Arnold

Вот что пишет дядька из The Mill с форума ARF о Ментале, Арнольде и Кси:

«We do use Arnold as well as mental ray, but our usage of Softimage has begun to dwindle. We only have one artist in LA that uses it. A few in NYC, but more in London. Which is a shame because for awhile we saw it as the possible Autodesk version of Houdini. Which was great because Maya FX is truly behind the times. And for awhile if you looked at some Autodesk developer comments, it seemed like they started to look at Softimage as a possible Game Developing software. This made a few users in VFX cringe.

As for rendering, mental ray is still our workhorse renderer. It's used on the majority of rendering and typically outperforms Arnold. A reason for Arnold was two fold: 1. We had (past tense) high hopes for the translator. It's a bit of a mess now for Maya and breaks compatibility often. 2. Artists that know nothing about rendering can hit the render button and get a frame from Arnold. That's a double edged sword.

And as you mention, XSI at the time had great integration for mental ray. It was one of the few reasons Autodesk even tried with their products. But once Autodesk bought Softimage, they no longer had competition for feature integration. As for the bugs, this is misleading. We were told that Autodesk didn't like the support they were getting for the translators. When we pointed out the translators were THEIR software. . .they suddenly got quiet. In the meantime, no one was reporting bugs to mental images. So they began to sit there and fester. So the reputation became that mental ray was the problem. Even now I get emails where Autodesk asks about a feature for mental ray that was THEIR idea! They don't even remember what they did on their own time!

In my history at The Mill, we have managed to complete multiple bug fixes in just a few days each for most of them. If ARC gets an actual example file that's well prepared, they can identify causes nearly immediately. The problem is that Autodesk does not accept the new builds of mental ray during the year. In fact, most users are currently suffering bugs in OEM products I know to be fixed in mental ray for about a year now. Even feature changes are consistently rejected by Autodesk. For example, Unified Sampling originally only sampled visual phenomenon, RGB. It was changed to RGBA a long time ago. Almost a year ago now. But Autodesk products never got the update. This is part of the reason for the horrid perception.

Our recent experience as customers of ARC has been good. We get fixes and updates consistently and typically quickly. End users without this relationship are definitely getting the short end of the stick.

The only reason I say "Maya" is because if you are a mental ray user (the question being asked in this forum) then I know the plans for Maya right now show much more promise than Softimage. The users for Softimage need to make more noise to Autodesk to get similar treatment. We spent the last year with other users absolutely pounding Autodesk to put resources into integration.»

Надо же... С другой стороны, интеграция ментала в продуктах от автостола очень отстала от того, какой она должна, по идее, быть. На этом же форуме спецы пишут, что им приходится постоянно самостоятельно пилить работу с менталом, вручную писать костыли и т.д., т.к. автостолу, судя по всему, похрен... И обычному фрилансеру эти проблемы, конечно же, не нужны. Отсюда популярность вирея, например. А теперь - и анбиасов.

Очень жаль, что они съезжают с кси, конечно...

странные слова какого-то дядьки из мила. посмотрите последний мейкинг-оф о шимпанзе. ск-ко там ксишников сидит...и это в NY! в основном, кси в милле, использовался в Лондоне...

еще "какой-то дядька" из мила пишет:

Hi everyone,

Thank you so much on the great comments. It feels good to hear all this.

It was such a pleasure working with the whole team and supervising this project.
It's not every day you get a project with great script for a good cause, with good schedule and have time to RnD so much stuff.
It was roughly 3 to 4 months of work, to get tools done and spot out of the door.
Seriously we couldn't have done it without ICE in the time we had.
I am always looking at any software for commercial, to get things done to a really high quality level, in a short amount of time, and i still can't find anything which can beat the combination XSi, ICE and Arnold.

Everything on this project used ICE, from rig, muscle, skin, hair, rendering.

I started early test on skin with syflex and handover to Jimmy with Verlet which was much faster while I was carrying on and finishing the muscle system and leading the project.
Jimmy was working on the grooming of the hair and did a lot of super awesome compounds and scripts (yes he is being very modest). Dave did an amazing work on the hair interaction in a couple of weeks... like proper Siggraph paper staff... to get the stiffness and collision of the hairs right.

On the muscle, it was one very simple and generic muscle which had a lot of control to expend to more complex shapes and dynamic.
It was extremely fast, and could control stiffness, handles, tangeant, jiggle and more, through few parameters and weight maps.
The main strength was the speed to setup the whole body. I just needed to place each muscles close to the skeleton geometry and they would stick to it automatically: zero rigging involved.

Anyway XSi and ICE are awesome, i know i don't need to convince you guys.
It's not just about the software it's a lot about the talents and people, but seriously...XSi/ICE help a lot!

Thanks again for the feedback everyone.

"I am always looking at any software for commercial, to get things done to a really high quality level, in a short amount of time, and i still can't find anything which can beat the combination XSi, ICE and Arnold. "

Просто песня...

Жаль руководство автостола не умеет читать. Поняли бы, насколько ксюха с ICE перспективнее майки, открыли б глаза уже...

в майке то хоть флюиды есть, даже целых три штуки, и все три ок

вопрос к тем, кто подключен к закрытому арнольдовскому мейллисту. что там произошло? я давно туда не заходил, а теперь там пусто. напишите в личку пожалуйста.

Можно отоброзить прозрачность материала во вьюпорте. испоьзую arnold shader- standart и SITOA viewer?

Если это нужно только для удобства навигации во вюьпорте, то можно настроить прозрачность слоя, на котором находится объект.

Ктот знает, в 13й Ксю, Hight Quality viewport с Арнольдом неработает, или то у меня руки кривые? И на Квик рендере, настройки качества тож неработают ;) эт как то можно поправить?

Слова "работать" и "high quality viewport" вообще в одном предложении лучше не ставить. :)

а кто-нибудь рендерит арнольдом на ферме ?

если 3 компа можно принять за ферму, то я рендерил арнольдом кое чего.

Summatr
Arnold to Deadline

Аааа. Понятно , Богданов сюда писан но не был услышан..