Shadow of the Colossus, by a 5 year old

My 5 year old daughter drew this picture, after we played some Shadow of the Colossus some time ago.

End of another half year, of madness!

A little over six months ago, I started on three large contract jobs simultaneously. One of them finished a few weeks back but they all finish this month. I haven't had a weekend or rarely an evening to myself, and I'm very tired, stressed, excited, bewildered and somewhat relieved. The three projects were very different from one another and each very cool!

Next month, I jump straight into new contracts. But this time there will be spare hours available to get back into developing Pixelpickle Games. Lylian, I've had rarely a moment to think about let alone develop. And another game idea that's been relentlessly tugging at me for attention.

So, I'm expecting the cogs to start screaming into action shortly... After I waste a night playing games and sleeping in.

Fun with particles - Softimage

A still from a particle effect I've been working on.

Softimage - Batch rendering - Common issues

I've been doing a  lot of batch rendering from Softimage lately and have come across a lot of errors that end up being simple fixes or possible bugs to work around.

If you ever come across render fail errors that grind your batch render to a halt or make them look wrong, here's a few things to check in v2012:

• Scene Output path - This one has caught me a couple of times, if you browse for the folder you want to export to, your path may look a little like this C:/Project/Render_Pictures/render . These forward slashes are evil and it's best to use the token and back slashes, [Project Path]\Render_Pictures\render.
• Unified Sampling - turn this off and use the old min/max Level Aliasing.
• Optimisation tab - I've found hitting the Optimize button here causes issues, but manually adjusting the Secondary Rays - Depth, etc. Works fine.
• Instances in simulations - instancing meshes with random offset animations. Point cache the pointcloud then freeze the model.
• Face Robot - best to make sure Face Robot is disabled in the scene file, otherwise the Slaves will need to activate it which sometimes causes fatal errors.
• Image clip Default settings - Management type, 'Use From disk' can prevent Slaves from running out of memory.
• Passes, Pass Gamma Correction - I have no real idea what the heck is going on here, but if you set your gamma to automatic and have this ticked on, all slave renders come out looking dithered 256 colour.

These are things that have worked for me and I understand for some users doing the opposite of a few of the above works. Just a few things you can add to your problem solving list.
I've tried all these in two separate studios and both have the same list of problems.

Bones on Path - ICE

While working on three separate contracts, I manage to use Softimage on all of them after successfully converting two studios to this great program.

Using ICE a lot as well, for many different purposes.

This is one of the simpler compounds I've created with it. After rigging and weighting a mesh then constraining those bones to a curve, I have basic control of overall position and spacing of the bones.

There's also a blend control from the original mesh shape to that deformed by the bone weight map and shape deforms

No doubt there's likely much smarter and cleaner ways of doing this. But this is an example of how easy it is to 'throw' something together while I still consider myself a newb using ICE.

No rest - 2012

2011 turned out to be a busy year for Pixelpickle Games. Although no games were released, and one game in development was cancelled (Tiny Match Maker). Contract work stood it's ground, helping pay off debts from the lacklustre year before.

2012 is booked up with contract work. Which is great news as the animation side of Pixelpickle holds strong, it does mean however that the games development has been placed second class. The current Lylian title will feel the pinch as well as other titles now put on hold.
You see, Pixelpickle Games don't rely on Government funding or Angel investors, That's when development focuses on return on investment and release dates rather than quality gameplay. Our next major titles will be something to be reckoned with, will just take a little time. :)

Wish you the best for 2012 - even though the world is meant to end - I have a feeling it's going to be a great year.

Materials - Softimage - SSS with transparency

I've recently had to create a character and wanted to use SubSurface Scattering on it. But it also needed some transparency. Here's the Render Tree:

This particular character is also quite small and resides in the ocean, so it needed a little outline highlighting which was created using Incidence and Scalar2Color.

Here's the little fella:

Leafy Sea Dragons aren't really this transparent in real life, but it's a specific request by the client to fit in with their presentation.

Scripting - Softimage - Similar Name Selector

Here's a simple yet handy little Python script I created for Softimage.

Used to select all object with a similar name to the currently selected object.

si = Application

log = Application.LogMessage

oSel = Application.Selection

#select and split the selected object by its underscore '_'.

for sel in oSel:

n = sel.Name.split('_')

log (n[0])

#Use the selected object's first section and wild card '*' to select all similar named objects.

si.SelectObj(n[0]+'_*',"",True)


It is very limited but works well for my naming convention; all objects are named 'objectname_1', etc. It splits the selected object's name at the underscore '_' then choose all with a similar name before '_'.  Simple as that!