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ImplicitAssembler posted:Most big studios have given up on Maya for FX work a long time ago. Yea to my knowledge only mpc uses maya for fx but they run their own plugins for everything. Ncloth is still the best cloth solver out there though. We run the maya ncloth solver in houdini.
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Jul 11, 2015 03:00
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keyframe posted:Yea to my knowledge only mpc uses maya for fx but they run their own plugins for everything. MPC uses Kali(DMM) for destruction and Flowline for fluids, interfaced through Maya. Not sure what they use for rigids...it was moving to a Bullet solution as I was leaving. But yeah, they're probably the last place that actively uses Maya for FX.
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Jul 11, 2015 05:36
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Say I'd like to give modelling a try but never did much of anything serious in it, what would you guys recommend doing and which software to use? I have access to Autodesk education stuff if it makes a difference. Are there good resources online to learn?
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Jul 11, 2015 16:34
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Modelling for what? Arch/viz, video games, film? Lot of options out there but they sort of depend what you might want to specialize in/have actual fun making stuff with. One package doesn't rule them all, it doesn't work that way.
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Jul 11, 2015 16:41
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I'd be more interested in video game stuff I think
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Jul 11, 2015 16:43
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In that case probably 3ds Max (or possibly Maya if you'd like to branch in to film someday), and without a doubt Zbrush. Photoshop as well since you'll need it, or maybe some free alternative. For resources, it depends if you want to pay for something or scour the net for free video tutorials (which is possible, don't think you have to pay for some Gnomon video series because that's all there is). I guess first you should look at some feature lists of 3ds Max and/or Maya, look at their interfaces, maybe get trial versions of each, and see what you think. You might get a feel for one or the other, so try them both out briefly. It'll be easy to find some beginner tutorials that let you learn some basics, then choose one you think you might prefer over the other, and go from there. Of course this is all my personal opinion, I could be giving you the completely wrong advice, so be warned!
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Jul 11, 2015 16:53
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KiddieGrinder posted:In that case probably 3ds Max (or possibly Maya if you'd like to branch in to film someday), and without a doubt Zbrush. Photoshop as well since you'll need it, or maybe some free alternative. Thanks for the tips, I'm going to get those then. I noticed that I can get version 2014, 2015, 2016 of max, should I take 2016?
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Jul 11, 2015 17:01
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Le0 posted:should I take 2016? Consensus seems to be to take the previous years iteration, reason being that it should have its bugs squashed and be nice and stable. The improvements between versions are usually pretty small, and not really worth having to upgrade all your plugins for. But again that's just me. 
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Jul 11, 2015 17:10
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I think that is very good advice with Autodesk software.
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Jul 11, 2015 17:46
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I don't use or care about max but if you are going to use maya you want the 2016 version.
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Jul 11, 2015 18:37
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The Polycount wiki has tons of great resources.
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Jul 11, 2015 23:04
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keyframe posted:I don't use or care about max but if you are going to use maya you want the 2016 version. if you don't value your sanity. 2015 crashes and fucks up enough thank you very much.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:19
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Have you used 2016 or is this just a "lol Autodesk sucks" kind of thing?
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Jul 13, 2015 03:35
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2016 is way more stable. 2015 is a nightmare trainwreck. The studio I'm at skipped right from 2013 to 2016 after seeing what a fuckup 2015 was.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:47
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Hmmmmm. Not sure how i feel about this.
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Jul 13, 2015 20:36
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Eh, what does it matter how we feel about it? They have a near-monopoly. They win.
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Jul 13, 2015 20:41
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SO I put in some more work on an FKA Twigs model I posted a bit ago. Exploring some illustrative techniques.   
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Jul 13, 2015 20:42
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Jewel posted:Hmmmmm. Not sure how i feel about this. Seems like everyone is seeing how profitable Adobe's getting from wringing its customers dry. Wouldn't surprise me if this increases piracy amongst younger people and small studios but being overall more profitable due to the bigger studios.
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Jul 13, 2015 20:56
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My Photoshop subscription is like... not even ten pounds a month. I used to pay more than that for Spotify. Maybe the rest of the Creative Suite is way more expensive but for basically the industry gold standard for image editing software I'm hardly getting wrung dry here. MayaLT is only £30/month, and that's the more expensive subscription option because I went for per-month billing rather than a longer period. It's pretty reasonable. A full-fat Maya subscription is rather harder to swallow though, at least for a precariously-employed freelancer. I miss plugins, but I don't miss them £145/month much.
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Jul 13, 2015 22:59
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My big beef with Creative Cloud is that there isn't a lot of flexibility right now. If all you need is Photoshop and Lightroom then you can really get a hell of a deal with the $10 photography plan. The next step up from that is a single application plus the cloud stuff for $20, which is an okay deal, but let's be honest, not a ton of people only need a single Adobe product. And finally there's the $50 plan that includes everything whether you want / need it or not. If you're like me and definitely need, say, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects but will probably never even give a second thought to most of the other 20 or so applications on offer then the full plan doesn't really look like the best deal anymore. I'd suggest they scrap the current single-program plan and replace it with a new one at around $30 or so that allows you to pick out 3 or 4 applications.
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Jul 13, 2015 23:58
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They switched us over from Photoshop CS6 to Photoshop CC 2015 and it is a pile of loving garbage. Changed all kinds of settings under performance to stop poo poo from randomly freezing or unable to pan or zoom, they still happen. Just random loving laggy nonsense. I loving hate Photoshop CC. But they took away my CS6 so now I'm stuck with the garbage.
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Jul 14, 2015 02:44
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Megaspel posted:if you don't value your sanity. 2015 crashes and fucks up enough thank you very much. I never had a problem with either 2015 or 2016 in or out of production. If it is crashing that much the problem is on your end. If you can reproduce a crash every time send a bug report to autodesk. Megaspel posted:Seems like everyone is seeing how profitable Adobe's getting from wringing its customers dry. Wouldn't surprise me if this increases piracy amongst younger people and small studios but being overall more profitable due to the bigger studios. Bigger studios are not going to be on subscription and have their own deals in place. Rental is way better than buying for the freelancer anyway. For the price of one full seat of Maya you can rent for three years. If you are not making money from it just use the free student version. There is no reason to pirate autodesk software since the student version is free and has no limitations other than a small notice that pops up when you save a file. If you buy a "perpetual license" of Maya you also need to pay for subscription on top to be eligible for updates. If you let your subscription lapse you are hosed and will have to pay out the rear end to get the new update. The price of maintenance is the same as renting Maya for a year so this way you get it for the price of maintenance and not have to pay the $3700 entry fee to get a license you won't be using a year or two from now. keyframe fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Jul 14, 2015 |
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Jul 14, 2015 06:10
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keyframe posted:If you can reproduce a crash every time send a bug report to autodesk. Right...and then they'll do bugger all...even if you are a major studio.
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Jul 14, 2015 07:51
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It's hard to reproduce crashes in Maya because it crashes FOR NO REASON. I've had it crash during saves, randomly coming back to it after going afk, during imports, during exports, changing shaders. It's gotten better since the last few versions but there are still crashes that I get that make no sense at all, and I'm not going to waste time trying to repro them just so Autodesk can ignore it. I'm fine with my studio dropping the money on the software, but I do not support autodesk at home. And won't, even after the laughable subscription price they came up with.
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Jul 14, 2015 07:54
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keyframe posted:If you are not making money from it just use the free student version. There is no reason to pirate autodesk software since the student version is free and has no limitations other than a small notice that pops up when you save a file. How do you get the free version if you're not a student? When my freelance contract runs out if I don't get another lined up sharpish I'm going to cancel my subscription, so it would be nice to have a legit hobby-only version to fall back on. But I thought Autodesk restricted access to the the educational versions to people who could actually prove they were a student.
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Jul 14, 2015 10:32
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floofyscorp posted:How do you get the free version if you're not a student? When my freelance contract runs out if I don't get another lined up sharpish I'm going to cancel my subscription, so it would be nice to have a legit hobby-only version to fall back on. But I thought Autodesk restricted access to the the educational versions to people who could actually prove they were a student. Last I checked, you just type in whatever school you attended. They didn't even require a school email address, so you can just use a personal email. The student version has all of the same features as the regular version, you're just not allowed to make money with it. Also, they have student versions of just about all of their 3d packages including Max, Maya and Mudbox.
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Jul 14, 2015 14:22
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Is 2016 actually pretty stable then? I was just going off the old rule my Uni told me, of always staying a version behind. If that's the case, I might make the switch. I still have 2014 installed because no one bothered to update the terrible leap motion plugin, which I know is terrible in itself.
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Jul 14, 2015 15:05
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I can't compare it to 2015(I made the jump from full-fat 2012 to LT 2016) but I haven't had any serious stability issues. I mean, it's crashed a few times but eh, that's Maya for you. I just wish they'd set auto-save on by default. That did catch me out shortly after upgrading when I was foolishly assuming I could do things for more than five minutes without deleting all my history.
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Jul 14, 2015 15:40
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I hate auto save, it's an unexpected lag spike every 5 minutes, ruins my mojo flow or whatever. I just have a ctrl-s twitch and make sure to save in increments on big changes.
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Jul 14, 2015 16:56
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Megaspel posted:I hate auto save, it's an unexpected lag spike every 5 minutes, ruins my mojo flow or whatever. I just have a ctrl-s twitch and make sure to save in increments on big changes. Ugh god I know the feeling, especially with big scenes/files, the wait takes what feels like forever. Also a lot of the time I alt-tab out because it's going to take ages, then I forget about it and come back in and as soon as I start to do something auto save kicks in again. 
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Jul 14, 2015 18:03
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I don't understand why all programs-and I mean everything- don't have iterative saving as a standard feature. It should be a basic function like save, cut, copy, paste.
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Jul 14, 2015 19:30
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floofyscorp posted:How do you get the free version if you're not a student? When my freelance contract runs out if I don't get another lined up sharpish I'm going to cancel my subscription, so it would be nice to have a legit hobby-only version to fall back on. But I thought Autodesk restricted access to the the educational versions to people who could actually prove they were a student. Literally go to the autodesk education site, sign up with an email and download.
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Jul 15, 2015 05:05
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I made a music video for our CEO using phoenix https://vimeo.com/132115954 stems from the track were sped up 5x, broken up and assigned to a series of objects with the 3dsmax audio controller sending an emission rate to phoenix. then a week later with 300gb of sim files, I rendered them, comped them together and used kronos to slow it down to 20% to get the correct speed back. Then i ended some dreamy video and slapped it over the top with a blending mode. Trying to capture that dreamy vibe with snippets of barely recognizable things. It was fun, and required minimal input being entirely driven by the original audio. 10/10 would do again for my own music.
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Jul 16, 2015 00:02
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Hey just dropped in! Real excited to progress my 3D knowlege so I thought I'd come here and learn some things. Still a newbie but I'm eager to my hands dirty. Been doing video editing for a few years now thought I would make the jump and start pumping out 3D vids for my youtube channel. Anyway I hope you guys don't mind my questions, as I will probably have many of them as I continue to progress!
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Jul 16, 2015 06:28
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keyframe posted:If you buy a "perpetual license" of Maya you also need to pay for subscription on top to be eligible for updates. If you let your subscription lapse you are hosed and will have to pay out the rear end to get the new update. The price of maintenance is the same as renting Maya for a year so this way you get it for the price of maintenance and not have to pay the $3700 entry fee to get a license you won't be using a year or two from now. I don't know if this is true for other currencies, but in USD the maintenance sub is ~$750/year where rental is just shy of $1500/year. That puts the break even point at ~5 years. Maintenance sub also gets you the bonus that when you stop paying you can use the last version you owned forever. edit: Should add, maintenance sub can only currently be bought alongside a new perpetual license and if you ever let the sub lapse it is dead forever and you are stuck with the latest version you paid for unless you go for rental. Rahu fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 08:29
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Still working on that model for the bronze bust. Having a really hard time deciding on whether or not to keep the blobby stuff or not. The liquid effect is not quite turning out as I hoped and is pain to tweak. Any thoughts? Working, or not working? 
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Jul 16, 2015 10:27
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sigma 6 posted:Still working on that model for the bronze bust. Having a really hard time deciding on whether or not to keep the blobby stuff or not. The liquid effect is not quite turning out as I hoped and is pain to tweak. Any thoughts? Working, or not working? I like the concept, looks like you are intersecting two meshes, but you may get more pleasing results rendering stills of slow motion/realflow liquid separately and using photoshop to combine the two images. Treat it like a physical photo of a model and stock images of splashes. You could even go the 3D route for the main blobs and accent it with photos or separate fluid renders. If you're set on doing it in 3D, do you have access to Zbrush? You could combine both your shapes as a dynamesh and use the smooth brush to blur the line between the head and liquid so it is one flowing volume. EDIT: Oh yeah if you want a physical copy you're going to have to do dynamesh probably. I know Video Copilot has a thing called Element 3D, which isn't what you want but the guy sells a bunch of "splash" geometry as well. It's not animated, just static meshes of splashes and stuff like that. Could cut down on work, but it's like $100 and comes with a bunch of crap you probably don't need: https://www.videocopilot.net/products/3d/motiondesignpack/ All the models are made to be used in his Element 3D plugin but they're just .obj files and you can do whatever you want with them. bring back old gbs fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 15:48
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I think his goal is to end up with a bronze bust in real life so post processing won't be much help.
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Jul 16, 2015 18:07
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32MB OF ESRAM posted:I like the concept, looks like you are intersecting two meshes, but you may get more pleasing results rendering stills of slow motion/realflow liquid separately and using photoshop to combine the two images. Treat it like a physical photo of a model and stock images of splashes. You could even go the 3D route for the main blobs and accent it with photos or separate fluid renders. Thank you but yeah, this is for 3d printing -> bronze casting. My workflow has been to use maya nparticles and convert them to a polygon mesh for the liquid effect. Then take everything into zbrush to try and merge them together. Very frustrating to get the effect I am looking for, which is to have liquid morphing into a head a la T 1000. Mostly the struggle is with nparticles, since my laptop can't handle the sim as well as it should (tweak a setting -> resim -> tweak a setting -> resim ... and on and on). I don't have time to deal with realflow right now and besides, when I did play around with it, the simulation was unbearably slow. Even slower than using nparticles. Might be tempted to use bitfrost but I have to print this out tonight or tomorrow, so I really don't have time to learn too much new stuff. Does anyone know of bitfrost converts to a polymesh at some point? Does it sim faster than nparticles? I don't have Maya 2016 ... and reading the last few posts it sounds like I should stay away from bitfrost in maya 2015. Here is another render but with a (less successful?) liquid mesh. Maybe the key is just more sculpting in zbrush vs. spending so much time tweaking nparticles .... hmmm. 
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Jul 16, 2015 18:39
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I preferred the first one, but both could use some work IMO. The transition is way too harsh and sudden, which is probably what's killing it most for me. And yeah, I think just sculpting it in Zbrush is going to be the way to go with your timeframe rather than mess around tweaking particles. This just hit top row on ZBC yesterday, and is some good reference for combining an effect into the sculpt: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?195068-David-Giraud-collectible-works&p=1148076&viewfull=1#post1148076
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Jul 16, 2015 18:48
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