Seems Softimage have been very busy and v7.01 is now released with plenty of bug fixes that were quite important and I would suggest to upgrade as a matter of urgency, is much much more stable, the rendering is way faster and seems to me is the first post-autodesk release which should be something to celebrate.
Kudos.
Color management has been avoided or forgotten for far too long and now with Softimage XSI v7 in our computers color management has been exposed to us, the end users, to take full advantage. Historically color management has been a thing of the print and press, and of course film pipelines but now has been exposed causing quite a bit of confusion although the benefits will be obvious very very soon, hopefully this will help understand it a bit.
The nature of look development has been always a tough one due to the limitations imposed by the shading and illumination stages along with the rendering process that needs to be kickstarted to check your changes. So far all sorts of trickery have been used to get things easier, delay decision making by sending layers to the compositing, precomputing of very intense processes as reusable maps and what not.
Well, seems like the deal is done, we are now part of the big Autodesk and will sure get a lot of good things and a lot of bad things while the whole deal settles. I must admit Autodesk, although strange at first, is a better player than Avid which never understood 3D too much and let’s face it, is way healthier.
Many of you may not have heard of it too much, many will think is a gone festival, well, I am afraid you should be paying attention to this one and yes, it is in Monaco.
This year they have put together quite an interesting offer on Architecture visualization, landscape, industrial activity and of course, entertainment.
So if you are considering reviewing where to go to see interesting stuff and are not planning to go to the US, probably this is one of the places you sure should go.
Seems the NCALM (National Center for Airborne Laser Swath Mapping) have been busy and have put together a KML file of the Lidar scans they have of some parts of the US for free download, so now you can see their “tiles” on Google Earth, navigate and download the data in ADF format (it needs to be converted to whatever format you want but in case you are a hacker, look at the file format here).
What is the benefit? well, you will have highly accurate scan data with the benefit of very confortable browsing, how is that?
Thanks so much guys.
Next,
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A few links to CG companies all over the world that do interesting stuff in no particular order.
These are some of the tools I use constantly and as people keep asking here you have a list plus links to the manufacturer's websites, but remember, the trick is not just the tools, you have to have something to say.
Going so soon? May these links be a guide to web enlightenment. Schwing!
