multitasking applications are they really necessary ?
Why develop multitasking applications such as blender, houdini, maya etc .... when an asset assembly software (object, particles, fluid ....) with lighting system would be enough? Many and very efficient (more than in blender, maya or houdini) specific softwares currently exist and make the tasks much more effective: For example : Storm granular for particles Embergen for fluids Substance for shading Iclone or akeytsu to animate the characters.
Well, there is modeling and rendering. And for those who do not have access to around 1000 euros, there is of course a blender.
But what a saving of time and efficiency with these specific programs.
3 Comments
Interoperability amongst those programs is not good, in general they have custom file formates that then need to be exported in a different translation file format where you loose part of the information and work, also you loose procedurality and adaptability of the project.
When everything is inside one packge you don't have to translate anything, when you have to jump from one package to another you may encounter a lot of problems.
One example, how would you make Storm granular particles to simulate together with the Embergen smoke sim while a Akeytsu character is falling in the sand?
What goes first in the simulation?
Does all the packages support the rig from Akeytsu?
Are all the constraints being exported?
Is the cloth exported too?
Will the sand affect the cloth?
Will the smoke be affected by the currents generated by the character?
And by the particles thrown by the characters?
This is a very complex situation that even in houdini is simulated by parts, but if you maintain everything inside the same packge you find less problems.
* @Juan Gea Rodriguez * Hello, alembic, vdb, fbx ...
I work with this pipeline and these formats and although sometimes I have to go back and forth between software - I think it's still better than with blender, maya and others.
And this for a very simple reason: each small specialized software consumes little ram or gpu. and the import / export alembic is light. While blenders, houdini, maya consume a lot.
For the same scene made entirely in blender or maya (with fluid, cloth, anim, particles) maya or blender freeze or crash. While separately the cloth (marvelous), the particles and fluids that can interact (import animation in alembic and re-export same) are lighter and fit perfectly.
It is certain that I would prefer to do everything in blender. He can do it by offering all the needs of sim, rig, and everything. But too heavy for the same application, it crashes or freeze.
(I7 - 32G ram - nvidia quadro - ssd). I would have to double the power of my machine (and it's cheaper to use storm, embergen, marvelous ....).
Thank you for your reply, Good work!
* @info20 *
How do you import a Storm simulation into Blender for example?
The thing is that interoperability is not as easy, for example if you don't do the granular simulation under the same hood that does the fluid simulation you cannot make the fluid to affect the particles, if the particles are just a cache, they cannot be modified, unless you have the toolset to do so.
You can reproduce your "cache" based workflow inside the same package, you don't need to work in separate packages, in fact is what we do, you may do the sim inside Blender, which simplifies a lot fo things, like having the character rig in the scene to be able to adapt small details you may need, and once the simulation is done you cache it all out and then in a clean scene you load all the pieces. It's the same, but you maintain your toolset at hand.
I dont' say that having third party tools is bad, not at all, I personally recommend Storm, but to get proper interoperability between softwres is hard.
Also, you have to take into account money, you say it's cheaper, but it's not.
If you see the license costs, Storm and Embergen have good pricing, but Marvelous pricing is outrageous:
Annual Subscription: 1700$... absurd for a cloth sim software.
The 490$ version CANNOT be used by any studio, I wrote to them and asked about this, and they were clear.
Also you have to add Akeytsu and other packages, and still you need somewhere to render and light.
In the end, you can do what you say, and it's done in many productions, that's the reason why Katana or Gaffer exists, so you may try to work with Gaffer (it's open source) but this comes with it's own set of problems, and it can slow down the piepline, since you have to keep importing / exporting, and that's an action that it's prone to errors.
In the end, you can already do what you want to do :)