Friday Flashback #13

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Click for full-size image

Many thanks to Rui Santos, who took the time to send me some scans of a “Words from the Wizard” newsletter from back in October 1995.

Here’s the cover from that issue. The big headline:

SOFTIMAGE Web ’95!
This fall, all you ever wanted to know about SOFTIMAGE will be available on the World Wide Web.
Visit the SOFTIMAGE Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/Softimage…

I remember being in a meeting where they presented the first designs for that new web page. It’s easy to forget that there was a time when companies didn’t have web pages 😉

I used the waybackmachine to dig up some old softimage.com web pages (see below):

1995

Web page from 1995

1997

1997

2002

25 Sept 2002

2006

15 March 2006

ICE: Array of cumulative sums

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If you have an array like [4,9,7,2], how do you get an array like [4,13,20,22], where each element is the cumulative sum of elements in the first array?

One possible approach would be to use a Repeat with Counter with Select SubArray in Array.

Python PolygonMesh.Set example

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This simple example shows how to pass in the vertex and polygon data in Python.

Application.CreatePrim("Cube", "MeshSurface", "", "")
oCube = Application.Selection(0)

# tuple of tuples
# one tuple for the X coordinate, one for the Y, and one for the Z
verts = ((-0.5, 0.5, -0.5, 0.5, -0.5, 0.5, -0.5, 5.0), (-0.5, -0.5, 0.5, 0.5, -0.5, -0.5, 0.5, 0.0), (-0.5, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, -18.0))

# tuple of polygon data
polys = (4, 0, 2, 3, 1, 4, 0, 1, 5, 4, 4, 0, 4, 6, 2, 4, 1, 3, 7, 5, 4, 2, 6, 7, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 6)

Application.FreezeObj(oCube)

oCube.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Set(verts,polys)

To help understand the vertex and polyon data, consider this simple polygon mesh:

Given the above polygon mesh, this snippet:

oCube = Application.Selection(0)

data = oCube.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Get2()
verts = data[0]
polys = data[1]

print verts
print polys

would print this:

#  ((-3.0, 4.0, 1.0, -2.0), (0.0, -4.0, 0.0, 0.0), (1.0, -4.0, 5.0, 3.0))
# (4, 0, 1, 2, 3)

Why does the Edit menu in the Animation Editor take so long sometimes?

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Some users have noticed that when you open the Animation Editor for the very first time, and click the Edit menu, it takes a little while for the Edit menu to appear.

That’s because the Animation Editor loads plugins when you click the Edit menu (for the very first time).

What happens is that when you open the Edit menu for the very first time, the Animation Editor scans the custom command maps looking for any commands in the siFcurve command category (the AE uses a custom command instead of menu anchor points–see the FCurveEditor object in the SDK docs for more information).

This scan causes the plugins to be reloaded, but this happens only once per Softimage session.