Best Softimage Plugins Part 1

Softimage is lacking major support of developer plugins in comparison with other software. Even VRay doesn’t exist for Softimage (though its in beta for at least 2 years now). Thanks to ICE (Interactive Creative Environments) in Softimage though, we have seen some addons beign made, mostly by independent developers. The following are addons that you can’t miss… emFluid 3.01 emFluid is but a fluid simulation solver (fire, smoke e.t.c.) created within ICE. emFluid is quite simple to setup and thanks to Softimage’s ICE speed the simulations are nearly realtime. The...

But it’s not 2011 yet…

Autodesk just recently released it’s new series on all of it’s products and that’s more than exciting if you compare these releases with the previous ones. Softwares getting updated to 2011 series (?) are but of course 3D Studio Max, Maya, Softimage (yei) and Mudbox. The previous 2010 updates were at least to say mediocre, more like the same software in a different present box. At least this time, Autodesk surprised us with most welcoming and surprising updates. I wish that to be true for the Softimage update too. Not that there hasn’t been some cool new ICE nodes,...

Octane Renderer

While biased renderers such as MentalRay and Vray have been the industry standard for years now, unbiased renderers, only recently have been used in production. That is due to the process power they need to complete a render and even with the current processor technology, it still isn’t enough to be used in animation without a huge render farm. The reason of their need for such process power is that in contrary of biased renderers, unbiased renderers simulate light as it behaves in real life. Thus, techniques such as global illumination, soft shadows e.t.c. are nor really techniques...

Silverlight in the tunnel

For years I’ve wanted to learn Adobe Flash to a higher level, but it’s something about Adobe Flash that I really dislike and that stems mainly from the work flow. It just don’t suits me. I’ve never been very fond with Microsoft either I must admit, but here comes something to light the path, or at least mine. Silverlight is a competitor to Flash in one way. It is all about RIA (Rich Internet Application) as flash is also, but for me at least its workflow surpass flash one. Silverlight applications can be made inside of MS Expression Blend (version 3 by now) where you...

Max Freedom!

Today November 23, Max for Live (and that is for Ableton Live of course) has finally been released!.. And I am really excited about it! I guess such as about every Live user. About those who are not using Ableton Live I suggest you take a look. Max is a product by Ableton in collaboration with Cycling ‘74 that brings literally endless creativity for music composition and sound design inside of Ableton Live. Max is in essence an audio or midi device in Live, but the user is no more limited only by tweaking the device’s parameters, but can actually dive deep in that device and...

The Hollywood way

It is quite often that I see new training courses getting released, but honestly… very sparingly I see such an exceptional training course with such a quality! Hollywood Camera Works has recently released their second training course targeting at film vfx. “Visual Effects for Directors” .The set comes in 7 DVDs which is a lot, but it also has an enormous amount of information to cover and as such, due to the fantastic quality and examples, an enormous amount of knowledge to learn. From green screen, camera tracking, camera mapping, compositing, modeling, cg live action...

Free, for Real!

Now these are good times.. UDK (Unreal Development Kit) which in essence its the Unreal Engine 3 came out for free! That is of course for non commercial projects, prototyping and educational purposes. Even then, this next generation realtime game engine used to cost thousands of euros and now its open for free to the public along with all the cool features that Unreal Engine 3 has, such as it’s terrific rendering engine, kismet node-based logic editor , matinee for cinematics, facefx and speedtree intergration etc etc. Of course if a product is ever to get released on the market the...

Small things to be happy for

Being happy with my recently bought Oxygen 8 MIDI controller by M-Audio that is. This thing is really small and lightweight and has only 2 octaves but nonetheless I am quite happy with it and using it all the time. The key velocities feels just right and using the knobs especially in Ableton Live is just  as fun and that is for Ableton’s feature to link any control with anything, on the fly, almost automatically. In fact, I am a bass player and I don’t intent to be a proffesional keyboard player anytime soon. 2 octaves are ok for what I need now, but I already feel a bit limited...