New Series of Training Videos for Basic Skeleton Setup

There just isn't enough information out there freely available for Softimage that deals with Character setup. As a small studio owner, I still make heavy use of the built in rigging tools Softimage provides out of the box, and they are amazingly fast, reliable and responsive. I will make the argument that you can rig and iterate through a full character setup in Softimage faster than any other software on the market using out of the box tools, and a few helper scripts / plugins. The construction history is simple and intuitive to work with. Chain building, although quaint, is still rock solid and very effective at getting me through a majority of my projects. Shape creation and management is so simple, I truly believe one could train monkeys to build shapes in Softimage. Ed Harriss would love that.

In any event the link to my basic skeleton setup videos can be found below. Since I haven't come up with a better way of organizing my videos which tend to run in series on a given topic, I am resigned to using the Vimeo albums as a way of breaking up my topics. That is the best way to view the videos on my page.

Basic skeleton setup in Softimage

Updates to the ant series of modeling videos

If you visit my vimeo site and search by albums, the 'Modeling an Ant' album has been added to recently. I'm using these as a step by step guide through moving around in Softimage. Its a great supplement for my classes. In videos 12 - 14, I introduce enveloping for modeling. Enveloping a character usually involves adhering to some pretty stringent guidelines. I wanted to create something simpler for the new user or the modeler who doesn't really want to deal with the ins and outs of rigging. Videos 12 - 14 use nulls as deformers, with parent child relationships holding them together to form a crude articulation rig modelers can use to quickly pose their creations. The idea is to use these simple deformers to rough in poses, and then model over top to capture the final pose for turntabling etc.This technique should not be used for anyone wanting to animate their ant.

Video 15 covers the technique of Vertex Color Mapping, on a secondary level it talks about Environment mapping with HDRI images, reflection mapping, and bump maps using procedural fractals,. Vertex Color maps paint color information onto a surface at the vertice level. The video covers displaying the maps in viewport, switching between maps for painting and viewing purposes, and also talks about integrating CAV maps with mental Ray.

Ants, Linear color workflow, and Softimage fundamentals training,

Hey everyone. I've been recording a lot of foundation stuff lately as the new school year approaches and I get ready for teaching my classes. I'm still trying to figure out the best way organize all the data I plan on uploading to my Vimeo Channel

For now, I've decided to go with albums. Rather than visiting the Channel, I recommend accessing my content here

http://vimeo.com/thejoncrow/albums

This week, the new videos I've added are:

1) Modeling An Ant

2) Fundamentals of Softimage Videos

3) Linear Color Space Workflow

I tend to bounce all over the place when it comes to recording content, thus the utter randomness of the 3.
Some of the modeling stuff is pretty basic, but my intent is to get more people to understand the modeling toolset, and how quick and efficient it can be. At the institutions where I teach, Maya is used as our modeling pipeline, and we use Softimage as a rigging and animation tool. In Soft though, it is necessary to tweak shapes or be able to make changes to the mesh after its been fbx or crosswalked from Maya. The fundamental training is done from the perspective of users having set up their keyboard maps as in my Softimage for Maya User keymap guide.  

Pipeline Integration Softimage and Maya

Here is the direct link to the video

For those of you interested in learning how to move animated data back and forth between Softimage and Maya, this may help out a little bit.

The objective is to use textured meshes from Maya, and  import them into Softimage for character setup. In Softimage, the rigs are animated, and the mesh data point cached to the Ncache file format. Scenes are iterated in this fashion, writing point cache files using standard rendering tokens.

Back in Maya, each piece of the character mesh imports an NCache file which essentially creates the link between the Softimage and Maya scene. If any change is made to the Softimage Rig and written out, the Maya mesh picks up the overwritten data. 

Crosswalk is used to sync camera animation between both programs, though Nache could also be used here.

Shattering Geometry using ICE in Softimage

With the release of Softimage 2012, ICE now supports topology creation and editing. This short video demonstrates how to setup a shot for shattering geometry as well as integrating Exocortex Momentum 2.0 into the shot to simulate the shattered geometry.

The video can be found here:

Shattering Geometry using Softimage ICE

The Exocortex web site can be found here:

Exocortex

Working with Softimage using Maya hotkeys

I have many students who switch between Maya and Soft all day long. To make the transition easier for artists used to the Alt + Nav  and QWERTY workflow, I've been teaching Soft using Maya keys for the last couple of years now. I thought I would share my hotkey mappings in a quick video

Softimage using Maya Hotkeys

Corrective Shape Animation Rigs using ICE

I've just finished putting together a series of videos that show how to work with corrective shape animation in Softimage. The first video is a review of how to build corrective shapes, while the second through fifth take you through a simple means of driving those shapes on a character using ICE.

You can follow the link below. It takes you to the albums I've started to put together on Vimeo. Since many of these tutorials / walk throughs are multiples of videos, the albums are a nice way to organize them.
 Corrective Shape Animation Rigging with ICE