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Heintje posted:Houdini has a free learning addition available for download on their website, and it's node based like C4D. I won't lie though, it's poly editing and character animation tools aren't well developed as yet though. For making other cool stuff like things blowing up, particle effects and crazy procedural stuff it's The poo poo. I'm sure you're restricted in what you can say about the upcoming version 10, but can you comment at all on improvements to poly modeling, and will they continue the apprentice HD for version 10?
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Mar 18, 2009 08:16
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Handiklap posted:Gentlemen, we have Expenditure Approval™ Have you put this together yet? I have grant money that I can put towards a computer, so this is the first time I've ever been able to consider a dual Xeon machine but I haven't been able to find benchmarks that compares a set up like this to the current i7 processors. I'd welcome even anecdotal information at this point. In fact I don't even know if there are OS limitations with server motherboards.
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Aug 14, 2009 21:56
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Two questions: 1) Are there any good free tutorials on basic modeling in Houdini? A couple minutes in the interface the other day did not reveal an "add polygon" tool to me; I probably just don't know where to look though. 2) Do you folks use Projection Master in Zbrush that much? I can't seem to get good results from it, the model doesn't inherit the changes well after picking up. I think this has to do with the pixol to pixel ratio but I can't find the old thread at the Zbrush forums that explained this. How do you guys set things up so that Projection Master works for you?
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Aug 25, 2009 19:48
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Can anyone recommend some up to date tutorials for working with displacement maps using the latest versions of XSI and Zbrush? I'm killing myself trying to figure out to get this stuff working- it took me half an hour to find out I was supposed to store the base mesh as a morph target before doing any sculpting. And I have no idea where I'm supposed to be adjusting settings in XSI to get a map to actually drive displacement- I followed the example in the help files to use alpha to create displacement but instead of applying my map it just seems to be applying a uniform intensity of displacement over my entire model.
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Jan 10, 2010 11:06
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tuna posted:Argh, don't get me started on how hosed up the process is to get displacement working from zb onto an XSI mesh. Thanks for this. Do you have to import the displacement map with the obj? My approach originally was to import just the obj and then try to build the nodes in the render tree. I would think it wouldn't make a difference but I couldn't determine which nodes had values I needed to change. Do other packages deal with Zbrush displacement maps better? Also is there a limit to how high off the base mesh you can scuplt? I'm doing very simple things right now as I'm trying to learn so I'm simply making raised and indented bumps, but the resulting displacement maps, when reapplied to my original object in Zbrush, don't have the same amount of height/depth. Listerine fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 10, 2010 |
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Jan 10, 2010 22:59
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sigma 6 posted:Geforce 2x family or cheap quadro? Every time I've asked this question the general consensus is don't bother with Quadro unless you're spending company money or especially require the drivers for stability. If it's a personal machine, better to go with the gaming card, you can get more bang for your buck.
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Jan 12, 2010 01:51
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sigma 6 posted:That's what I figured. I was eyeing an overclocked 260 but I haven't looked at vid cards in so long, I am pretty lost as to where the "sweet spot" is for bang vs buck. Check out the hardware buying guide/question thread in SH/SC, they're pretty good at recommendations. No idea about SLI. tuna posted:You will save a lot of time simply using Mudbox. How does Mudbox compare to Zbrush in terms of texture painting? I already had Zbrush when Mudbox was first released and couldn't shell out any more money, and haven't checked that package since, so I have no idea if they've implemented decent painting tools or not. Listerine fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Jan 12, 2010 |
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Jan 12, 2010 09:38
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sigma 6 posted:From what I hear Mudbox is far superior to zbrush 3.5 for texturing(though 4 may change this). Reason being that Mudbox can paint/project textures in LAYERS which at this point zbrush cannot. On the other hand zbrush has a new texture painting program built into it called "paintshop" which can be accessed under the document menu. I haven't used Zbrush since the 3.5 upgrade so I'm behind on all the new stuff that's being added in, but I thought that Paintstop was for 2D painting and not for painting on models? tuna posted:One thought though is that you could still texture in ZB as long as you're using the same UVs (heh good luck with that in ZB though). UV management kills me in Zbrush, every time I've tried to learn it I've failed- probably because I just don't have the free time to devote to figuring it out and the interface is so non-intuitive. The other thing that I could never manage to get to work well was Projection Master, but now Zbrush has polypainting which seems to obviate the need for that?
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Jan 13, 2010 08:16
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Sigma-X posted:People will often build base meshes in 3ds Max/etc and then bring those in to Mudbox/zBrush, but those are specifically built to subdivide well for sculpting, and are not really low poly models, as they are not built for animation or efficiency, but instead for evenly spaced quads for a good subdivision. Do you- or anyone else- have any recommendations for tutorials, free or otherwise, for retopologizing? Thanks, I should also specify that I'm using XSI and Zbrush, though. \/\/\/\/ Listerine fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jan 27, 2010 |
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Jan 27, 2010 03:59
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Sigma-X posted:Retopo after making a high-res sculpt is the way pretty much everyone does it, especially for characters. I have one question- after looking at some tutorials and such online, as I understand it, the workflow is: 1) Model base mesh 2) Import into sculpting program, sculpt high res details 3) Make retopologized mesh with proper edge flow etc. 4) Apply displacement map calculated from high res mesh and original model to retopologized model How do you ensure that the displacement map will be correctly applied? I imagine that the retopologized mesh will not have the same UVs as the original model which was used to generate the displacement map, so how do you ensure that everything lines up properly? For instance in this video by Wayne Robson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP9_frQw5Dw He applies the displacement map to the retopologized mesh and then has to fix some errors with the displacement. I imagine after he generates a new, accurate map for use with the retopologized mesh during rendering. In his video the displacement map applies pretty nicely despite having to do a few fixes, but I imagine that that wouldn't necessarily be the case every time depending on how much the model changes between the base mesh and the retopo, and I think that I'm missing a step. Thanks in advance for any info.
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Feb 2, 2010 07:06
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ThreeHams posted:It's right at the convergence of the clavicle and upper arm, so it moves quite a bit during a gallop. Horses, like a lot of quadrapeds, don't have clavicles.
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Mar 1, 2010 03:34
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Ratmann posted:I suggest people buy Naiad, it is sweet. What is it? never mind, two more minutes of google: http://www.exoticmatter.com/overview/
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Apr 9, 2010 21:27
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Does anybody have any comments on the latest release of Mudbox? I just can't get into Zbrush but right now the vendor I'd use only has 2010, I'm wondering if it would be worth waiting for 2011.
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May 5, 2010 06:08
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ceebee posted:Why can't you get into ZBrush right now? Mudbox only has a few things over ZBrush, but ZBrush has a ton of poo poo that Mudbox doesn't. It's pretty much the interface. This is a hobby for me, and I don't need the tons of extra stuff that Zbrush has; I do own a copy though so I can always go back if I get more time later to do stuff. I really do like Zbrush, but when I go through periods of 3-4 months in between playing with stuff, having to relearn parts of a very unintuitive interface gets to be a waste of time. Mudbox is easier for me to use to do the relatively few things I want to do, I'm just wondering if 2011 has improvements to painting and displacement map extraction that are worth waiting for.
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May 6, 2010 00:35
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ceebee posted:The only thing I like about the new Mudbox is it's vector displacement stencils. Allows for geometry stencils that are able to throw poo poo down in 3 directions instead of two, it's pretty loving dope. That's a pretty cool feature. I'd love to stick with Zbrush but when I have to relearn how to do things every 3 or 4 months, it's not very efficient.
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May 6, 2010 08:24
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polarbear_terrorist posted:C&C appreciated on the piece as well. It's an editorial illustration of chronic glomerulonephritis (The kidney becomes pale, forms granulations and contracts. Healthy kidney is in the background for comparison) Your healthy kidney seems a bit too irregular to me, normal kidneys don't bulge so much. The divisions you've sculpted between what I assume are the lobes appear too exaggerated for the normal kidney and look more like lobated or lobulated kidney, which occurs when the fetal appearance of the kidney is retained in adulthood. If you smoothed it out, that would also help with the contrast to the contraction of the diseased kidney. It would probably also help with identification if you rotated the kidney to expose the hilus and show the profile of the organ more. Also, the capsule is not vascular if I remember correctly.
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Aug 5, 2010 21:08
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polarbear_terrorist posted:I did pull out the shape a small bit, but it was to help expose the lobes (if you look at most medical illustrations, the lobes are exaggerated for educational purposes. I've opened a body before as well and yeah, kidneys don't look like that- especially after being dead for awhile). I've only ever looked at them in a cadaver, so there you go. polarbear_terrorist posted:*Edit* Ok, thinking more about it, it wouldn't be such a bad view for a small rotation Yeah that's what I was suggesting, since right now you don't see any of the hilus at all. A little rotation so that you can see the actual crescent shape would help a lot. Right now your perspective view emphasizes the top half of the organ making it look top heavy. Of course maybe that particular person had a kidney that was larger in the upper half than the lower, but my experience has been that kidneys are fairly equal in size across the axial plane. polarbear_terrorist posted:Also, consulting good ol' Gray's Anatomy, there are vessels in the thin fibrous capsule. Aren't the vessels a small network of capillaries or really small venules, nothing large enough to actually see with the naked eye as individual vessels, and are deep to the capsule in any event? I didn't think there were any vessels actually running within the thickness of the capsule, but I might be thinking of the liver though. I don't do medical illustration- I have a degree in Anatomy and Neurobiology but I took gross and histology over ten years ago and haven't been inside a cadaver in about six. I'm a neuroscientist who does anatomy work in the brain- I haven't thought about anything outside the cerebral cortex in half a decade so I'm hugely rusty on this and could very well be wrong or confused.
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Aug 6, 2010 07:58
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tuna posted:I just wanted to say how impressed I am at how far Houdini has come in just a few releases in terms of usability. Is modeling still kind of crappy?
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Aug 16, 2010 01:58
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Geared Hub posted:And as someone else pointed out 40k isn't a lot of money. Most of the work done in our field is in very expensive cities. Occasionally you get a studio pop up in the middle of nowhere due to a tax break, but as a result there's no stability in that area. You have a one studio city, and if work dries up you will be forced to move back to a big media hub again to find work. Not being in these professions, I was wondering why is it the case that so many studios operate in LA? I would think that since so much of the work is on computers that studios would be able to operate anywhere that was cost-effective in terms of rent and the tax situation, and I'd think a lot of places would be cheaper to operate in than CA. Is it simply because it's easier to be geographically close to the rest of the film industry? Out of curiosity, what are people using for computers in terms of specs? I tried Zbrush 4 for the first time last night and I don't know if it's the latest version or if it's time for an OS reinstall, but my computer was a getting sluggish rotating a model that wasn't even at a million polys yet. I've already got 8 GB of RAM, is there a point where adding more would cease to be any help with programs like Zbrush/Mudbox?
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Aug 24, 2010 20:30
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SynthOrange posted:Yeah, 8gb should be plenty for <1 mil polys. What are the rest of your system's specs? I built it December 2006, it's got a Core 2 Duo E6400 processor @2.13 GHz, the video card is an ATI Radeon HD 2000 (or maybe 3000) series card (I think 512 MB), and I've got a raptor hard drive for the system disk. Disk space is running a little low but I'm not in the red yet; but I haven't done a clean install of the OS in a while so I'm sure there's a bunch of poo poo running in the background that I need to clean out. I just remember the program being snappier in the past with similar sized objects.
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Aug 25, 2010 00:19
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Can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to achieve a line art appearance to renders in XSI? I know very little about rendering, any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Dec 20, 2010 00:56
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SVU Fan posted:I don't use XSI but this looks about right, if that's what you mean by line art Thanks, that's put me on the right track- except I can't seem to figure out how to connect the toon_ink_lens node to the camera node; it just won't attach. edit- figured out how to attach. Listerine fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Dec 20, 2010 |
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Dec 20, 2010 03:31
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ChaoticSeven posted:Does anyone know how much advantage an Intel i72600k would give me over a 2500k in Max, Maya and Zbrush? The 2500k is already going to be an excellent processor, I don't really think it would be worth it to pay more for the 2600k- you could get another 8 GB of RAM for the price difference. It's hard to gauge how much of an increase without buying both and benchmarking. There are some benchmarks here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/17 In these tests, the two seem to score near each other on many tasks, and the differences aren't enough to convince me to spend almost another $100 on the 2600k.
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May 21, 2011 09:12
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I'm trying to model using symmetry in XSI, and I've used this setup: http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Symmetrical_Modeling_Setup but not every change I make to the original object is inherited by the duplicate. For instance if I scale the entire original object, the duplicate clone does not update. Does anyone know if there is a better way to model with symmetry using XSI?
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May 28, 2011 09:18
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Combat Pretzel posted:Also, there's a beta for XSI of the mythical Arnold Renderer floating out there. If anyone cares. Is there a way to get this legally, or are you referring to torrents and such? I'd be interested in trying this but I'm not industry so I don't know where to look.
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Aug 31, 2011 03:37
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Mine just came but I'm stuck at work for the next 6-7 hours.
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Sep 23, 2011 23:54
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He stated in an interview that he models tons of stuff, and that he completely populates his images whether you see the objects or not; for instance if there's a desk in the image, he makes objects to put inside all the closed drawers.
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Oct 28, 2011 23:57
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polarbear_terrorist posted:Hey guys, I'm not sure if this is the kind of criticism you're looking for, but the phopholipids in the cell membrane appear to have multiple phosphate moeities, whereas what I think you're trying to depict are phospholipids lined up next to each other. I think because you are only showing phospholipids at the "cut" edge of the membrane and elsewhere it's just shaded a lightly textured blue, it makes it seem like the phoshopholipids have two "heads" stacked on each other as opposed a layer composed of phospholipids to next to each other. Also the transmembrane proteins don't appear embedded in the membrane but rather pasted over the membrane, as if they were rendered separately and pasted in. If you had the nearby phospholipids encroaching on the edges of the transmembrane portions, it would go more to sell the embedded nature of those proteins. See my lovely clone brush mockup attached. Grr, image did not attach, will try again. Listerine fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jan 10, 2012 |
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Jan 10, 2012 20:23
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FYI for those upgrading to Zbrush 4R2b, Pixologic has a standalone installer for the new version. I got it when my computer was reset to an earlier restore point a day after upgrading- I was reverted to 4R2 but since my activation was now for 4R2b, I couldn't use the software. Pixologic gave me a link to a 4R2b installer so that I wouldn't have to go through the headache of installing 4R2 and then running the upgrader.
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Jan 29, 2012 06:05
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Macksy posted:A friend just sent me these links. I don't know if these programs are any good, but they're on sale 100% off, so why not. Hexagon had some promise as far as an easy to use polygon modeler- some of the tools had some nice sliders to help you get new components exactly where you want them, which I was hoping other products would adopt. Bryce was used for Coil's "Musick to Play in the Dark" album art. I think at this point all these programs are no longer being developed, so free is really the only worthwhile price.
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Feb 11, 2012 22:33
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:I'm a bit confused on ZBrush pricing. I've heard they charge for each new major release (v3, v4, v5), but I've also heard other people say that once you buy, you get free updates for life no matter the version number. Which situation is actually true? I don't know about "for life", but I bought at version 2 and haven't paid for anything since. I don't ever recall seeing a guarantee that I get free updates and I'm usually pretty diligent about noticing things like that. I think it's a pretty smart policy to keep people from jumping ship when a competitor comes out with a new, cool feature that they need time to implement for Zbrush. Maybe what you've heard is that the price for new purchases gets updated with each major release? I remember paying about $450 or $500 for version 2, but just noticed that new copies are something like $700. Holy crap, I just noticed that the next update will be like my 9th or 10th free update since I bought the software. That's pretty awesome. Listerine fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 08:08
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Trintintin posted:http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2121&Itemid=360 Was the starving artist edition always an annual license? For some reason I thought it was just one payment of $99.
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Mar 3, 2012 21:02
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Geared Hub posted:It goes back to the cheerful subject that 95% of animation studios are a few months away from bankruptcy Does the CG industry not really make that much money, or are the profits just not being shared among the workers?
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Mar 14, 2012 01:36
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Or they are living on unearned income. [using next jobs downpayment to pay the last jobs bills].
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It's interesting to hear about the industry from insiders, with the large volume of movies, commercials, and shows with special effects compared to when I was growing up, I figured there was a good amount of money being made by CG. Instead it sounds surprisingly similar to research science.SVU Fan posted:I see people like http://www.markbannerman.com/ who look like they're doing great applying CG in other ways. That guy used to post on a forum I read, I think he did a lot of those images using Carrara studio.
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Mar 22, 2012 07:00
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What options exist for me if I want to make models with textures and displacement, and let others view them and rotate them in real time? Should I be looking at something like the Unreal engine? Basically I'm looking into making 3d anatomy materials for my students to be able to interactively view from different angles.
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Mar 28, 2012 01:26
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polarbear_terrorist posted:How about a 3D pdf? Holy crap I never even knew about that. Thanks, looking into it. Hmmm seems to only take data from CAD programs. You wouldn't happen to know if I can get something from XSI into a 3D pdf? Listerine fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Mar 28, 2012 04:54
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I have a program that requires ctrl to be held when scrolling (for example with a mouse wheel) in order to scroll through frames in an image; I was hoping that I could bind this to the touch strip on my Cintiq so that I could just use the touch strip to scroll, but I'm not sure how to designate scroll as part of a key combination in the wacom tablet preferences utility. Currently I'm pressing one of the Expresskeys for ctrl and using the touch strip, but since I do a lot of scrolling it's killing my thumb. Any of you guys know how to do this?
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Apr 2, 2012 21:51
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There are also a bunch of brushes (and some matcaps) provided by the author of this thread at Zbrush central for polishing and edging, but you have to pick through the thread to find the download links. I could put them in my dropbox but not sure if that's against the rules? I don't know if they're updated/compatible with release 4, or made obsolete by the brushes in 4, but they were certainly useful in the past.
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Apr 27, 2012 01:54
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polarbear_terrorist posted:Also, I have no idea on this. I've never made a 3D pdf, sorry :\ Just saw this, no, never got it to work- had to drop that idea and finish some other things that I was on a deadline for. I'm putting that on hold anyway because the anatomy group I'm joining in the fall already have some system for making models that their students can interact with, so I'll probably just jump into whatever they're using. but thanks for following up!
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Jun 1, 2012 02:08
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sigma 6 posted:Bonus celebrity busts by another student of the same teacher. Pretty sick IMO. Christopher Reeve, Bruce Willis, then who? Michael J Fox?
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Jun 26, 2012 18:27
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