RE: horton hears a who

["John Payne" <john(at)pureny.com>]

I’ve had conversations with some of the animators and riggers at Blue
Sky during “Robots” about possibly moving to XSI and I don’t think the current
version of XSI warrants the pain they would have to go through to switch.

 

I think It would take a paradigm shift in the software akin to what happened when
Alias was shifting over to Maya and Soft 3D to XSI.  Both Maya and XSI have
a feature set that with some differences are roughly the same. 

 

I think it would take an enormous effort for XSI to change the paradigm.

It would probably mean completely rewriting the IK system, integrating
hair and cloth completely, switching to a nodal based operator stack,

rewriting the particle system,  AND coming up with a new enveloping system
that plays well with the fore-mentioned items.  Oh and don’t forget the new physics
engine, soft and rigid body dynamics and metaball plugin, that kicks real flows ass,
and works with the new particle system. 

 

They would have to do this while holding off the Autodesk juggernaut, while keeping the end
users from migrating to Houdini, (don’t tell me you have not thought about it).

 

- John

 

 

 

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From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Kris Rivel
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 11:05 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: horton hears a who

 

Nice to hear you are flying the XSI flag there still.

Yeah, this is the reason why most large shops just can't switch or even think about switching.....unless XSI can someday spit out wads of cash.  Do I hear a feature request for v7? :-)

Kris

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 3:27 PM, David Gallagher <daveg(at)blueskystudios.com> wrote:

Hi Simon and Kay.

There is a decade's worth of tools written around Maya. So...

Simon Pickard wrote:

Hi David,

Good news to hear.

So I guess my question is...

What did others there think? Were they convinced also by xsi (in terms

of maybe expending it more into the pipe) or was it regarded as more a

support to Maya?

Regards,

SImon

On 01/04/2008, David Gallagher <daveg(at)blueskystudios.com> wrote:

 Hans Payer wrote:

That's awesome David! Hope you made many other believers at Blue Sky.

Congrats on Who's success! I'm curious, were there any non-XSI riggers

assign to Who? how many?

 Yes, the whole team uses Maya - I don't know how many riggers there are

exactly. I just was attached to the process to help out, and I would rather

poke myself with a sharp stick than model blendshapes or weight verts in

Maya.

 There are many workflow benefits like being able to model a change to a

head in the context of a pose, compare to the unposed or prechange version,

then decide which contributing shape should receive the change.

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 9:21 AM, David Gallagher <daveg(at)blueskystudios.com>

wrote:

I thought some of you would enjoy hearing that many of the main

characters on Horton Hears a Who had significant input from my efforts

in XSI, using the spectacular shape creation tools.

Many of the brow rigs were done all in xsi, most of the Kangaroo face

shapes and Horton's mouth, cheeks, and brows.

(I am a one-man xsi team here, sometimes contributing to the rigging

process using xsi.)

--

David Gallagher

Character Development Lead Animator, Blue Sky Studios

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 Hans Payer

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David Gallagher

Character Development Lead Animator, Blue Sky Studios

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David Gallagher

Character Development Lead Animator, Blue Sky Studios