Kees just sent me the link for this, it is f’in hilarious.
Along the theme for this thread, you all should look in to Reflex from Digital Fish,
http://www.digitalfish.com/
It was built with some of the ideas you all are talking about. I think some of the people on here might all ready have NDAs with them.
[QUOTE=bclark;1737]Along the theme for this thread, you all should look in to Reflex from Digital Fish,
http://www.digitalfish.com/
It was built with some of the ideas you all are talking about. I think some of the people on here might all ready have NDAs with them.[/QUOTE]
That looks interesting. Too bad there aren’t any video demos of Reflex.
XML would be a great ascii format choice!!
All in favor say aye!
-R
I hope Reflex comes out one of these days… or at least releases some videos like randall is saying.
It seems reflex is still very reliant on sparse keyframes… I’d like a way to manipulate animations where all the frames are keyed… sorta a zbrush type philosophy for animating… manipulate lots of data at once, easily and with understandable feedback. I think I’ll try to put together an example of what I mean sometime next month.
[QUOTE=PaK;1739]XML would be a great ascii format choice!!
All in favor say aye!
-R[/QUOTE]
Now this might be an unpopular view, but I don’t regard xml as a human readable format.
We used to use a modified form of .x for our intermediate model files, but since we changed to xml, I really miss the old format. It was really easy to quickly scan an .x file to track down bugs (dodgy normals etc) and I just can’t do that as easily with xml.
Jeff Atwood calls it The Angle Bracket Tax http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001114.html, and I heartily agree.
Now, if everyone will wait a few minutes while I don my fireproof suit :laugh:
Drea
Fireproof doesn’t deflect bullets (:
Light
This is definitely interesting but I don’t think this is the thread. While there are plenty of reasons XML isn’t great as a language, I think lots of the authors miss what makes it extremely good in a more broad sense (having the option for commonality and standardization outweighs, for me, any relatively minor problems of XML as a language).
brad: That Reflex stuff is very interesting. I’m going to send them an email, thanks for the link. They really have the right idea for what they are doing, it seems.
BTW, here is a link to the thread on CGTalk.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=383388
What I find appealing is, people have great ideas- but they don’t have the ability to execute (assuming they have the drive to do it, which is not common itself). I mean, I can imagine doing something like that in Max (heavily reliant on dotnet stuff), but… it wouldn’t be fun to make. And there’d need to be serious hacky workarounds, slowdowns, and innumerable unforeseen obstacles. But what if there weren’t? What if, you could code on an underlying animation system that worked, and was extensible and transparent? What if someone wrote a ‘sketchbook’ utility that allows you to draw on screen, play back, etc.,… and if it was written and exposed correctly, you could just drop it in to your module? I mean, if it works the way you need, what is the difference between if you wrote it (mostly a series of classes, no?), or not? If it needs more functionalities, you can just extend or make more classes. The more I think and blabber on about it, it does start to become clearer and seem more possible to do.
@ Matt- Reflex has very nice layer tools and lets you adjust and deal with dense data just like I would in Motionbuilder or Max or now Maya… On top of the fact that Reflex in view edit handles on the path are amazing, dense data editing is not an Issues when you use both layers and 3d editing on the objects displayed path.
The sketching on the view is really just icing, I mean There are a few maya scripts that let users do this just fine and , my friend Josh wrote a mel script based on the sketch pose tool from Chicken Little, where you can draw on the screen and have contorls snap to it pos/ rot. etc…
The fact that reflex is a Realtime Animation system (like mobu) but the clean design of the UI and layer system…until you see the power of useing editable motion trials on objects, it is amazing and the stills don’t do it justice. (those are not path animations like draw a curve and attach and object)
So digitalfish is still alive?
Great! I haven’t heard any news from them for a while so I was wondering if they stopped development.
Hopefully whatever they release will catch on, but I’m worried it will be bought by Autodesk if it does. :\
Yep our animation team are very interested in Reflex and we were talking to DigitalFish recently. They certainly have good ideas about keeping everything really simple and artist-friendly, while still being flexible and powerful for varying pipelines.
Not to get too off topic, but…
Hey Kees… speaking of ShaderFX: any plans for a stand alone app? The fact that it is tied to 3dsmax is the gating factor in my purchase. 
Okay Rob,
When I heard the announcement about XSI and autodesk, I threatened to write my own modeling / animation package in much the same way you guys have been describing it. Simple, light weight, great scripting, configurable UI, etc.
Looks like I might get some help on this project if I started on it …
Then again, time spent working on this would be time not spent making more games…
Kind of a tough call for me.
Then again, if it let me create content for my games and projects…
Hmmm.
So tell you what. I’m slated to finish Caster by Jan.
So start making your designs / wish list of what you want this thing to be. Come January, we’ll take a stab at it.
You know my motto is “making it happen” right?
I think we can get something very simple up and running without too much trouble. We’ll focus on making it extensible rather than adding bells and whistles and just get a few core behaviors into the framework.
We’ll set a few reachable goals, get to that point, and evaluate where to go from there.
So what do you say?
Glad to hear from you Mike.
A few of us have already started talking about the app’s design… I’ve added you to the appropriate usergroup to access the forum. Anyone else that is serious about this and has something to contribute, I’ll add you as well. I have some really cool ideas I want to roll out for discussion- especially community components- but starting a project like this is difficult with lots of cooks… after we find our footing I’d like to open it up a bit, because everyone has very useful ideas and feedback.
[QUOTE=Rob Galanakis;1800]Glad to hear from you Mike.
but starting a project like this is difficult with lots of cooks…[/QUOTE]
I’m a cook! :D:
I’d love to help if it mean’t i’d git a big chunk of change when we sell out to Autodesk.
If money is your goal, tools and middleware is the wrong area, my friend.
…
One thing I would like to see is a centralized community resource centre. Ever since I started to learn max I’ve spent hundreds on additional training resources (books and DVDs). I’ve found that the F1 button rarely helps me that much and most of the training resources packaged with the app tend to be geared towards the basics.
What I would propose would be an official wiki or something along those lines. For example if I needed to rig up tail, I could go to the rigging section and there would be a list of techniques with a synopsis and a general idea of the types of projects the different techniques are best suited for.
To me this would be a great idea as it’d help eliminate the hours searching the net and reading through various tutorial sites just to find a way to tackle something.
The important source should be open- I believe allowing customers to see source allows a degree of confidence and transparency that results in better software overall- but no, the project won’t be open source. The project is too niche, too focused. What it needs is a core development team and eventually studio partnership/financial backing. But there needs to be great community involvement- one of the biggest shortcomings of the 3D apps is that they have so far not tapped or made use of the community. That is part of the reasons this site was founded. There is so much potential to integrate the community with the app itself, to enhance both, to open up new possibilities that simply aren’t possible with a community made of a forum or two and another place to download scripts.
One thing I would like to see is a centralized community resource centre.
Well yes these are good ideas but, are they practical? Wouldn’t it be great if absolutely everything could be completely organized and productive under one roof? Yes, but no, it will never happen, nor would I ever want it to happen. What drives innovation is individuality, freedom, and both of those things spur creativity. So the key to a community is, how do we enable, enhance, individuality and freedom, then give people the tools to realize their creativity- then how do we make it all useful and organized for the community, without encroaching on freedom and individuality?
Again, I think one major component is how the software itself interfaces with the community. The software design is modular, nodes, connectivity between parts. This should extend to community involvement as well. It is about building links between those individual nodes- it allows the users freedom and individuality- they can do things their way. But if we can and do interface with it- well, it enhances the software, and exposes more people to the product and in turn spurs improvement and creativity. And the third benefit is that it helps the community as a whole. It is a positive feedback loop.
This has a good example of a bare base with add on modules, I mean you could almost go the route of website CMS like www.drupal.org with the core code set and then have modules hook in to the core of the software… skinning, rendering etc… treat it as a true 3d os that gets used with Maya a good deal because it is a hub app at larger studios.