I am the only one who notice the stagnation in 3d software development!
polycounter lvl 6
Hi guy's
First let me introduce you to my background, i start in the wonderful 3D world under DOS 3ds max, yes DOS i know for many this seem like an alien concept but it was a pc primitive OS and 3ds max was running on it!
I saw the beginning of the video game industry and witness the ongoing development of all tech related to 3d software, video cards and complex math algorithm .
I have work for a few studio here in the video game capital of the world Montreal and then start teaching for 7 years in various college.
In the late 80's the tech was exploding everywhere a good example was Softimage founded in 1986 by National Film Board of Canada and not a single month or even week yield another 3d tool or tech advancement that revolutionize the way we work.
Then the late 90's came and everything start to crumble to a screeching halt except for some minor tools or feature, from now on nothing major or impressive is being develop in the 3d software and we are stuck with a ridiculous workflow that increase the risk of developing sever RSI.
Sculpting a model is already enough but no you have to retopologise it so you work twice on the same model, then you have to UV unwrap it, paint it, rig it and finally export it and for anyone who has been 17 years in the industry you understand what that mean!
If software development was like in the 80's we would probably have an auto retopo that need to manual work and ptex kind of tech would probably mean we don't need to do pesky UV work anymore. But no we are there working with very old tech with no hope that it will ever get any better.
I know that juggernaut like Autodesk didn't help the industry with buying the competitors but don't tell me they were the only brains capable of developing 3d software on the whole planet!
The amount of work is now insane and so many studio go belly up simply because they cannot afford the extra time required to finish project.
I know that scientists also made a study showing that we are getting dumber by the day and that in 500 years(I sincerely doubt we will last that long)the people who are going to be around will not have the necessary intelligence to understand the current tech.
This is my personal opinion and will probably be consider as a rant over the industry but i think many from my generation know very well what i am talking about here.
Excuse my horrendous English since it is not my native tongue.
Replies
Read the third paragraph. That's an example he points out.
A caterpillar suddenly burst into a butterfly, but nobody gets upset when it doesn't continue bursting into more butterflies again and again.
A person decides to work out, get in shape. At first they make lots of gains. Eventually things taper out, and coming by gains takes more work, more time.
That's just the way things are. If OP had made some conclusion as to why they think things have stagnated, or any kind of point really, there'd something to discuss.
I'm not sure it even the tech to be honest. You look at Vitaly Bulgarov works with zbrush, softimage and moi3d and it amazing. He also insanely fast. You would assume Vitaly is using some crazy tech, but he isn't.
...and yet despite an all pervasive stagnated tech point of view premised here, audiences today are able to enjoy via their collective heart's content whatever CG entertainment preference be it interactive, Film/TV or other, whereby enabling a multi billion dollar industry globally employing thousands too further flourish year on year...
During my lifetime gaming, I went from playing Pong (1977) to recently picking up a copy of CoD - WW2 at the local EB Games store the other day which I personally reckon is a stark illustration how far technology has progressed. Anyways aren't CG based software at days end only a collection of tools?! no different from a sable brush or graphite stick?!
I mean this artistic medium in terms of longevity compared with a few others is still brand new.
USD adoption will take some time... http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html
if done right the core of the DCC aps will suport it...
the new renderman is based on USD.. no RIB files like in the past...
USDZ will be the new streamable .fbx like file format...
same for materialX... http://www.materialx.org/
shaderX and lookdevX from autodesk is part of the materialX universe...
http://www.materialx.org/assets/MaterialX Sig2017 BOF Slides.pdf
https://github.com/autodesk-forks/MaterialX/blob/adsk_contrib/shaderx/documents/Specification/ShaderX.Draft.pdf
or the new caching tech in maya...
bifrost...
near all render engines will have a GPU version next year...
siggraph will reveal some of them.... they will have all presentations in two weeks...
its the mass of data to control and make impossible things working...
if you ask a studio head they wont ask for better modeling or uv tools...
softimage, symbolics, wavefront and alias products were around - just not on machines most mortals were able to afford. there are some hilarious training videos on youtube from those days.
So, what?
Are you just burnt out on 3d? Airing general grievances? What is the point? Do you think you will rally a bunch of pissed off people to grab their pitchforks and force the engineers at autodesk to build something better so we can have an easier time? Are you hoping somebody is going to throw some brilliant idea out that will catalyze some new business venture that will revolutionize the industry entirely?
Alexa, make me art! No, not like that, make it more better. There you go!
Its like the wheel... Try to find something better to move a car...
Maybe this is your calling? To become a software engineer? To fill the black hole and save us from retopo and UV's.
What's worse, if all the tedium gets automated, and all you need is the very best artist with the most impeccable artistic sensibilities, you're going to put a lot of people out of work. Studios will just have one artistic genius who tells the machines what to do.
The point is, if you have a specific problem with a specific solution proposed, great. If you are just generally unhappy, whoop-dee-doo.
Think of it like you would with creating a 3D model, when you get to 80% completion you flatten out and those last 20% that is required to make it perfect takes as long as the first 80%.
Isn't this how a lot of the tech artist get started? They do the regular art for awhile, then in interest of easing their workflow or enhancing it some way, they start learning about how to edit the tools themselves. They get deeper into this, and next thing you know they are a highly sought after specialist who can develop powerful tools to make the artist job easier.
You develop an anecdotally based hypothesis from your own experience. You read some internet pseudo-science which obliquely might help explain your hypothesis. Next thing you know, you are trying to convince a bunch of people that the tech industry isn't developing at as quick a pace as it was when it first began because humans are much dumber today than they were less than one generation ago.
There's so many holes in the argument it is useless to even identify them. Eventually you have to just throw your arms up and ask the real questions to get to the bottom of the issue. "What are you smoking?"
When somebody starts throwing "rank" around, that's a sure sign they've got little else to stand on. If you can let go of the ego, and recognize that I'm spending my time trying to help somebody not waste their time and instead be more productive, the argument doesn't have to devolve into character assassination.
Anyway, that's all I have to say. Back to work.
If you were to go with the argument that bigger discoveries happen more often in the past because of education then that argument would be destroyed if you look even further into the past, if you look at discoveries in any field the most ground breaking discoveries happened when very few had access to an education and information was hard to come by.
Overall there could certainly be some bad schools in certain countries, and some schools certainly just operate as business which focus on the money part rather then the quality of education, but the information is out there and no one is stopping hard working people from getting it. Also there is good ideas out there, it's just not that easy to jump onto a totally new technology as for example it would be to go from a square wheel to a round wheel, it's very complex and I would guess many engineers just settle to work on details of the current workflows instead of going the risky route of creating something ground breaking that even if is ground breaking might not actually be used.
Why do so few people major in computer science?
the 3 most successful developers that I know personally that went on to make their own companies and products didn't go to university, they were already beyond that before graduating high school, and compared to the past where university was a must it is now mostly seen as a way to get a Visa for many, so many choose to go the self learning route, overall people have access to learning material at a much younger age then they did in the past.
I think the Halo2/Pavlovich talk is an example of that. By focusing so much on trying to automate linear steps at all costs using a bruteforce approach, crucial aspects of art iteration get completely thrown under the rug (not to mention that assets produced that way scale down very badly).
Many game artists indeed assume that "Sculpting a model is already enough but no you have to retopologise it so you work twice on the same model, then you have to UV unwrap it, paint it, rig it and finally export it" - and pipeline and habits end up being built around precisely that.
I tend to believe that studios end up getting locked into this kind of pipeline (and the logical need to automate it) because artists don't take the time to consider that maybe, just maybe, sculpting/highpoly modeling doesn't have to be the first step. It may be fun and produce fancy screenshots, and people budgeting big productions have (or think they have) the ressources for that sort of stuff ; but focusing on creating something lightweight that can be exported to the game in just a day or two (using, shock ! horror ! clean polygon modeling rather than a dense polygon soup that simply cannot be exported at all without heavy post-processing) is infinitely more valuable that trying to develop some magic autoLowpoly / autoUnwrap / autoBake button. Or at the very least, should come first - because lightweight, easily editable work is the key to fluid iteration ; bruteforce processing of models isn't.
Now of course this isn't necessarily true for all games, and can vary with art style, target platform, and even the stage of production a project is currently at. But there is definitely a certain widespread stubbornness among game artists when it comes to how things are supposed to be done (because X or Y big studio said they do things that way in their Youtube video), and this can be dangerous.
So, what I am getting at is that ... it's not necessarily the tools that are causing the friction and intertia. Sometimes, it is the assumptions on how things are supposed to be done that get in the way of working in a fluid, efficient and iterative manner.
Modeling is fun. Texturing is fun. Setting up lighting is fun. But then getting to the part where I gotta start hitting planar/cylindrical/pelt unwrap on every single polygon? And on top of that, having to watch for stretching/overlapping errors? That stuff makes me depressed.
Well, see the above. You are probably just making assumptions about the way things are supposed to be done, and likely ended up stuck with a very convoluted workflow that could be sped up immensely without even the need for any automation.
If I have a cylinder, then I group select the body and hit cylinder unwrap. Technically, I selected all those polygons that form the body.
If I'm unwrapping a car, I draw boundaries on the car frame, and only uv unwrap half the polygons (because it's going to get mirrored for the other side). But I still selected all the polygons to be unwrapped.