule. Recently, that schedule has included some striking work for well-known Pepsi Co. and Yazoo, a popular flavored milk kids’ drink in Europe. Both projects put ComicHouse and their technology to the test.
The Pepsi spot gave a new twist to an old theme. “Rudolph the Blue-Nosed Reindeer” offers a decidedly more hip version of the classic Christmas character. Forget all those reindeer games: this Rudolph finds his own fun, snowboarding to a grungy version of Jingle Bells, and using his boss’ house as a ski jump. This Rudolph is definitely the choice of a new generation.
“As with most of our projects, all the animation on ‘Rudolph’ was first done by hand, then processed by cleanup and ink artists,” Buying explains. “The inked artwork was then scanned into Toonz and painted using the Ink and Paint module. All the Pepsi cans were created using SOFTIMAGE|3D. We used the rotoscope to load all the pencil tests into perspective view then, using the pencil animation frames as a reference, we positioned, rotated and scaled each can frame-by-frame. We rendered the cans and the packshot with the SOFTIMAGE cartoon renderer, matching the cartoon style as close as we could.”
While not as well-known as Rudolph – at least on this side of the ocean – the Yazoo character adorning bottles of the beverage was created by ComicHouse in 1988. When Campina, the company that produces Yazoo, wanted to repackage and remarket the product for the new millennium, they decided to go back to the source.
Aiming to make Yazoo a friendly and likable character, ComicHouse realized the unique nature of the task at hand: “It’s very unusual to shift the marketing focus away from the product to an animated character,” Buying admits readily. “Right from the very beginning, however, everybody wanted to make Yazoo a well-known and loved character. If we could do that, we figured that establishing a secondary link with the product would then be a logical and simple next step.”
To create a Yazoo for the next generation, ComicHouse used their substantial contacts to create a team of international animation talent. Top animators from the Netherlands, Great Britain and Canada all came to the ComicHouse studios in Amsterdam, where they worked on some fourteen Yazoo commercials.
According to Buying, the biggest challenge on the Yazoo spots turned out to be not with the character, but with the beverage itself. Faced with the seemingly innocuous task of modeling a glass filling with milk, the ComicHouse team worked for days without success. After numerous failed attempts – and more than one system crash – Buying and his team arrived at a novel solution:
“In the end, it went something like this,” says Buying. “We started by modeling the milk itself, then split the model horizontally and applied some waves and animated the top half of the model. After creating a modeling relation, we extracted the top and bottom curves created and combined them into a believable milk flow. All other animation was done by keyframing and some minor tweaking of function curves. The character animation and all the inking of cells was done by hand. We then scanned all the artwork into Toonz and colored everything digitally. To get a good 3D look for the character, we animated an FX level for the shadows, then used the Toonz plug-in for the highlights.”
Whether it’s Rudolph or Yazoo, ComicHouse characters and animation have been delighting clients and garnering awards for many years now. The company is also a founding member of the Society of Artists Agents Holland (SAAH) and a member of the Dutch Designers Association (BnO). And the activity and adulation don’t seem destined to slow down anytime soon. ComicHouse seems ready to keep people laughing for many years to come.
