Silo as a model app and inhouse work.

IronHawk

I love Silo for modeling. It's fluid and works great for me as a modeling app. Using max to model seems slower and clunkier overall though I still use it for some things like path deform. Once I have my meshes built I use max for pretty much everything else.

For inhouse work do they frown on using personal licensed software? I've never had a problem exporting meshes from Silo to Max and find the time saved using Silo's tools to be worth the extra effort.

any feedback is appreciated. I understand this is most likely a studio specific question.

rooster

its fine here, we're relatively small though. so long as we dont introduce anything that requires other people to also have it, we dont have a problem with stuff that improves workflow (and it being a commercial as opposed to personal license would be important obviously, im speaking generally)

edit: it would be important that you dont have all your files as .sibs tho.. I would model in there then bring it into max/maya

Snowfly

Yeah down here at work I use my personal license of Silo, and 2 colleagues use their own personal copies of software as well. I just needed to get my art director to clear it with our sys administrator...he's a bit paranoid about software not evaluated by him spreading viruses, causing security leaks in the network, breaking the other DCC tools, etc. No doubt Silo slips well into a max/maya pipeline, but there is all that other stuff...

The company keeps offering to just buy me a license.

And yeah keeping your saves in a non-Silo exclusive format is just good manners. :-)

thomasp

inhouse as a full time employee working with company equipment? can't imagine an employer letting you install your private software on that, not in any halfway organised studio i'd say. but you might be able to convince them to get you a licence, especially since it's not a particularly expensive program.

as for having a separate modeller - if that works for you... personally having worked on characters in a number of places i found the approach a time-waster (unless the pipeline app is a complete failure on the modelling side, hello maya.) since you're required to go back and forth, make revisions, re-use assets, share them with co-workers...

going back to a different software to tweak a mesh - you can lose so much data in the conversion process (weight info, vertex colors, uv sets/material groups, tweaked normals, triangulation, custom properties, etc) that it's more efficient to just stick with one app.

my two cents.

Rick Stirling

I use Silo at work to do a bulk of my modelling. Export as .obj to max/zbrush.

MoP

I agree with ThomasP. While using a separate app like that might work for quickly blocking out a base mesh or something that you're not going to hand off to anyone else, when you're in a pipeline with a lot of back-and-forth, it'd just get annoying to have to keep converting backwards and forwards between apps. Any time saved in the modelling stage would probably get lost later on during conversion or trying to keep things up to date and organised.

CheeseOnToast

I use my personal silo license for making base meshes and for re-topologising. OBJ is such an easy format for any app to read these days, it hardly matters.