To feather or not to feather, ...

#1

Hi everybody,

coming from Lightwave and doing a lot of CGI animals lately, I got a bit frustrated with my favourite piece of software. The alternatives are obvious. Maya, Softimage and Max.

So my question to you is, which package does have the best fur solution so far and best approach to do feathers. I do poly feathers right now, but to place them without intersecting on the body is a pain in the behind. are there any nice solution out there to solve these tasks. Also with hair, would one go for the built in solution or buy Shave and haircut?

Anybody who can give me a hint which package would suit my needs? I work generally on still images with a high resolution (approx. 8000x6000px).

Thanks in advance
Thomas

#2

well the 3 package that you mention are part of the autodesk family and all of them from previous year run the same hair engine bases on shave and hair cut,
what it use to be a plug ing. now is incorporated into the software.

i guess doesn’t matter wich one you chose.

#3

In my opinion, coming from Lightwave myself, and trying to learn Maya and XSI. XSI was the easiest transition. I also now use MAX in our pipeline, and still prefer the useability of XSI. So if they all have comparable hair systems, I would concern myself with ease of transition.

#4

Maya has it’s own hair system, the other 2 indeed have a shave and haircut plugin integrated

#5

So what about the usability? Is it kind of a productive environment or is it like going through hell and back? In LW the styling is a mess in my opinion, though the render quality is nice. And I still worry about the feathers, because I don’t think the hair plug ins do these, or do they?

#6

XSI’s hair is not just a SnH plugin bolted on, it’s been discussed before :slight_smile:
That aside, hair in XSI has an instancing on hair system, which can get you part of the way there, and for soft down and fluff just plain hair is enough.

For the longer and more distinct feathers where you need a certain degree of control in animation too you’ll have to go for rigged objects, and for the remaining long feathers on the body and blending out of primaries, if instancing on hair doesn’t get you anywhere, you can try with a feather system in ICE, there’s some very good stuff you can get off it, but it’s obviously fairly involved.

How hard feathers are changes drastically bird to bird though, some you can get away with murder and use 90% fur, some others are absolutely unforgiving.

#7

I guess it depends on how much you are willing to learn in a package. If you are willing to do scripting, any will suffice. If you want quick and easy feathers that animate nicely, maybe try Cinema4d with the hair module and probably the mocca module so you have some extra flexibility in animating the bird. The hair module looks nice and moves nicely. The only problem with c4d is that it won’t take you long to hit the wall with it. The lack of a shader tree and it somewhat lacks a history stack though the modifiers do stack in a way that is similar to history. But if you are willing to deal with some of those issues… It’s really quite nice and it renders fast. If you are interested in going this route maybe check with the people in c4d forums on what they think.

Traditional feather demonstration…
http://www.maxon.net/pages/products/modules/hair/mov_rendering_2.html

Some other hair stuff you can check out.

http://www.maxon.net/pages/products/modules/hair/hair_e.html

#8

Here is a video of a feather system, someone built with ICE,
it’s the second video on his demoreel.

http://www.vimeo.com/3499358

#9

Doesn’t look bad at all.

Any ideas which package might make me happier/less frustrated in the days of hard work? Right now I have no clue which other features might be needed and XSI or Maya offer.

#10

The simple way to look at it is that, push come to shove, ICE is the only thing between the softwares you list that gets anywhere close to providing performance and ease of use to do what you want without having to go through a fair bit of hacking and writing.

The only thing though is that it’s not going to be painless or uinvolved in any of those, a certain degree of experimentation and trial and error, and potentially some learning too, will have to happen :slight_smile:

#11

As an aside, I personally think the hair shaping and styling tools in XSI are, at this current time, sub par when compared to other packages. There are some simple things that would make them much easier to work with- and I also find it a bit buggy at times. Not that I’ve found a system in other software that is perfect- just that this one needs some work and still feels a bit slight “bolted on” compared to the rest of XSI. These issues are pre-render though.

Once you start getting into feathers though this is kind of irrelevant as you will not be using these pre-packaged and semi-out dated tools much (as the others have stated). Do look into C4Ds solution though if you plan on using more than one package. You might also want to check out using 3Delight as well.

#12

Unfortunately I didn’t get many answers on the Maya forum. So, ICE looks my kind of thing, but if hair is painful compared to Maya, then I don’t know…

What about high res rendering and distributed rendering in XSI. Buggy or straight forward? In LW it takes some tricks to go highres and navigate around the horrible memory management, at least in the past.

What does suck in the hair system exactly Mocaw?

#13

I wouldn’t say it’s painful compared to maya, there are ups and downs, but they are more or less on par when you put it all together.
I can’t speak for him, but I think Mocaw had more C4D than Maya in mind when he mentioned there are other more modern toolsets for hair.
C4D’s hair module is indeed more modern (I only had it demoed to me and played with it for minutes though), whether that’s enough for you to shift the balance though I don’t know, there are other things that would put me off it when it comes to feathering a creature, or for character work in general, but my opinion is only half formed.

Btw, it’s also worth noting that while the hair tools in xsi (grooming and gen particularly) might be getting stale, strands and strands interpolation in ICE are pretty bloody powerful, and there isn’t an equivalent offer in terms of power and proceduralism in any other package on the market except Houdini, which would set you back a fair deal more than XSI though.

Rendering wise, it depends what you compare it to. Scalability wise, especially on a 64bit platform, MRay does ok, definitely better than LW, 3delight though is even better, but that’s additional cash, a fair bit of it if you need to support many cores. The first license of 3del is free even for commercial use, so it might be worth a go, but I don’t know (don’t think it does) it includes a free license of 3delight for xsi too, so you’d have to resort to free but more technical/tinkery solutions like Affogato.

#14

well i not pretty sure, all the Hair, in all the systems, like xsi maya and Stuid (i am not sure on this one)
you can built it from Curves, so you Model you hair curve like a regular obj.

#15

regarding net rendering, i havent try yet since we have 3 or 4 computers at the studio we Brute force them with Skip render =).

we try once royal render, but was to much toruble and sometimes the computer didnt recive the order to render, so we decided to old fashion =(.

when we get more ppl and more PCs i will let you know =).

#16

Excellent point that I totally over looked like the idiot I am! And also a good example of how with XSI, you’re not often “stuck”- there is almost always a solution. This will only be more true as (fingers crossed) ICE is spread throughout the whole system and opened up to the end user. Easy? Maybe not- but it’s nice to know the application isn’t going to leave you high and dry (as often as some).

#17

O.k. Concerning the rendering I wonder how it works. I’d buy advanced with the 5 render nodes. As there’s no fPrime in XSI to my knowledge, will the additional arts and computers contribute theitr power to my test renders? Most important to me is that XSI slices the one big image into parts and sends these to the render nodes. Is that the case?

Also, is there an advanced camera in XSI?

Cheers
Thomas

#18

I strongly suggest you to look into 3delight for XSI for feathers rendering. Whatever system you will set up, most important is how you gonna render it. This is perhaps the biggest advantage of Houdini over XSI in feathers respect. Mantra can render out of the box very detailed, high quality fur, hairs and feathers. You need 3delight to get this performance and look as rays don’t play well with millions of tiny semi-transparent objects ;).

Here some inspiration for you:
http://www.framestore-cfc.com/#/Commercials%20London/Monster,Stork

cheers,
skk.

#19

Not that I disagree that 3delight is usually a better choice for this kind of things (mantra though… not as sure really, and afaik most of the time framestore uses PRMan, not mantra to render work similar to what you linked), but what exactly do you mean with “rays don’t play well with…”?
You seem to assume that MRay is only capable of brute force raytracing, while it’s had a rasterizer in it for a while now, which tends to be the mode of choice for hair. Not to mention primaries tended to be scanlined before anyway.
You are aware of the fact that PRMan and 3Delight cast rays too right? :slight_smile:

Also there’s been plenty feathery/furry creatures rendered with MRay recently and not so recently, definite a lot more than I’ve seen rendered with mantra.
Suggesting that one -needs- 3delight to render fur coming from XSI is misleading at best. It’s been done plenty times in MRay even before 64bit. With 64bit platforms and the consequent memory availability it’s become a breeze in pretty much any package.

#20

I’d almost argue that it’s a given you’ll get hair and feathers to render in many packages and look great as long as you follow a few guide lines, and while there maybe different performance issues with different render engines, grooming, dynamics, and animating the said hairs/feathers is a bigger deal because no mater how sexy that single hair/feather looks, if you’ve got 300 or just 3 of them intersecting in the wrong area when they shouldn’t be then the game is up.

Not saying at all that 3Delight isn’t something worth looking into- just that when considering a package, look into the other aspects of making hair and feathers “work” too esp. if you plan to animate it.