I could see Modo and XSI being a good pipeline… report from SIGGRAPH

Thursday - Modo FTW! - So today I went and watched a demo of modo 302 at the Intel booth. I want it! The modeling and unwrapping tools alone would make me switch from Maya to modo for modeling tasks. The animation tools aren't at all available for character animation, but you can do simple turn around or movements. What struck me was just the ease of use. To select a loop of edges you just double click an edge. You could click an edge, face, or vert and increase the selection by hitting a key, so it would increase the selection to the edges near it. Another thing is the modeling tools were similar to sculpting brushes. You can grab a face and "pull" it out and adjust it anyway you want. From the demos I saw you can literally create as fast you you imagine. That's it. I mean the people doing the demo's are pros but come on! They were making faces and weird creatures in as little as 5 minutes while I asked questions and they explained it to me. The renderer for modo is top notch now too. I would still keep your renderman or mental ray around, but the modo renderer is no slouch. I seriously want this piece of software! After seeing it in use I can't see why I've been using Maya for so long for things other than animation.

Another thing I saw, on the same day, is XSI's ICE (Interactive Creative Environment). This is XSI's node-based programing. This is hard to explain - you have to see it to believe it. So... I found this vid. It's visual programing. Like I said I can't explain it other than saying that it's like the hypergraph in Maya connecting shaders, but this is writing scripts. The Siggraph demo showed that someone made pong and space invaders only using ICE. They also showed some crazy rig and skin trick where you can drag and the last action you just did to the ICE viewport and connect other node's to that so that action is used by the other nodes... Like I said hard to explain. Watch the vid! I wouldn't mind trying it out.

I could see Modo and XSI being a good pipeline... Maybe someone could write Autodesk's Stereo camera rig in ICE!

And I've got to mention the Star Wars Clone Wars movie. Not Impressive. The animation was a bit stiff, the faces showed no emotion and all around it tried too hard to be funny when it just wasn't. With that being said, if this movie was left to be viewed on TV like originally planned, then it would have been different. As a TV show it's good. I just don't think it should be shown in theaters. It's not good enough for theaters. Other than that the battle scenes in the movie are really good. They were huge battles the action was great. I don't really want to say much about the movie because I don't want to ruin it for those that want to see it.

So that's it. My time at Siggraph 08 is finished. Friday I went to my shift to take down the slow art displays then back to the hotel. Not much to see on the last day. For those that haven't been this conference is huge, and exhausting, almost overwhelming. I'll be glad when I can finally sleep.