{"id":31,"date":"2009-02-11T01:35:42","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T01:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/11\/exciting-developments\/"},"modified":"2009-02-11T01:35:42","modified_gmt":"2009-02-11T01:35:42","slug":"exciting-developments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/11\/exciting-developments\/","title":{"rendered":"exciting developments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Been too busy at work to thing about anything other than fur and rendering, buy a lot&#8217;s happened in the past few days in 3D and with school.<\/p>\n<p>For starters, the story for my short film has totally changed. ^_^ It&#8217;s become a merger between the story of the grandmother and the cockroach, and the original Ramswoole maide story. I&#8217;ll post more about it when I have a finished leica reel, which should be some time next week.<\/p>\n<p>I was finally able to get the Wipix no-flip leg working in Blender and that makes me happy. I still need to finish the rig and get Briar weighted, but I&#8217;m feeling a lot better about my decision to go with Blender for this short. Every time I have time to sit down and work in it, things just flow along.<\/p>\n<p>As far as 3D news goes, Modo 4&#8217;s first set of preview vids are up at Luxology. Normally I watch Modo with only a passing interest, but there&#8217;s one video where a few thousand instances of a Rhino are spun around in the preview renderer, with full radiosity \/ GI going and volumetric lighting. It&#8217;s not unlike the speed of FPrime, although the instancing is something the old LW couldn&#8217;t do without third-party plugins (and I don&#8217;t think FPrime worked with them).<\/p>\n<p>But that brings me to the second big CG thing of the week: Lightwave Core was announced and Newtek is already accepting pre-orders. There was a serious snafu with how the reveal went, but what was shown has me pretty excited&#8211; essentially an underlying architecture not unlike that of Houdini \/ Maya, but with Lightwave workflows and a fully-open C++ \/ Python SDK. It&#8217;s also using the Collads format as its regular scene format, which means it&#8217;s already a step ahead of all other packages with regards to interoperability. They said they&#8217;ve made a few extensions to the format, so just how compatible the LW Core files will be with other Collada-reading apps remains to be seen, but it&#8217;s a step in the right direction (IE: away from the horribly flawed and closed-source FBX).<\/p>\n<p>There were a lot of buzzwords bandied around, and you can see the full tech FAQ on the new Core site. If you preorder (they call it purhasing a HardCore membership; man was that a bad name choice) you get access to the betas, with an apparent release date of the first build sometime in Q1. I&#8217;m remaining cautiously optimistic.  If they deliver, they&#8217;ll be in a good place to pick up disgruntled users of Maya and XSI.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, I&#8217;m actually hitting &#8220;post&#8221; this time; I have about three drafts on my iPhone that are now irrelevant. ^_^<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Been too busy at work to thing about anything other than fur and rendering, buy a lot&#8217;s happened in the past few days in 3D and with school. For starters, the story for my short film has totally changed. ^_^ It&#8217;s become a merger between the story of the grandmother and the cockroach, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[62,32],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d","category-short-film-blog","tag-3d","tag-lightwave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sugarandcyanide.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}