What is the relationship between PMG and Luxology?

[fwtep]

What is the relationship between PMG and Luxology?They're both software companies.

Fred

[DMack]

Ha Ha Fred!

Seriously is there ANY strategic connection at all? Are you guys going to develop a connection to the rendering part of luxology's suite (nexus?).

Always though it was a shame that you guys didn't do this together...... Some real cooperation must be good for both PMG and Luxology?!?!

[Wegg]

The current Messiah renderer is blowing my mind in terms of quality and features. If your itching for the hottest/coolest renderer on the market. . . chances are you already own it.

If Messiah could use Modo's new Sub-D options, weighted edges and morphmaps. . . Man. . . THAT would rule the school.

[crossbones]

After using it at Siggraph Edge weighting is intresting not necessary part of modeling anything. the New Sub-D is amazing. They have a chrome mode where you can have your model look like chrome and model with it to check reflections.

It would be nice if we had options to use metanurbs or catmull Rom sub-d

[Julez4001]

does modo sub-ds workwith n-gons?

[Wegg]

Yea I think it does. But. . . personally I'd never see it as a fault if Messiah didn't support them. They kind of scream "LAZY MODELER!" to me. . .

[crossbones]

HAHA Right on. Yeah it supports ngon sub-d's. I modeled with it for about an hour. It is completely foreign to metanurbs to have ngons, there were obivious visual anomollys of stretching and tearing when i had an Ngon. I am pretty if I could animate those, it would be deform unpredictably.

[DaveW]

After using it at Siggraph Edge weighting is intresting not necessary part of modeling anything. Lot's of things aren't "necessary" for modeling if you really want to be picky. But having edge weighting saves a ton of polys and, especially on some of the more complex mechanical models I've made, it saves a ton of time.


Yea I think it does. But. . . personally I'd never see it as a fault if Messiah didn't support them. They kind of scream "LAZY MODELER!" to me. . . I don't think lazy has anything to do with it. It's annoying as hell when I'm modeling and as I go along, some of the operations I do end up making 5+ sided polys. I'll correct them eventually, but having a mesh that can't be properly subd'd is a pain to work with. And there are times when it just makes no sense to come up with some workaround to ensure all quads/tris when a 5 sided poly would work. Any tool that speeds up workflow is a good thing.

It is completely foreign to metanurbs to have ngons, there were obivious visual anomollys of stretching and tearing when i had an Ngon. I am pretty if I could animate those, it would be deform unpredictably. I haven't used Modo but the anomolies you saw could just be OpenGL errors, like the creasing LW has that usually doesn't show up in a render. It could just be that they have a crappy implementation of ngons. Apps like Maya and Mirai handle ngons with no weird artifacts and they deform just fine. There is a big thread about this in the modeling forum.

[OZI_Jason]

I think LW modeler is the only modeling package that does not have 'edge' selection/weighting etc.

Would be great for messiah to include the real Sub-D's along with the current Patch method.

:thumbsup:

[Zithen]

I know it would be a major deal for pmG to do this...but I don't think it would be a bad idea for Lux and them to join forces or cooperate. Lux evidently has a 3d OS, platform independent system code going on. If pmG ported messiah to Lux's OS, I would imagine that you could work in messiah and modo seamlessly. You would bring Modo up in one window and messiah in another.
I remember in the messiah user group about a few years ago Brad kinda mentioning about wanting to do that...but I guess pmG at the time did not. I think it would have been a good idea because it would have added some modeling funcionality to messiah.

I think messiah's a wonderful app, but I think the future will be the ability for different programs to work seamlessly together.

By the way...messiah really needs to improve its dynamics...especially soft and hard bodies.

[fwtep]

Lux evidently has a 3d OS, platform independent system code going on.Don't let the marketing fool you. Their "3D OS" is, at least as described by Brad, the same idea as messiah's core.

Fred

[Wegg]

Wouldn't it be more reasonable for Luxology to develop a modeling compnent within the Messiah development platform? pmG already have a production proven product that is mature and compatible with almost all the rendering packages available on the market. Considering Modo hasn't even shipped yet. . . and it's current price point. . . I kind of doubt the pmG team will be "porting" their products any time soon. ;)

[Zithen]

Don't let the marketing fool you. Their "3D OS" is, at least as described by Brad, the same idea as messiah's core.

FredIs messiah's core platform independent?

Lux's "3d OS" reminds me of what the tao-group is doing, which is what the new Amiga OS was based on. www.tao-group.com (http://www.tao-group.com/)
It's platform independent, loads quickly, the OS can rest on top of another OS and all "tools" can share info and interoperate with other tools.
Tao's Intent and digital Amiga is written in a virtual assembly code which gets translated by a virtual processor, allowing a developer to write a program once and have it work on multiple platforms. So the OS has it's own UI and it's true multitasking, allowing you to work in multiple windows/programs at the same time (unlike Windows), and it's fast in the translation...sometimes faster than the translation from C code to machine code.

In Lux's Nexus you can have Modo in one window while simultaneously working in the animation or render program. Also Modo is its own seperate program and does not have to be a host to a main program ...but can interoperate with other programs in the Nexus OS. For example, you can play the game mindsweeper in a window within Modo, but mindsweeper is a completely seperate program. So if you wrote a program in the Nexus OS, you could also have it reside in one of its UI windows and everything would work with everything. All of what Lux seems to be doing reminds me of Tao's intent and if so, calling it a 3d OS would be more true than not.

[Gwot]

Fred: How about a modeler from you guys then? :twisted:

I'd buy it. :buttrock:

[Wegg]

With Wings3D, Silo Lightwave and now Modo. . . you really think we need ANOTHER great modeling app?

[Gwot]

It can't hurt. =]

Messiah is a damn fine piece of work by PmG. I wouldn't be surprised if they could pull another rabbit out of their hat for a modeler. Who knows, they might even start to reach a wider audience with a complete package. Look at the ground that C4D is gaining. R9 is going to be a serious release for Maxon. Same goes for Lux. Their modeler is looking pretty fine... It's not enough to win me over yet, but I'm sure if they added an animation/rendering module, I'd be more interested, as would others. I'd also like an excuse to never need to leave the messiah interface. Call me crazy. =]

[Wegg]

I see this as a major opportunity for a developer more than the responsibility of the pmG development team. Lets let them work on things like fur, new Sub-D options, compose features etc. Wings kicks so much bootie. . . and what wings can't do. . . there are tons of others that can pick up the slack. A pmG modeler would just get lost in the noise in my opinion.

[Zithen]

From talks with pmG at siggraph, I would say a modeler is not in the pipe. No, if messiah were to work with a modeler...I'd say Modo would be ideal because of its very open architecture and the way it treats data. But I think a deal between Lux and pmG would benifit the messiah customers. If done right, the interoperability between the apps might be seamless...but this is speculation, for I don't know the Nexus API.

[dobermunk]

I agree with Billy - let modelers be modelers and messiah take it from there. But, I do think messiah has to take into account those elements of modeling that affect animation and setup - and now rendering. Such as sub-div tensions, weight-map support and editing and bone-driven morphs.

Else there will be a gap in messiah's base philosophy that shows itself in those moments where animation needs overlap modeling tasks. And those moments will be an argument for 'whole' packages like xsi.

My 2 cents.

[Labuzz]

Components selection ( vertex ) in messiah would be cool to have....Actually, I think its a must have in a more "generalist" animation software.

[Gwot]

I wouldn't expect nor want PmG to be working on a modeler right now. There's enough work for such a small team to go towards animate and render as it is. My request was more of a poke in the ribs than anything. Though in all seriousness it would be nice for the exact reasons that dobermunk mentions. I'd rather work in XSI over LW any day for character work, simply because it doesn't hinder the setup phase nor force you to step backward if you need to make changes or tweaks. This will always be a weakness for messiah in a pipeline, so a modeler in the future would be a pipedream for me.

[Wegg]

Wait what!?! Messiah lets you change the model any which way you want at any phase of your production. There are no weight maps to worry about. If your client wants warts instead of horns. . . go ahead and re-build your model keeping roughly the same proportions and Messiah will take it in stride. There is no "stepping back" for model changes.

[Gwot]

Oh yeah, I'm well aware of that Wegg. In fact it's better than LW in that sense... not depending on weight maps. I still haven't figured out how I'm going to get bone animation and actual weight information back into a lws for game work though. I'll either need to get a plugin that will dump messiah weight info into an lwo weightmap or I'll be stuck with weighting in LW still and trying to just use the messiah bone animations in the lws instead. Which means a lot of going back and forth in Modeler/Layout/messiah as I currently do when setting up characters

LW still isn't very efficient when it comes to things like joint morphs though. In situations where these are used, it's definitely better to be able to have access to modeling tools in your setup/animation program. Again, you could argue that messiah doesn't need to use joint morphs with the host of other tools it offers. I definitely wouldn't want to have to do joint morphs in messiah the standard way. I'm finding it's just a different (and good) way of working, it's just that for something as specific as my game work needs, I'm having more difficulty than I anticipated.

If I could code, I'd write a plugin that allows me to send my messiah weight info back to layout as weight maps.
If I was a better coder, I'd write that plugin so that it could send all my messiah bones over to layout as bones as well.
If I was an awesome coder, I'd write an exporter and whatever other tools I needed to just dump my stuff right from messiah to our game engine. I'd never need to do anymore setup in LW again. =]

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