Since there is really nothing much to write this week other than that I’ve been ill again those past few days with a bronchitis bordering on a pneumonia, I thought I take that opportunity to refresh some older post. I’m pleased that Larry seems to be doing better and things are slowly straightening out a bit, but seeing that I still spend a good deal of money on my pills (prescription charge, of course our care system is otherwise free), I’m beginning to understand how expensive it must be to be sick in some parts of the worlds. So if you have a few bucks, perhaps consider donating. While I was in the clenches of my doctor, who also is a chiropractor, he reminded me of that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do something for my back while he was wrestling out some blockages in my spine with a firm grip. So I’m seriously considering starting to go to a special kind of preventive/ therapeutic gym to improve the situation and perhaps also get a slightly more toned chest. Just wait for the day when I update my pictures and they need to be landscape just to fit the broad shoulders ;-).

Many of you who take my work for and with Adobe as my primary public persona may not know this, but I’ve long had a life as an 3D artist before I ever even got near After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop. A considerable part of that life – which may surprise you even more – was not driven by Cinema 4D (though for those MoGraph tutorials I guess I got a little famous), but rather Lightwave, which I’ve been using ever since version 4 (essentially the first PC version of it). Now that program has been forever and still is in limbo on some level, but has been a trusty workhorse for many artists especially in relation to doing TV series and broadcast work, which includes some of my favorite series’ FX in Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek – Voyager, Star Trek – Deep Space Nine, Space – above and beyond and of course Babylon 5. There are many more, but let’s focus on the important things before spending days listing them all.

The point I’m aiming at is, that just like any other program out there, we have our own set of "industry veterans"/ heroes that worked on all that cool stuff and just like everyone else, we care for them. That is why some sad news has reached us today and to my surprise, it had a considerable emotional impact on me. Larry Schultz, a.k.a. Splinegod, is in severe health trouble and one inch from leaving us. Now since my boss also had some serious trouble with his kidneys this year (AgI Nephritis) and was also on the verge of dying, I more than a little know the dangers involved and how quickly things take a turn for worse as do I know the exorbitant costs arising from treatment, if you are on private health insurance. Now I never got along with Larry in all these years of forum battles, but I know the meaning of decency, so I’m gonna hit that orange donate button on his wife’s blog any second now and maybe so can you, if you have a few bucks to spare. For the rest of the story, read this post on the NewTek forums and his profile.

I’m always looking forward to SIGGRAPH every year, both for reasons of catching up on latest product news and research papers, but sadly enough, this year feels quite empty. It’s as if it never happened. Several interesting products (Mari, RealFlow, various render engines) had long been announced and shown before the show, taking quite a bit the wind out of the whole event.

Additionally, what news we got on Lightwave, ZBrush, Houdini and Autodesk‘s products was not particularly spectacular or interesting to me as a user nor on a geek level. It feels like everybody is mostly trying to defend his market position with only minor enhancements that might still come in handy in your day to day work, but do not necessarily expand feature sets. One such thing would obviously be the whole Lightwave 10 situation with the VPR renderer – as I wrote, useful, but not necessarily the ultimate incentive for an upgrade so any user who already owns FPrime will have to think hard about shelling out the money. In itself it’s not a bad thing of companies focusing on more practical workflow things, but still, somehow I’m craving for those times when literally SIGGRAPH reshuffled all the players involved and you generally were a bit more excited. Well, there’s always next year and, which is also quite noticeable, there have been no news on some programs (modo, Cinema 4D), which leaves room for something to look forward perhaps later this year.

Research papers, as far as I have looked them up and as my puny brain understands them, were also a bit odd this year. Several of them focused on topics that are not necessarily relevant to an end user and are perhaps a bit too esoteric to ever become relevant for mainstream programs even. Of course there was once again a ton of fluid simulation stuff and the notorious foam bubble noise simulator (which seems to become a running gag), but lots of it focused on alternate implementations or resolving quite specific detail problems in the underlying algorithms. The same always strikes me when seeing those behind the scenes presentations about how specific effects in movies were created – sure, interesting to see the science at work, but 99% irrelevant for your average Joe who doesn’t have the resources to even run the simplest fluid simulation and constantly struggles with deadlines, because the render farm is always too small…

It’s that time of year again… Everybody is going to SIGGRAPH and pushing out new versions of their 3D software and users have to decide which way to go. That has been getting more difficult from year to year in the past already with prices dropping and even "small" programs becoming so feature reach that they already do more than one will probably ever need, but this year seems to be a make or break year for some products.

Most notably, Autodesk is putting a lot of pressure on competitors with their Entertainment Creation Suites Premium (yeah, it really does sound just as awkward and ominous as Adobe‘s suite branding) which include a ton of programs at a good price. If you read the signs, the inclusion of XSI as the baseline tool and the second one (Maya or MAX) being a choice item, you clearly get the impression that there is something cooking behind the scenes, indicating a possible merging of those apps. Not today and not tomorrow, but perhaps 3 or 4 years from now. You also get Mudbox and Lagoa Physics for ICE thrown in, which makes this a quite complete package for everything. Those 7000 bucks are still way over my budget, but considering, that at some point a single app alone would cost this, it’s quite amazing what you can buy for the money. Should be really interesting. They now have pretty much bought everything in terms of technology that they would need, now they just need to put it to use and either create a unified kilelr app or bring all apps consistently up to the same level…

In the more attainable world of mid-range 3D, there is some news on Lightwave. Obviously, their CORE project exploded in their face, but given NewTek‘s track record of poor development management and somehow always prioritizing the wrong things (let’s be honest: Who gives a fuck about creating a full custom skin for his 3D program, when in all seriousness the default one should cater all needs and be production ready?), I’m not really surprised. So before running out of money, they apparently decided to backward-transplant some of the more relevant parts from CORE to the "old" Lightwave and brand it as version 10 to get more people to sign up. Most of it is not particularly interesting to me, though, as I neither have need for game-centric features nor does the inclusion of Bullet physics give me a tingle, knowing how limited it is by itself and that it probably won’t integrate with Lightwave‘s own legacy particles and dynamics. So what’s left? Yes, it’s the interactive viewport rendering that may still pull me in. I’ve so gotten used to using FPrime and also the Preview in modo to tweak my stuff, that I can hardly do without it. It literally has helped me to produce 20 times more balanced, better renderings.

Slightly related to that, but more in an indirect way are rumours about SynthEyes 2011, the newest and latest version of this affordable 3D tracking and matchmoving tool. Adding geometry reconstruction sounds interesting, but then again their awful UI will not make it the most pleasant experience after all. Funnily, I was just running the demo of the 2008.1 version a few weeks ago because we may need to update/ replace our 2002 or so version (which in all these years we only used rarely enough as it is) for a potential upcoming project.

All that interesting 3D software is of course nothing without proper hardware to run it on, and in what seems more than just a coincidence, Apple also have announced the imminent release of new Mac Pros. Now I’m not particularly pro Mac these days, as they really, really, really have a list of serious issues to straighten out, but if someone would send me the money, I’d still take one – and run my Windows software on it (with an occasional boot into OS X). The performance is right and in this price range, it doesn’t really matter which logo is on the box, so one can indulge in the design factor at least.

Fresh from the production line, Battlestar Galactica – The Plan arrived on Wednesday, I had set aside some time to watch this movie that same day and on Thursday and needed a little time to let it sink in. First off, anyone should be aware that this is strictly a movie for fans. If you have never seen the series, it will be quite confusing to watch. On the other hand, and that really is the problem, it will likewise disappoint those fans. Why? Well, for the most part it simply takes away the mystery by explaining too much and makes the Cylons appear more than slightly not so clever. The beauty in the main series is that it leaves a few lose ends (except for the ending that came all too soon and tries to force a resolution on some things) and once you’ve seen The Plan, some of the events and scenes lose considerable impact. We always somehow knew that there were more Cylons in the fleet and that someone was pulling strings, but it was not really necessary to spell it out. Dean Stockwell is of course brilliant as the various Cavils and exactly shows what you’d expect from a "true" Cylon and this cynicism and sarcasm really makes it funny. Also the movie has some excellent CG stuff, especially at the beginning, where we see some more of the colony planets and the actual attack. Amazingly enough, they still use Lightwave for their work, which shows how robust it is for quick turnarounds, regardless of its other shortcomings. As a longtime LW user myself, it makes me feel good. On the other hand, you can see that this movie has been done after a lot of the original sets had been scrapped or auctioned off so we don’t get to see much new there. Still, even with its flaws, the film makes a good addition and is definitely a lot better than Caprica in almost every aspect that matters – that is story and acting.

Still almost 2 weeks to go on my biggy 3D animation project, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Even more so, as my latest scientific breakthrough involves Lightwave‘s dynamic motion blending for the first time and it actually works, even with my IK rigged robot arm! Now that is so nice to have dynamic parenting and constraining without jumping hoops. I know, nothing to write home about because I’m late, but after having only recently fully moved on to 9.6 (before, I used it only for rendering and did all the setup still in 8.5 because I used some old deformation plug-ins that do no longer work in 9.x), but I have to give it to NewTek – that old crooked lady has really gained quite some capabilities. Okay, compared to modo, Modeler is still a piece of crap, but Layout really does what it is sold for. And all that at a price 3 times lower than Cinema 4D with all it’s bloated and super-expensive modules. Today I’m really glad I hung in with Lightwave.

I’m still quite tired and not exactly in full control of my senses due to having stayed up too long yesterday (for nothing), but at least I now have seen what I have missed (in the sense of not attending the life web event) and not missed (in terms of it being pretty cheesy and meaningless). My overall impression unfortunately confirms the usual: The hype created before is not at all proportionate to what was actually shown. Okay, we now have confirmed that Lightwave in its tenth incarnation will have copied a ton of features from other programs and of course it will still be the best thing that happened to the program in a long while, but the real hard questions to me remain unanswered. Not a tiny bit was shown how actually this flexibility will be used to overcome old shortcomings, and that’s the part that would have been interesting. I want to know how it will better my workflow, not how I can make it look and feel like a competing app. It’s as simple as that. So after all of this, we are no closer to the truth than we were before and still have to wait until we actually can see the product in action.

Honestly, I have no clue. It’s 22.22 in the evening after a 16 hour day, my eyes hurt like hell and I’ve just been delivered the greatest PR disater I’ve seen in a while. The much anticipated Lightwave CORE reveal just didn’t happen. “Off Air”. Thank you, NewTek, for this reminder of the last 5 years when you were a company of big words with no real substance behind it. I really had hoped, now that you worked out the technical stuff in Lightwave, so would you in its marketing and media presence. But nada. You just did the greatest fuck up in history by building up so much hysteria, that too many users are nuking your servers and now everyone gets nothing. Let’s hope someone over there had the good senses to prepare recordings, so we can all watch in 2 or 3 days, when the dust of this media implosion has settled…

Good news: NewTek will be revealing more details in a live webcast tomorrow. Bad news: Due to the difference in timezones this will be 22.00 (that is 10 P.M.) around these parts. I really don’t know if after a 16 hour day I will have the patience and wits to stay with it, so I hope someone is smart enough to provide a recording of it for download for those who couldn’t attend.

Shortly after making Lightwave 9.6 available to customers, NewTek have sent out e-mails proposing an ominous Core and sending you to a website with a 12 day counter. Of course it makes speculations run high, but even the most unknowing can only deduce that this scheme is meant to serve as a vehicle for announcing Lightwave X. Not that it would matter much, though. As written two days ago, anyone who has been following the 9.x cycle pro-actively knew it would come one day or another and that it better be good. Still, those next two weeks will make an interesting wait for what’s on the table…