A belated Happy New Year! Have some champagne (thanks to Ed Harriss) 🙂
Friday Flashback #101
4
Softimage mailing list 2012 retrospective
Misc numbers and facts…
- 11830 total posts
- 1434 active threads
- 1739 new threads created by 287 different users
- 453 different posters (for an average of 26 posts per person)
- According to Google groups, there are 1053 group members
- Busiest day was 17 April, with 152 posts (73 of those posts in the “Softimage development” discussion)
- Longest thread: “In case you missed it..” 236
- Number of different posters in that thread: 76
- Number of posts in the Friday Flashback thread: 271
- Most posts in a thread in a single day: 84 (in the “Intro to the new team (was Softimage development)” thread, on 19 April)
- Most active poster contributed 3.6% of all posts
- 25% of all posts come from the 10 most active users
- Most posts by one user in a single thread: 19
- Most new threads started by one user: 70
Top 12 threads
- Friday Flashback 271
- In case you missed it.. 236
- Intro to the new team (was Softimage development) 152
- Small Annoying Things 135
- Softimage development 111
- Rumors 111
- test 79
- Softimage 2013 74
- raafal 61
- Qt Wrapper command log issue 58
- 2013 save scene = no load in 2012? 58
- V-Ray for Softimage released 57
Top 10 users by number of posts
- Alan Fregtman 428
- Steven Caron 393
- Eric Thivierge 380
- Stephen Blair 300
- Matt Lind 297
- Rob Chapman 259
- Szabolcs Matefy 246
- Alok Gandhi 241
- Sandy Sutherland 234
- Bradley Gabe 200
Top 10 users by number of new threads started
- Szabolcs Matefy 70
- Alan Fregtman 35
- Eric Thivierge 30
- Bradley Gabe 29
- Sandy Sutherland 26
- Stefan Andersson 26
- olivier jeannel 24
- adrian wyer 23
- Kris Rivel 22
- Morten Bartholdy 21
Top 10 days and main topic of discussion (if any)
- 17/4/2012 152
- Softimage development 73
- 10/9/2012 123
- “A sad day, in this part of the country, for digit” 24
- In case you missed it.. 55
- 19/4/2012 118
- Intro to the new team (was Softimage development) 84
- 13/9/2012 109
- In case you missed it.. 81
- 20/3/2012 105
- 20/4/2012 99
- Intro to the new team (was Softimage development) 58
- 12/9/2012 98
- In case you missed it.. 80
- 22/2/2012 96
- 10/2/2012 90
- 31/8/2012 87
- Friday Flashback 75
Century club (100 posts or more)
- Alan Fregtman 428
- Steven Caron 393
- Eric Thivierge 380
- Stephen Blair 300
- Matt Lind 297
- Rob Chapman 259
- Szabolcs Matefy 246
- Alok Gandhi 241
- Sandy Sutherland 234
- Bradley Gabe 200
- Raffaele Fragapane 175
- Chris Marshall 164
- Chris Chia 164
- olivier jeannel 163
- Stefan Andersson 145
- Stefan Kubicek 144
- Luc-Eric Rousseau 143
- Adam Sale 142
- peter_b@skynet.be 137
- Simon Anderson 133
- Grahame Fuller 129
- Ciaran Moloney 129
- Xavier Lapointe 123
- Tim Crowson 120
- Eric Turman 119
- Ben Houston 115
- Guillaume Laforge 111
- Dan Yargici 109
- Paul Griswold 109
- Eugen Sares 108
- jo benayoun 106
Wednesday word clouds – 2012 activity on the Softimage mailing list
Two word clouds to help visualize the activity on the Softimage mailing list during 2012: who was posting, and what were they posting about?
What were the popular topics?
Note that I removed “Softimage”, which was by far the most common word in the post titles (aka Subject), but which doesn’t really indicate the topic of discussion.
Who was active on the list?
There were approximately 450 different people who posted during 2012. This word cloud shows the 100 top names, so assuming most people have no middle names, this is more-or-less the 50 most active posters on the list.
2012 Softimage Year in Review
Here’s some of the Softimage-related news and events that caused a buzz during the last year.
 |
October After months of malware warnings and the like, xsibase finally goes down…forever. RIP xsibase. |
| August Autodesk Lays Off 7% Of Entire Staff and a number of current and former Softimage people were gone. |
|
|
June Softimage 2013 Service Pack 1 released |
|
May Autodesk announces 5% price increase, and changes to upgrade pricing that will take effect 1 Feb 2013 |
|
 |
May Autodesk reshuffles Softimage development team. The original Montreal staff moves onto Maya VFX, and Softimage development is now headed up by a team in Singapore. |
| May Launch event for the Softimage Creatives user group, London chapter. |
 |
|
27 March Subscription prices change again. For Softimage Gold support, the price change was actually a modest decrease in price, from 900 to 890. BUT this is when many people found out that Softimage subscription prices went up significantly last year (in Europe only). |
| March Softimage 2013 released…and the crowd goes wild. |
 |
|
Feb V-Ray for Softimage released. |
This isn’t an exhaustive list, obviously, as there plenty of other things that happened during 2012, such as Exocortex Species, SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2012, NYC ICE workshops, MotionTools, ProceduralTopoPack, baEssential shaders, emPolygonizer4 version 4.0, Fabric Engine, Fabric Creation Platform, emFlock2, emTools, Exocortex Alembic, Autodesk Softimage Masters nominations for Benjamin Bracamonte, Jeremie Passerin, and Todd Akita, and a Junior Masters nomination for Normand Archambault.
2012 in blogging
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 290,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 5 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!
In 2012, there were 374 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1,123 posts. There were 810 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 186 MB. That’s about 2 pictures per day.
The busiest day of the year was August 31st with 1,893 views. The most popular post that day was Friday Flashback #85.
Screenshots of the week
Iterate through arrays
by rray
Particle color gradient
by xsisupport
MotionBuilder with Softimage
by SI UserNotes
Game of life
Saturday snippet – Tuple assignment
Early this week, I posted a script that did a random shuffle of a collection of objects. That script used tuple assignment to swap elements in a list; here’s a simpler example, with the tuple assignment (line 9) highlighted:
import random v = [o for o in Application.Selection] print [o.Name for o in v] # random shuffle for i in range( len(v) ): j = random.randint( i, len(v)-1 ) v[i], v[j] = v[j], v[i] print [o.Name for o in v] # [u'cube', u'cube1', u'cube2', u'cube3', u'cube4', u'cube5', u'cube6', u'cube7', u'cube8'] # [u'cube5', u'cube4', u'cube7', u'cube2', u'cube1', u'cube3', u'cube', u'cube8', u'cube6']
Looking at that line, you might wonder why you don’t end up assigning the same value to both a[i] and a[j] (eg, how does that line not do a[i] = a[j] and then a[j] = a[i] ?).
In tuple assignment, the right-hand side is considered a tuple of values. So the right-hand side is evaluated first, and then the resulting values are pairwise assigned to the tuple on the left hand side. For example, consider this-rather-more-concrete snippet:
a = 2 b = 8 a,b = b-a,b+a print a print b # 6 # 10
The right-hand side “b-a,b+a” is first evaluated, giving the tuple 6, 10, so you effectively have this:
a,b = 6,10
Friday Flashback #100
Three XSI ghosts from Decembers past…via the wayback machine.
December 2006
xsibase reaches 12000 members
December 2004
Softimage news…XSI 4.2 had just been announced
December 2002
First meeting of the Montreal XSI User Group
Cycling particle colors through gradients
Here’s an ICE tree that uses a simple two-state setup to gradually move particle colors through two gradients (in State 0, the gradient is from black to white, and in State 1, from white to black). Randomizing the End Time gives me some variation between particles, and I customized the Modify Particle Colors to use “time in state” so I could use that as the trigger test.
In the Modify Particle Color compound, I simply swapped Get Particle Age for Get Time in State.
Building an array for weighted random selection
Here’s a little ICE tree that takes an array like
[ 0.1, 0.2, 0.2, 0.5 ]
and builds an array where
- 10% of the elements have value 0
- 20% of the elements have value 1
- 20% of the elements have value 2
- 50% of the elements have value 3
This is something I wanted to do for randomizing with weighted probabilities. The array [ 0.1, 0.2, 0.2, 0.5 ] is the weights I want to use for the values 0, 1, 2, and 3. The idea is that if I randomly select from the larger array, the weights will determine how likely I am to get each value (eg if 50% of the elements have value 3, then I’ll be much more likely to get that value when I randomly select).
To automatically build the array, I had to use a Repeat with Counter; I didn’t see around that.
So, for example, in an array of 1000 elements, I would have 100 elements with the value 0, 200 elements with the value 1, 200 elements with the value 2, and 500 elements with the value 3.
That works fine if the input array of weights adds up to 1, but what if I start with an array like [2 4 2 8 16] ?
To handle that, I need to make a small change:
eX-SI 