For those of you wondering why this is important, it’s simple enough. Fury is fast. Really, really fast. And it was written by Ben Houston, the original author of Krakatoa, a tool of choice for rendering particles. Softimage, Max and Maya users alike can move their simulations to ICE (or create their simulations with ice directly) and partake in the Fury awesomeness.

LOOK at it. 1 million points. Self shadowing and cast shadows. 1-second-per-frame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“The major new features in Fury 2.0:

* GPU-accelerated particle self-shadowing
* Shadow maps
* Built-in compositing previewing.
* Command line renderer support.
* Synchronized Softimage and Maya support.

In this example, 1 million points are lit and rendered in about 1 second per frame and the shadow map is also created at the same time. Motion blur and DOF do not slow down rendering time.

The simulation in this example is from a alpha-version of SlipstreamVX 2.0 and thus the smoke motion isn’t quite perfect in this video.”

Very cool. But, you say, it’s for softimage and my stinking studio makes me use Maya. Well,  Maya users, have hope. Jeremie has also been beta testing a Maya version, called MGEAR.

Let’s face it, there are more animators needing high quality rigs than there are high quality riggers. And rigging takes a lot of time. That’s why autoriggers came into being. If you are laboriously assembling all your rigs by hand and you just want to get to animating, you really, really need to be using a solution like Gear.

GEAR has the openness and enough well -thought tools to appeal to a dedicated rigging TD while also providing a fast and reliable way for animators to generate sophisticated rigs with a minimal learning curve. It’s modular in design, meaning it isn’t restricted to rigging only humanoids or quadrupeds, and it’s extensible, so riggers can use GEAR as a framework upon which they build in their own particular style.

It’s a very well thought out system and highly recommended for small studios and individual animators who need good rigs fast, as well as riggers interested in having the capabilities of an autorigging framework without the desire (or time) to make their own.

A 3D World review I wrote a while back of the (now free) Mach Studio Pro v2, which I have also written about on this blog, is now online. – AM

This is fun, and was inevitable… a plugin to use a Microsoft Kinect for very basic motion capture in XSI. 99 euros.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m going to have to check out “Darktable,” a GNU-license photo management app similar to Lightroom and Aperture. It’s claim to fame (aside from being free) is it’s blazing fast performance thanks to GPU acceleration. If you like photography as much as me, and you are using a *nix OS, this is probably worth a look.

XSI users may want to check this out, the site has some tools and plugins for XSI, including a free set of ICE compounds, a metaball (pay) plugin, and some very nice scripts.

The $100 euro metaball .addon is pretty nice, many of us have encountered it’s ancestor as the popular free metaball tool which has been around for a while now. Now a grown up product for sale, this plugin adds ICE compatibility as well as the added/cleaner functionality of allowing metaball models to be constructed by hand, through “metapaint” etc. The tool includes not only spherical implicit metaball primitives but cylinders and cubic meta-surfaces, which is a welcome addition. The generated meshes are reasonably clean and can be set to use several models of meshing.

This took just minutes to set up and bake, tuning the meshing was really fast.

There’s a fair amount in here for the money, feature wise. Usage is pretty straightforward, and the mesh generation is fast. Since ICE users are wanting any mesh generation tools they can get their hands on it’s worth taking a look at the free demo, and my first take is that this tool makes a nice compliment to Eric Mootz’s emPolygonizer. It’s definitely a lot of fun to play with!

Fun for the four-minute Borgmann in all of us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wow indeed!

Maya Community?

I have to admit, I’ve got a love/hate thing going on with Maya. It’s an industry standard. It changed the world. It broke new ground. And it… well, kinda sucks.

Look, before you get out the pitchforks and torches, Maya fans hear me out. You have gotten used to coping with things you shouldn’t have to worry about. Every dedicated maya user I know has a cornucopia of tricks, scripts, workarounds and fixes just to get the basics done. Want to constrain an object on a curve? Sure, you can. Kinda. If you know the trick, and are willing to think about it, or have a script handy. How about editing the animation curves on an animated texture? Visually? Make particles flow on a deforming surface? The answer is always the same – yes you can. But it’s not going to be straightforward….

Folks, that’s not good. It’s the legacy of an old architecture which has had additions and patches layered on it year after year.  Sure, to be fair all 3D apps are complicated and have their caveats aplenty. XSI sure does, and it’s also taken it a long time to get to the point it’s at now.

But I have to tell you… XSI’s newer architecture and more consistent methodology make a difference.

It’s new and scary and confusing for longtime Maya users to learn XSI. It was the same for me when I learned Maya. But you know what? When I learned my way around Maya I was rather staggered by how many tasks are unnecessarily  convoluted.  After a few months of production in Maya my suspicions solidified… from the perspective I come from, this app kinda sucks. I mean come on, I know people are used to it but exactly how is it ok that to get a decent rig built you have to route shit through the hypershade?

Burn the witch!

Whoa don’t throw those torches. This is just my opinion…. One I’m sure I will take plenty of heat over. But if you haven’t used XSI in a production that knows what it’s doing (psyop anyone?) you honestly don’t know what you’re missing out on. Particularly now that XSI users have ICE.

So I’m glad to see that XSI is doing well and progressing ahead nicely under Autodesk’s banner – not because I’m a mindless fanboy (don’t say it!)… but because I have used XSI and Maya extensively. And having done so I can’t wait for the industry as a whole to get to a point where the capabilities I’m used to having in XSI. I want to see some of this next-gen workflow end up in the hands of the brilliant artists who have been turning out amazing work in Maya, despite it’s creaky rusty workflows and endless workarounds. XSI isn’t the enemy guys. It’s actually pretty effing cool. And more and more artists and TDs are beginning to exploit what it can do – give it a honest effort and you’ll see what I mean.

Just try it!

Some maya rant links to reward you for reading this far….

http://www.ireallyhatemaya.com/

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=17620

Click here to view the embedded video.