L'Ancien Regime

This looks pretty impressive... SideFX is pleased to announce SideFX Solaris at SIGGRAPH 2019. This presentation was recorded on Tuesday July 30 at the Houdini HIVE in Los Angeles. Solaris brings a new context called LOPS, or lighting operators, that brings native USD [Universal Scene Description] support to Houdini to allow for comprehensive lookdev, layout and lighting workflows. Geometry brought into LOPS becomes USD - USD remains USD while in LOPS. Solaris provides a visual editor for working with USD. Solaris supports a wide variety of lookdev, layout and lighting tasks. Solaris is a new context in Houdini Core, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie and Houdini Apprentice - not a separate application. A new USD-compliant renderer called SideFX Karma Render was announced for Solaris/USD This new renderer works with Hydra for fast IPR. This will be a fast CPU-based renderer with a GPU version of it being developed for a future release. Solaris also works with other Hydra-compliant renderers such as RenderMan. Solaris is planned to be released as part of Houdini 18 in late 2019. Karma Render will be released in beta at the same time. https://www.sidefx.com/community/sidefx-solaris/ http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/08/sidefx-unveils-solaris/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) What is USD? Pipelines capable of producing computer graphics films and games typically generate, store, and transmit great quantities of 3D data, which we call "scene description". Each of many cooperating applications in the pipeline (modeling, shading, animation, lighting, fx, rendering) typically has its own special form of scene description tailored to the specific needs and workflows of the application, and neither readable nor editable by any other application. Universal Scene Description (USD) is the first publicly available software that addresses the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets. USD provides for interchange of elemental assets (e.g. models) or animations. But unlike other interchange packages, USD also enables assembly and organization of any number of assets into virtual sets, scenes, and shots, transmit them from application to application, and non-destructively edit them (as overrides), with a single, consistent API, in a single scenegraph. USD provides a rich toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D geometry and shading. In addition, because USD's core scenegraph and "composition engine" are agnostic of 3D, USD can be extended in a maintainable way to encode and compose data in other domains, https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

Thanks guys. https://www.amazon.ca/X-Rite-CMUNDIS-ColorMunki-Display/dp/B0055MBQOM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=xrite+colormunki&qid=1564722616&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Eevee is amazing. http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/blender-2-80-ships/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) And while we're talking of add ons here's the site for all the addons compatible with 2.8+ https://blender-addons.org/

I'm looking seriously at the Wacom Cintique 24" pro; https://www.newegg.ca/black-wacom-dtk2420k0/p/172-000R-000P0?Description=wacom cintique pro&cm_re=wacom_cintique_pro-_-172-000R-000P0-_-Product# That's a good price to me. It was $3500 just a year ago. This is the USD price; https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Cintiq-Pro-Creative-Display/dp/B07BDDYK99/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=wacom+cintique+pro+24&qid=1564273027&s=gateway&sr=8-2 There's one problem though; color calibration. For example, this review at NewEgg; https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-EODIS3-DCWA-Color-Manager/dp/B01B96L2QE/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=wacom+color+manager&qid=1564273320&s=gateway&sr=8-1 Apparently the Wacom Color manager is exactly the same hardware as the X-Rite i1 Display Pro with different software setup. https://www.amazon.com/X-Rite-EODIS3-i1Display-Pro/dp/B0055MBQOW/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=wacom+color+manager&qid=1564273378&s=gateway&sr=8-2 There are other solutions both hardware and software. https://hub.displaycal.net/forums/topic/xrite-i1-display-pro-colormunki-or-wacom-color-manager/ I'm a complete novice to this stuff and I suspect a lot of other people here are too so any knowledge you have that you'd like to share on this matter would be welcom.

Thanks so much for this. I've never been so excited by the release of a new 3D Coat update. It's getting some good positive press too, which is richly deserved. http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/pilgway-releases-3d-coat-4-9/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) And is THIS ever some good news. "Holes in geometry are now automatically closed before voxelisation, and the closure operation is described as being “much more stable and powerful”.

Actually, I think the train has already left the station on Maya and 3DSMax...they're stacking bits of new code on top of old code while Blender is totally rewriting their code. I know this very cynical guy who claims that the reason Blender is so small and lean as opposed to say, Maya which is massive and bulky, is that much of Maya's code is not only old, but they're obsessed with encrypting and decrypting everything you do with them to maintain their proprietary secrecy so everything is matched by huge and growing hash files for the encrytpion. Thus the crappiness of Maya Binary Files.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/epic-games-donates-1-2-million-to-blender-development/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) Epic Games has awarded the Blender Foundation, the nonprofit organisation that oversees Blender’s development, a $1.2 million cash grant, to be delivered over the next three years. The money, which has been awarded from Epic’s new Epic MegaGrants program, will be used to fund Blender’s Professionalizing Blender Development Initiative. New grant nearly doubles development funding for Blender This isn’t the first time that Epic has funded Blender development, but it is by far its biggest donation. Before the grant was announced, the crowdsourced Blender Development Fund stood at €37,538/month (just over $42,000/month), meaning the award almost doubles development Blender funding at a stroke. Roughly a further €40,000/month (around $50,000/month) is donated through Blender Cloud, but the money is primarily used to fund Blender Institute‘s open-source animation projects. Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal said that the grant money will form “a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality”. “As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.”

I can see it's going to be a big investment in time to learn it all though *sigh*.

Yeah there's some great plug ins out there for Blender alright. Thanks for listing those. This Gleb Alexandrov has a massive 30GB hard edge tutorial for Blender using just native tools.

So is this guy modeling in 2.8 as it comes in its basic package or is he using a collection of 2nd party plug ins? And if so, which ones exactly?

What an amazing modeling toolset.

The work that went into this 3D animation was just amazing https://youtu.be/4IKUeIEdRMY

I thought, this has to be Houdini. The purple ocean in particular had to be Houdini Ocean. So I started looking for info and it came down to a company called BUF. Like a lot of high end companies they don't use anybody's software. They created their own; B Suite. https://buf.com/films/twin-peaks/ http://bufsoftware.com/products/bsuite#bstudio We’ve regrouped all our powerful integrated software in 2 separate packages. Bcreative Suite includes all the tools BUF has built and improved to ease the creative process : A complete 3D pipeline studio from modeling, dynamics, animation to high end rendering, a node-based compositing software, a batch process manager and many more… Bpipeline Suite is the collection of efficient tools creating a coherent pipeline that meets productions biggest challenges in Full CG Animated films and live actions movies especially regarding financial constraints : A production management tool, an asset management tool and many more… Only Bview is available so far! Bcreative Suite is coming progressively, then Bpipeline Suite. Interested in Bsuite or just one of these software. Register now and find out more.

Is it overpriced or underpriced? https://www.techradar.com/news/msi-mocks-apples-dollar999-pro-display-xdr-stand-with-a-5k-monitor-for-almost-the-same-price

Top fully loaded version is $35,000.00 USD!

There's a lot more to this than I thought.

If you look at the gumroad page it says; "More videos and tutorials are coming" And as for " With a comment on which areas this asset shines in and what are some of its drawbacks to be aware of?" It's funny because I was just watching this video when the ad for DM1.5 arrived in my email. It makes a pretty good enquiry into the use of n-gons in modern modeling and their drawbacks. This Direct Modeling is essentially the same as Groboto's Mesh Fusion in Modo. So there seem to be n-gons galore in this application. Is that a deal killer?

https://gumroad.com/l/GVLLS/dm_discount DM 1.5. What's new: SoftBoolean 1.1 - UI improvements and small optimizations, groups preservation, new soft boolean tools Geometry Library 1.5 - add elements by the construction plane, filter items with mask, set a material for icon rebuilding operation, UI fully revamped Menu. fully redesigned menu subsystem. You can now create custom menus with submenus by using a simple Python syntax Menus are now fully customizable and works much better with HiDPI displays DM shelf fully redesigned All tools and HDAs have icons Lots of new modeling HDAs Python code is now open Modeler - a brand new classic modeling environment. From now you can really model in Houdini like in other modeling programs

The big advantage mesh fusion has over booleans in 3d coat is the control you have over beveling and chamfering the intersections between boolean objects which simply doesn't exist in 3D Coat, at least it didn't exist the last time I used 3D Coat two years ago.

It was purchased by Modo and it's embedded fully in Modo and it rules.

The thing that gets me is with their zillion dollars of cash warfund, and all the super high paid creative talent they've got in their super space age headquarters it takes them four years to come up with piece of junk like this and charge more than double the price for it. Just what are they doing in there?

https://wccftech.com/mac-pro-apple-intel-amd-launch/ GPU options for the MacPro start from AMD’s Radeon 580X and go all the way up to the Radeon Pro Vega II. The aforementioned 56 teraflops of output is achieved by equipping the Mac Pro with two APX modules, which allows two Vega IIs on the rig, for a combined output of 56 teraflops. To expand the Mac Pro ecosystem, and to learn from the past, Apple also introduced its custom expansion card for the Mac Pro earlier today. This card, dubbed as ‘Afterburner’, is an FPGA ASIC that capable of decoding 6.3 billion pixels per second. It can also handle 12 streams of 4K video and 3 streams of 8K video. The standard version of the Mac Pro will feature an eight core Intel Xeon processor that’s coupled with 256GB of SSD storage and 32GB of RAM at a $5,999 price tag. Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments section below and stay tuned. We’ll keep you updated on the latest.

This is getting pretty awesome. I sure hope I can get to this level one day. https://blenderartists.org/t/human-progress/1143224/131