Re: Sami animation project

Robin Rowe wrote:

>> I just want to get an idea of what people like, what they hate, how
>> they have to work around limitations, but also how certain things have
>> made things easier for them. Regardless of style and preferences of
>> the artists I'm interested in knowing more about how other artists
>> work, especially those who are on a linux mailing list.
> 
> Maya + RenderMan + Shake seems the most popular toolset.

I assume RenderMan refers to PRMan. If you want to spend less money use 
Maya + Liquid (free) + 3Delight ($1k/client; beats PRMan anyway in some 
areas already).

> DreamWorks uses Maya. ILM uses SoftImage|XSI. Sony Pictures Imageworks 
> uses Houdini. These are all good tools that make great movies. If there 
> was a compelling advantage to a particular tool then studios would adopt 
> it predominantly (as has happened with Linux). Many studios use 
> competing tools for different tasks or to accommodate an artist's 
> preference.

I think that misses the point.
The reason lies imo merely in the availability of trained people for a 
particular package. The time one can save when developing a pipeline 
around e.g. Houdini vs. Maya or, worse, XSI, one looses quickly when 
having to ramp up the number of people actually using a package. There 
aren't that many Houdini animators around... :)

I btw. also doubt that ILM uses XSI solely (I heard it was good old 
Softimage, not XSI) and even if they did, chances are that their XSI 
doesn't have much in common anymore with the XSI you can buy off the shelf.
That is a very important point to keep in mind: /never/ trust the 
marketing mumbo-jumbo on demo reels of contemporary "high-end" 3d 
packages. Fact is that the amount of R&D going into a pipeline for the 
VFX of a feature film is close to the R&D you would do to write a base 
version of Maya or XSI themselves quite often. So don't be trapped to 
believe you can do fancy blockbuster VFX with package XZY just because 
company ABC used that package and did so. They probably had an 
ubertweaked, pimped-up version of that package with dozens of in-house 
scipts & plug-ins their R&D department spit out.

The pipeline developed for the feature film I'm currently working on 
could have been developed for /any/ 3d package (I guess even Truespace, 
if we wanted to). But for some rather odd reason it was XSI.
I do know though that if we had developed it for Houdini, we would have 
finished it long ago (this is the R&D pov) but then we would have 
trouble finding animators fluent with the package.

I'm over the rendering part of things but speaking e.g. only of the rig 
the character TDs here built in 5 months (!): that is /very/ package 
agnostic from the user's pov (as it does absolutely everything for you 
-- setup-wise); it wouldn't make any difference if people here had 
written these scripts for Maya or Houdini. Only that software 
development for the latter is simply much less of a pain in the a##...

It breaks down to: how much money do you want to spend on pipeline/tool 
R&D vs. how much money do you want to spend on training people. If you 
save money on R&D by going with a package that has a better designed API 
& less issues aka bugs (Houdini) then you have to be prepared to train 
people on that package. On the other hand, going with a more common 
package like XSI and Maya will allow you to bring people on board rather 
quickly and at any time of production as there are lots of trained 
animators for these but you will spend more time & money doing R&D.

Producers usually see the latter (being able to staff up quickly late as 
the need arises) to be more important than saving money on R&D as the 
latter is believed to be much more prone to become a major showstopper 
than the former.
Hence the decision which package to use is often driven by this (imho 
very debatable) consideration and then there's maybe things like a 
personal preference of the lead animator and things like that. :>


Cheers,

Moritz



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