…showing Max’s pointcache working inside of Blender as a modifier. It was coded internally at our work (Iloura) by Grant Adam. It is also capable of working with shape keys and sculpt corrections simmilar to the process described by Pepe.
We’re pretty excited about it at work. Check it out.
The animation is baked in Max (or maya as it’s pointcache which is standard in both) and bought into blender as a single file. It updates the animation per frame based on the baked out data. It’s liek rigging a character, baking the animation into the skin, and doing away with the armature. We use it a lot when sending animation between pakages.
On Charlotte’s Web, we animated Wilbur the pig in maya and pointcached out the mesh. That mesh and pointcache file was bought into Max where we rendered passes in Vray and 3delight.
Using this build, we can make aniamtion in any package and use lender for hair combing. we can then export the hair splines back into maya and render out to renderman or 3delight etc. It adds a LOT of interoperability between that packages (and lets me wiggle Blender into our pipeline for fun )
Not sure, the thing is that Grant has written it into the core as a modifier so it would have to be submitted for testing etc, and I’m not certain Grant has the time for it.
We need to discuss it at work.
Very cool stuff, Glenn! A pretty huge step toward industry usage and acceptance of Blender!
Its my understanding that as a part of agreeing to the GNU GPL, any modifications to blender’s code must be made publicly available. So, regardless if they assist with further testing or merging with blender’s main, it must be posted to be publicly accessible (at least in code form) under the same license. This is the great thing about FOSS, eh?
The license (check gnu.org please!) says that if you distribute a GPL licensed program (assuming GPL here, not LGPL!), you must make the source available on request. It would be insane if any changes, even if private, had to be made public.
Not if its only used internally. They can change the hell out of Blender (like give it a Maya interface :evilgrin:) and there is nothing they have to share. One only needs to provide the code if you provide binaries to others (ie outside your company).
Even if Grant doesn’t have time to maintain it himself, it still may be worthwhile to release a patch, even in a half-finished state. Someone interested may want to pick it up and get it to a level where it can be integrated properly if it’s not already - a guy named Michael Fox was already halfway working on something similar - a ‘bake modifier’ that saves a point cache to Blender’s internal physics cache format. It would save patching and maintaining in the future too. Anyway of course it’s up to you guys, but there can be benefits to just getting it out there.
Good stuff, lads. Maybe, releasing it while you’ve got a full head of steam, might get it over the line sooner than you expected. Plus, i’ll buy ya a slab, if you do.