3dsmax TD have become increasingly envious with the release of Maya 2016 and the parallel rig evaluation toolkit allowing Maya TDs to finally use all the CPUs and GPUs cores in parallel, in order to speed up the viewport display but until now I hadn’t see such a thorough demonstration as the following one.
Have a look it is really interesting for both TDs and animators as they give some really good tips on how to speed up rigs for animators. Also, have a look at the related Rigging Dojo article which is pretty funny:
There has been some development in the secrecy surrounding Pixar’s animation software in the past few weeks but before we get started, you might want to refresh yourself with the previous article I wrote about Menv and Presto.
Pixar officially revealed their software Presto (aka Menv 13) to the world, in a jaw-dropping tech demo illustrating the benefit of relying on GPU and Nvidia latest tech for that matter.
Maya and other 3d animation softwares look so antiquated compared to Presto. Unlike Autodesk and their mono-threaded CPU viewport, it is quite obvious that Pixar engineers are listening to the users.
In the following video you will get to see some features animators have been screaming for and no-one seems to be listening to it.
1. Invisible on-viewport local trigger controls.
Forget about having to constantly disconnect your sight from your model and having to keep half of your screen free for a silly GUI:
See how the presenter simply click on the geometry to activate the transformation gizmo. If you pay attention you will also notice that the smile to sad control he is activating, triggers automatically the mouth corners up/down and in/out values.
Invisible local trigger controls
2. Realtime animation WITH hair!
It is a lot more predictable to pose a character when you can see a closer representation of the final groom and if on top the playback is real time…. damn!
3. Realtime shadows
Nothing too exceptional here. Most 3d packages have been doing this for quite a while but definitely not with fur visible in realtime.
Real time shadows
4. The pose library is not that different from other software but some people might be interested to see it :
Here is the extract from the demo followed by the full presentation showing the realtime lighting engine:
I am using this opportunity to plug an old article about World orient head and shoulders. I am amazed how many professional rigs don’t have such a simple constraint switch that makes animators life much easier and allows us to reach higher quotas and quality.
