However the ambient occlusion option in the architectural shader has still not been corrected, and the values for the shadow and ambient color are still flipped.Ī welcome addition to lights is the ability to use IES profiles. The physical sun/sky shader set-up has been updated and is more complete than previous versions. Other improvements include the ability to insert nodes by right-clicking existing nodes in the render tree. It’s now also easier to write realtime shaders for games or viewport display with the included shader wizard. The architecture for these shaders has also been modified to more easily allow their authoring. Mental Ray has also been upgraded to the latest version, and the entire Mental Ray library can now be accessed directly from the render tree unlike previous versions where you had to manually navigate to an outside folder to use them. But it’s free, and that can’t necessarily be a bad thing. Although I didn’t have a chance to use it, it seems like a welcome set of tools for artists to explore their cinematic creativity but not necessarily for bigger studios that have probably scripted their own tools to achieve the relatively simple effects that are included. A third-party plug-in called Craft Director Studio is bundled with Softimage 2011. This will also allow Face Robot to grow beyond being an additional module that seems daunting and too disconnected from the main app to be used effectively.īesides these two, there’s a wealth of other additions or improvements to the existing toolset. It’s not perfect, but if the audio file (and accompanying text file) is clear, without distracting background sounds, it does a pretty good job of laying out phenomes, which in itself can be quite a tedious task. But by automating quite a significant portion of the lipsync process, artists need to just fine-tune the pretty impressive results this process gives. This is a smart move for Softimage as previously, Face Robot required motion capture techniques to effectively use the facial rigs. The next major feature for character animators is the automatic lipsyncing feature in Face Robot. Subtle improvements such as now being able to apply ICE operators on nulls help a lot in not being locked into specific objects, as the ICE instructions can now live external to an object, allowing greater flexibility in swapping objects. There are Deformation Effects, Hull Deformers, Verlet Integration and Strand Dynamics. Granted, the creation of more complex rigs could evade the non-technical artists for now, but as a repository of custom ICE compounds proliferates online, everyone will benefit.īesides rigs, standard operators, such as constraints, now have an ICE equivalent and a wealth of ICE compounds - which one used to have to find online - have now been included as part of the package. But now it’s possible to rig models entirely using the ICE interface, thus making the possible transfer of rigs between different models incredibly simple. Previously a sub-section of kinematics could be unlocked but, being officially unsupported, it was prone to crashes and was not reliable. One of the biggest new features is the inclusion of ICE kinematics. It’s nice to see that considering it has only been six months since the past Softimage release, there is quite a spate of new tools and enhancements added into this year’s version. It’s that time of year again when we artists are rewarded with an update to the preceding year’s software package and we expectantly wait to find out what new improvements have been made and which bugs have been eliminated. WEBSITE: PRICE: With subscription: $3,790 without subscription: $2,995
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