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So it's Siggraph week and I went to the Foundry-Mari/Modo group at the Hyatt Hotel


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WE4wHq4.jpg

 

That's Jack Greasly founder of Mari and Brad Peebler of Modo on stage.

 

I got to ask them some questions;

 

Mari still uses a paint buffer that drops your painting to the  surface of the object after the fact; I asked them if they'd ever do it the more sensual 3d coat way. Answer: no...

 

But Jack had very good things to say about 3d Coat and says he admires it deeply particularly as it's been mostly a one man operation.

 

We talked afterwards about UVDIM and it's a pretty fantastic setup...200,000 x 2000^2 pixels  texture maps with it just for Smeagol alone.

 

I did find one good thing for all of you from this; the speaker who did the demo clued me in on a great website with free downloads;

 

Surfacemimic.com

 

http://www.surfacemimic.com/gallery/index.php

 

 

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WE4wHq4.jpg

 

That's Jack Greasly founder of Mari and Brad Peebler of Modo on stage.

 

I got to ask them some questions;

 

Mari still uses a paint buffer that drops your painting to the  surface of the object after the fact; I asked them if they'd ever do it the more sensual 3d coat way. Answer: no...

 

But Jack had very good things to say about 3d Coat and says he admires it deeply particularly as it's been mostly a one man operation.

 

We talked afterwards about UVDIM and it's a pretty fantastic setup...200,000 x 2000^2 pixels  texture maps with it just for Smeagol alone.

 

I did find one good thing for all of you from this; the speaker who did the demo clued me in on a great website with free downloads;

 

Surfacemimic.com

 

http://www.surfacemimic.com/gallery/index.php

 

Thanks for posting!

 

That's an interesting response with regards to the frame buffer :D. I decided to give Mari a try, and though I can live with the paint buffer, it was really disappointing not being able to paint with a color/height map as part of a single projection. The other feature which felt necessary was tangent space object painting. Mari feels more like a massive pipeline-texturing tool, rather than a "quick feedback" 3d painting tool. It really shines when it comes to hundreds of tiles, and has a fantastic hdr painting environment. When it comes to games though, I believe that more people will go the 3dcoat/substance route.  

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Thanks for posting!

 

That's an interesting response with regards to the frame buffer :D. I decided to give Mari a try, and though I can live with the paint buffer, it was really disappointing not being able to paint with a color/height map as part of a single projection. The other feature which felt necessary was tangent space object painting. Mari feels more like a massive pipeline-texturing tool, rather than a "quick feedback" 3d painting tool. It really shines when it comes to hundreds of tiles, and has a fantastic hdr painting environment. When it comes to games though, I believe that more people will go the 3dcoat/substance route.  

 

I'm glad you mentioned that; I did ask him about that and you'll like his answer; you can paint in as many channels as you want in Mari...so if you want to point normal map displacement, specularity  and diffuse simultaneouslly then you can. You just have to know where to go in the controls to do that. 

 

As for Modo, the main thrust of Brad Peebler's talk was about modo as an animation tool with rigging emphasized. 

 

 

And they talked alot about Mesh Fusion 1.4 coming out and 1.5 coming soon with some big improvements in stability and speed and functionality

 

 

I went to Siggraph yesterday and I'll be reporting on that but my main rig died and I'm taking it to the shop right now

 

 

I got to talk to the founder of Clarisse, and I saw an amazing amazing display of Vray and Nuke 8 at the Chaos booth.

 

I talked to a lot of studios at the job fair including Blizzard and I was treated well. I got to show them my portfolio on Facebook and several studio sat down and had serious talks with me. 

 

Vray's new vector displacement is out of this world...it's so powerful it's mind blowing...I saw them take a beveled slab and turn it into a fully detailed complex sculpt of a 3d head with the flick of a switch turning on the deep vector displacement they've developed

More in a few days with some photos..

 

Oh and Maxon did not impress...it's retopo tools are where 3d coat was before Andrew developed autoretopo.

 

I also asked David Greasley about 3d coat and he had very very kind words for Andrew and his work. He thinks 3d coat is a great program that produces some superb work  but that Andrew should focus more on one area if he's going to be a loner competing with larger companies with lots of staff.

 

 

For  me though the most important matter was how to get real time render with a high end render engine like Vray or Maxwell. My friend and I are dying for render engines to adopt the Xeon Phi card with 60-70 cores in it. I talked to Intel and they had 3 of them running on a big rack mounted rig at their booth.

 

Everywhere I mentioned the Xeon Phi eyes lit up. This is going to be the real deal. After his talk at the Vray booth I asked the speaker about it and he assured me that Vlado has the Xeon Phi and is experimenting and developping for it but that there are complex problems to solve to make it work right...but it's 1.7 ghz per core and imagine 70 buckets ripping though your render at that speed.

 

 

I also mentioned it at the Next Limit Maxwell booth and they've purchased Xeon Phis for development too and they're working on it. 

 

 

Very very exciting stuff.

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Pilgway actually has 5 developers working for them...so, Andrew isn't a one-man show anymore. Actually, with Raul and Sergi, it's not been a one man show for years. The 3 (relatively) new ones will be helping in key areas of the app, once they get up to speed with the code...from what I understand.

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You can share maps between channels in Mari, but you cant paint height and color at the same time using a unique texture for each channel. I use this feature in 3d coat quite often, and couldn't believe that Mari didn't have something like it. I'm really excited about Clarisse 2.0 so hopefully you got to see some behind the scenes demo as well :).

 

At one point, I was quite interested in the Phi, but then noticed that no render engine had full blown support for it. "Interest" in something might translate to years of waiting, and I can't wait that long for a rendering engine to catch up. That's what happened when I was using Renderman 18. At this point, slow engines are not worth the time or money (at least for me).  If you're interested in faster rendering right now, I'd recommend Redshift, Octane, and even Vray 3.0 looks really nice. I really love the look of Maxwell, but without an accelerator like Phi or CUDA, it wouldn't be doable with deadlines. 

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If you use 3ds Max, Moskito is a STEAL! It's basically the core GPU engine for finalRender R4 GPU...currently in closed Beta, and will be a hybrid (GPU/CPU) renderer. Moskito gives you the same integrated, all GPU, rendering as Octane, but is tightly integrated with all of Max's native tools, shaders (including Mental Ray mats/shaders), lights, etc. All other engines are designed to be highly dependent on their own proprietary elements.

 

This one is like Octane without all the proprietary constraints...and it's dirt cheap. $119 for a year subscription ($295 for the perpetual license).

 

https://www.cebas.com/index.php?pid=store_product&id=175

 

I have a license of VRay 2.4, but decided not to upgrade to 3 largely because it's RT module is just too limited. No SSS, no Procedural materials/maps, no volumetrics of any kind. You can do all of that with Moskito, and I find it's refresh rates much faster than VRay's RT module.

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I also asked David Greasley about 3d coat and he had very very kind words for Andrew and his work. He thinks 3d coat is a great program that produces some superb work  but that Andrew should focus more on one area if he's going to be a loner competing with larger companies with lots of staff.

 

I somewhat agree. At the very least the rooms should be consolidated (just like object management); Do the tweak tools and render options really need their own rooms?

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I somewhat agree. At the very least the rooms should be consolidated (just like object management); Do the tweak tools and render options really need their own rooms?

I don't mind the workspaces so much, since bringing up context sensititve menus would do largely the same thing. Plus, you can set up the layout of each workspace. The only problem I have with them is the pipeline within the app is rather rigid. It's not very efficient if you need to go back and do something over (change a voxel sculpt after you've already gone through the Retopo > Merge to the Paint Room stages). If you bring a model into the Paint Room, to do some texturing and a little bit of sculpting, and decide the Image-Based sculpting tools + the dilapidated Tweak tools aren't cutting it, then it's a bit of a hassle to get your asset into the Voxel Room > Sculpt and then get that work back to the Paint room. In Mudbox, it's easy as pie, because there are no ROOMS.

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You also have a UV Room and the same UV tools in the Retopo Room. That trips up a lot of new users. And it shouldn't be that way. The way the Rooms are set up, is a bit of a maze...and hard to navigate unless you have the map in front of you. So, in that sense, I agree about consolidation. I hope Andrew can do something to address this.

 

I think having an all-inclusive Outliner is the first step. Then remove the ROOM paradigm. Have just one viewport/workspace, but tabs or buttons that reveal a certain menu set..similar to the way Rooms work now. With an Outliner in place, the user can access the assets he/she wants to work on.

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That would be great. I always felt having 'rooms' only works if you can seamlessly switch between them, but in 3DC it's often a big process. One 'room' with presets for what tools/options/windows are shown would be better.

Maybe then it'd even be possible to paint and sculpt at the same time since all the tools would be in one room...

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That would be great. I always felt having 'rooms' only works if you can seamlessly switch between them, but in 3DC it's often a big process. One 'room' with presets for what tools/options/windows are shown would be better.

Maybe then it'd even be possible to paint and sculpt at the same time since all the tools would be in one room...

Ah now that's an idea... :)

You also have a UV Room and the same UV tools in the Retopo Room. That trips up a lot of new users. And it shouldn't be that way. The way the Rooms are set up, is a bit of a maze...and hard to navigate unless you have the map in front of you. So, in that sense, I agree about consolidation. I hope Andrew can do something to address this.

 

I think having an all-inclusive Outliner is the first step. Then remove the ROOM paradigm. Have just one viewport/workspace, but tabs or buttons that reveal a certain menu set..similar to the way Rooms work now. With an Outliner in place, the user can access the assets he/she wants to work on.

 

 

Like Catia for  example..

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