a) When styling hair, is there a comb function which enables me to brush the hair into its position with a proper collision detection? I’m sick of pulling hair guides out of my geometry after brushing the guides in LW. What I need is a collision detection WHILE combing! Please don’t mix this up with a collision detection during animation. I want the guides flow around the object.
b) What about muscles? Is there a way to simulate them to avoid strange skin deformation? Being not a great rigger currently, I struggle a lot with quadruped deformation especially in the neck and shoulder area. I’d guess muscles could work great (nMuscles?). I read that CAT does have muscles, but didn’t find any demos. Is there anything like that in XSI?
c) If I’d buy XSI Advanced, I’d be able to use 5 computers for batch rendering. What about the 5 other quad cores which are available. Would I need to buy an additional Advanced seat to have a 10 computers render farm?
d) Is there an alternative to MR currently?
Cheers
Thomas
P.S.: For the multi talentes software user: How do XSI abilities touched in my questions compare to Maya and Max?
For the non ICE standard toolset, not really. The tools make it ok to deal with it, but there’s no actual collisions with the emitter as such.
You can still drive the guides with various deformers/ice to deal with that though.
b) What about muscles? Is there a way to simulate them to avoid strange skin deformation? Being not a great rigger currently, I struggle a lot with quadruped deformation especially in the neck and shoulder area. I’d guess muscles could work great (nMuscles?). I read that CAT does have muscles, but didn’t find any demos. Is there anything like that in XSI?
Again, ICE and/or shrinkwrapping and other techniques deal well with that. There isn’t a muscle primitive with volume preservation, but in all honesty even if there was one like the ones available in maya I doubt I’d use it over what I can whip together in a day with ICE.
c) If I’d buy XSI Advanced, I’d be able to use 5 computers for batch rendering. What about the 5 other quad cores which are available. Would I need to buy an additional Advanced seat to have a 10 computers render farm?
Yes, another advanced seat is probably the cheapest option to cover those seats. If pricing policies changed on XSI Batch you can consider buying licenses of that, but that’s a sales question, and afaik nothing changed, and for batches of 5 units advanced is still the more convenient option.
d) Is there an alternative to MR currently?
A few, the really noteworthy one though is definitely 3delight for xsi.
P.S.: For the multi talentes software user: How do XSI abilities touched in my questions compare to Maya and Max?
More or less the same in those packages, except you don’t get ICE to alleviate the problems.
Hair dynamics for hair alone, without ICE, are probably better in maya in some regards, but there are other things that are sorely lacking.
I still got to see an OOTB hair system that is anywhere close to propietary systems or what a decent nodal editor can produce, but I guess that’s the price for all-purpose, generic approachable stuff that doesn’t have pipeline confines to help them.
Are there any hair examples with ICE guides like you mentioned. The point is: ICE might be really powerful, but if you don’t know what you need to do it is pointless. In my case: All this ICE stuff, will it be kind of straight forward or is it top secret and nobody will tell you about?
There seems to be good user and direct support from SI for ICE. While much of the forum has only several posts here and there every day, it seems the ICE threads get updated and posted too regularly on the SI community forum:
There is also ICE help here, and a fair amount of training that is ICE oriented now given the size of the SI user base and how relatively new ICE is from i3D, cmiFX, and digital tutors.
I’m a total ICE noob by far, but you’d be surprised how just a little bit of understanding in it starts to opening things up that would have been much harder to do pre-ICE. Still, to really use it to it’s fullest it’s going to take time, experimentation, and training just like all other parts of 3D! The fact that there are a lot of TDs more than willing to help out though (like Thiago, Hedge etc.) definatly helps ease that learning curve along.
For quick rigging basics and how to start a basic muscle system in XSI using shrink wrap deformers, simple geometry etc. check out Manny’s training at 3Dmastermind.com
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