Ruby the CG parrot in a Softimage-Live virtual set.
From the SOFTIMAGE|3D docs:
You can synchronize live action and computer-generated (CG) animation in real-time to create a virtual set by using SOFTIMAGE channels and SOFTIMAGE Live. This involves creating a set and virtual characters in SOFTIMAGE|3D to interact with real actors that are positioned in front of a blue screen. Real people control the movements of the virtual character and the camera in real-time!
SOFTIMAGE “Sumatra” (code-name) RC2 disk
Posted on Facebook by Manny P
It took a bit more work this year, but here’s a CHM version (210MB) of the Softimage 2015 User Guide.
The User Guide is available online , and you can also download an offline HTML version.
Update: If you don’t see any content in the right-hand pane, right-click the .chm file in Explorer, and click Unblock.
The CHM version has a better index. I was able to use all the index entries, not just the top-level entries. See the difference in the screenshot below?
This year, I had to generate the CHM toc and index from these huge JScript arrays of anonymous objects. It was actually pretty simple, I just needed one little recursive function to handle arrays that look something like this:
ixdata = [
{ l: '', c: [
{ l: '_ADSK_LicServers', f: './files/distrib_render_SettingUpForDistributedRendering.htm'},
{ l: '.motor (normalized motion) files', f: './files/mocap_SavingAnimationDatainNormalizedMotionFiles.htm'},
{ l: '.xsi_n.n (Linux environment script), editing environment variables', f: './files/configfiles_EditingtheEnvironmentScriptsetenvbatand.htm'}
]},
{ l: '', c: [
{ l: '2-point constraints', f: './files/constraints_ConstraintsbetweenPoints.htm'},
{ l: '2D and 3D chains', f: './files/char_skel_WhatMakesUpaSkeleton.htm'},
{ l: '2D motion blur', f: './files/cam_motion_blur.htm'},
{ l: '2D paint', f: './files/compfx_paint.htm'
,c: [
{ l: 'also raster paint, vector paint', f: './files/compfx_paint.htm'},
{ l: 'background color', f: './files/2D_paint_GettingStartedPaintingonImages.htm'},
{ l: 'brush cursor', f: './files/2D_paint_GettingStartedPaintingonImages.htm'},
Word cloud for the 2015 Release Notes, which lists the bug fixes (216) and known issues (12). I took the top 50 words and removed a few.
Top 25 or so words in the Softimage 2015 What’s New section.
Yes, this old chestnut…I thought I had posted this ages ago, but I don’t see in the archives, so:
If you want to check if an object exists, and you don’t want to deal with any error handling, then do it this way:
from sipyutils import disp # win32com.client.Dispatch
def objExists( name ):
c = disp( "XSI.Collection" )
c.Items = name
return not( c.Count == 0 )
print 'Object does exist' if objExists( "XSI_Man.geom" ) else 'Does not exist'
You can use the OriginPath property to get the location of a plugin, but OriginPath is available in the scope of a plugin callback only.
__sifile__ and __sipath__, however, can be used in the global scope.
import win32com.client from win32com.client import constants import sipyutils Application.LogMessage( "Global: __sipath__=%s" % __sipath__ ) Application.LogMessage( "Global: __sifile__=%s" % __sifile__ ) null = None false = 0 true = 1 def XSILoadPlugin( in_reg ): in_reg.Author = "SOLIDANGLE" in_reg.Name = "TestPlugin" in_reg.Major = 1 in_reg.Minor = 0 #Register plugin items Application.LogMessage( "XSILoadPlugin: __sipath__=%s" % __sipath__ ) Application.LogMessage( "XSILoadPlugin: __sifile__=%s" % __sifile__ ) Application.LogMessage( "XSILoadPlugin: in_reg.OriginPath=%s" % in_reg.OriginPath ) return true
The above will output something like the following:
# INFO : Global: __sipath__=C:\Users\SOLIDANGLE\Autodesk\Softimage_2015\Application\Plugins # INFO : Global: __sifile__=C:\Users\SOLIDANGLE\Autodesk\Softimage_2015\Application\Plugins\TestPlugin.py # INFO : XSILoadPlugin: __sipath__=C:\Users\SOLIDANGLE\Autodesk\Softimage_2015\Application\Plugins # INFO : XSILoadPlugin: __sifile__=C:\Users\SOLIDANGLE\Autodesk\Softimage_2015\Application\Plugins\TestPlugin.py # INFO : XSILoadPlugin: in_reg.OriginPath=C:\Users\SOLIDANGLE\Autodesk\Softimage_2015\Application\Plugins\
For each polygon, I want to get the EdgeIndex of the longest edge (ultimately, I want to get the midpoint of the longest edge for each polygon).
Being literal-minded, I started by getting the length of the longest edge for each polygon:
Here’s a Show Values to show it works:
From there, I hacked my way to the edge index:
The Show Values:
For my second try at getting the index of the longest edge, I stopped trying to go from the length back to the index. I think this is a little better approach:
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.
I recently had reason to investigate the order in which things are loaded from workgroups, and here’s what I found:
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.
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.
eX-SI 