As you might imagine, it was a busy March on the Softimage mailing list (5000+ posts, ~300 topics). So, here’s a word cloud.
Softimage occurred 3651 times, Maya 3059, ICE 1025, and Bifrost 2078. Bitfrost just once.
Wednesday word cloud
1
Loading order of workgroup plugins and addons
I recently had reason to investigate the order in which things are loaded from workgroups, and here’s what I found:
- Workgroup plugins are loaded first.
Softimage goes through all the workgroups, in the order they are listed in the Plug-in Manager, and loads all plugins that are not in an add-on. - Workgroup addons are loaded second.
Again, Softimage goes through all the workgroups in list order, loading add-on plugins.
What was my motive for looking into this? A plugin that was trying to get the OriginPath of a plugin in the SItoA addon. That was never going to work, because the plugin was loaded before the SItoA addon.
I tested this on Windows 7, not Linux.
ICE: Calculating edge midpoints
It’s a relatively simple thing to do, but to get to edge midpoints, there’s a few context hoops to jump through:
I guess I could most of the context conflicts by putting the ICE tree on the mesh and storing the midpoints there.
And now, let’s get the midpoint of the first edge only. All the Show Values are there to prove that it works.
Friday Flashback #165
Brad Hiebert demos Softimage for Bill Gates, back in 1995
Friday Flashback #164
Demo reel and testimonials for XSI 1.5
https://vimeo.com/89714113
Testimonials from Janimation, Giant Studios, Pixel Liberation Front, Aldis Animation, and Giant Killer Robots.
Wednesday word cloud: Softimage Top 5
Word cloud for the “Your TOP 5” thread on the Softimage mailing list
Loading PLY files into Softimage
As Arnold standins…
The Arnold procedural node can load Arnold Scene Source (ASS), Wavefront Obj (OBJ, OBJ.GZ), and Stanford Geometry (PLY), as well as DLLs/SOs.
The swirl is a PLY file I downloaded from http://www.3dvia.com/
Screenshots of the week
Get Closest Location on self, in a cluster
by Vladimir
Softimage Tip: Selecting Components by Projection Selection
by Studio Gohde
emTools 1.93 – New Stuff and Liquid Particle Shaper
Teahouse
by milanvasek
And here’s a few unposted ones from the previous weeks:
Volume of a grid
by gustavoeb
Rendering Golaem crowds with Arnold and Softimage
Forester Walkthrough
https://vimeo.com/88423962
Friday Flashback #163
Up until late 2008, Softimage wasn’t the name of a software product. It was a company with its own unique history, culture, and mythology. For many of us who worked there, it was a special time and place, and a lot of it happened in this building in Montreal.
https://flic.kr/p/5HnK3k
How many Softimage licenses do you need for an Arnold render farm?
None, not for the render farm itself. You just need Arnold licenses for the render nodes. You need Softimage licenses for artist workstations; on the render nodes, you’ll be using xsibatch -processing -render to render (and -processing doesn’t take a Batch license for third-party renderers).
You wouldn’t need Maya Batch licenses for Arnold render nodes either. The Maya render/mayabatch command line tools won’t take a Batch license for third-party renderers either.
eX-SI 