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You really ought to look at the marking menus in Autodesk's Maya, which have been around since before Maya existed back when it was called Alias Power Animator. These marking menus are also hiararchical, and allow for moving up and down the hiararchy easily (which yours don't). Someone even developed it further as a script to include icons (Xumi) Also, there have been a number of pie-based gesture extensions for Firefox for as long as there have been extensions for Firefox, Firebird, etc... One such extension is still being developed/maintained/updated (easygestures).

You don't know any professional artists, do you? I think you're definitely right about why apple isn't producing them, because they won't sell that many. But I think that tells you a lot more about who actually is using apple's computers than it does about what professional artists would "go for". I've talked to a number of professional artists who have made the comment that they'd rather have a mac tablet PC than a windows one, but guess which you can actually buy?

As for your previous comments:

"Tablet PCs are very much a niche technology."

Exactly, and artists are part of that niche market. There are very few professions where tablet PCs are more useful to the task at hand.

"And most of the artist types already have an off-monitor tablet and know how to use it. And, you can definitely rotate them, and rotate your screen."

You're bizarre "artist types" fixation aside, I've got to question if you have ever even used a tablet. You can NOT rotate them in any usable manner, as soon as you do it breaks any sort of continuity between your hand and what you are drawing. Do you even understand what rotate means? If you think it means landscape vs portrait as the GP suggested, you're sadly mistaken. I hear Corel Photopaint (or is it Painter?) has a rotating canvas feature, but can't confirm this first hand. And even then it's not nearly as natural as drawing on a surface that you can rotate freely.

"And, you have the heavy-duty CPU for your high-end graphics card, and you can select the exact monitor you want (for color, contrast, etc.) at the resolution you want."

That still doesn't replace the usefulness of a tablet PC. Are you really so clueless as to think that no one whose livelihood depends on their art can afford a second machine, especially if it is a laptop? Get real, a tablet PC is like a heavy (though not that heavy anymore) sketchpad that you can take anywhere, has unlimited undo, doesn't require scanning to get the images on a computer, and doubles as a fully functional laptop.

"What kind of pressure gradient is available on Tablet PCs anyway? Can it detect stylus tilt? Does the stylus have fully scriptable buttons on it?"

I believe they're all 256 levels of pressure on the Wacom Tablet PCs, which is completely sufficient. I believe all of the recent ones detect tilt, though I don't know what level of sensitivity (probably not hard to fucking google it, you know), and if you mean the stylus has buttons that can be mapped to other features than left and right click or whatever, I think that depends on the tablet manufacturer. The pens tend to differ between makers, for instance the Gateway's (which are about the lowest end you can get) they sell at Best Buy don't even have an eraser.

The amount of buttons available when using the convertibles in tablet mode is a bit of a problem, as most don't have that many buttons exposed (and I hear are poorly placed for lefties sometimes) and I have yet to see one with a rocker switch like a Wacom tablet on the pen. But even my Wacom pen is lacking there, where's the middle mouse button? Additionally, if apple is such a great hardware maker and artists really are a core part of their user base, how come they haven't put out a tablet PC done right? I don't even like macs and I'd buy one if apple put out a good enough model, it's not like windows is my native platform either.

Maybe you should read a review of one sometime, or something. Or better yet, go find a retail location that has demos of them. Just make sure they're running software that can actually take advantage of the pressure and don't listen to the idiot sales kid if he tries to tell you they don't support pressure.

4.1 is the end of the line for Shake. The huge price drop to $499 reflects that. All support contracts are being bought out and not renewed. Large customers have a source-escrow option available.

They are rumored to be starting work on a new compositing app which may or may not be shake-like, but which will certainly take some time to develop. Some of the shake support people have been laid off, but AFAIK the developers are moving over to the new shake-replacement project.

See http://www.fxguide.com/article359.html (podcast with Dion Scoppettuolo of Apple), http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showforu m=19, or http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2006/06/the-uncer tain-future-of-shake/, and so on.

Pov-ray is hardly the most-high tech software available today. Check out some of the links posted earlier like this site and in particular this artist. Its possible, but not with pov-ray (apperantly)

Does that look 'too clean' for you?

I don't know. I think this one is pretty good.

You must be kidding that those look real. Those renders look like they are more like 5+ years old. Have a look at what a modern rendering looks like here. http://www.highend3d.com/artists/

For a "Render Farm" manager Here.

Just thought this was an appropriate discussion. Also, maybe a "slashjobs" would be an interesting addition to this site.

Last I checked, .obj (from the old Wavefront days) and .ma (maya ascii files) were both open formats. Those *were* both of SGI's biggest 3D formats. The trick being that Alias (Wavefront) was sold off from SGI last week.

Hell, they're even (as someone pointed out above) human readable.

From the point of view of someone in the industry (I do FX work for indie films), here's my perspective... some of it's off-topic.

- VRML sucks for anything except crude realtime flythrus. High-end 3D work these days deals with nurbs & subdivision surfaces. No support in VRML, huge file sizes, and while it's an open format, every vendor's interpretation of the data leaves something to be desired. More on this below.

- DXF. Hello? We've *had* a standard 3D interchange format since autocad came out. Doesn't suck as bad as VRML, but still sucks for many of the same reasons. But it's a way to fairly cleanly exchange poly data between programs. Polys are the basis of sub-d surfaces. I already use .obj and .dxf for the role that this new format (created by industry outsiders, no less) is hoping to fill.

- Filmbox format: (.fbx) does a hell of a job moving professional-grade models and textures back and forth between high-end packages. Interpretation doesn't vary as widely on the host platform, but there's still one catch: textures & shading.

Until there's a "standard" rendering engine that absolutely everyone uses, a unified 3D format is still only getting half the picture. Every major package has a different way that shaders are written, different channels available in said shaders, different lighting models, etc.

Don't even get me started about feature parity.

Hell, on a given project, depending on my needs I may use a combination of Renderman, Mental Ray, Hardware texturing, and even the Maya renderer. It all boils down to what gets the job done fast enough and pretty enough.

Getting subdivision surfaces and nurbs geometry ONLY to interchange cleanly between packages is only half the job, and that in itself is a monumental task.

What happens when you start adding textures / shaders / lighting / HDRI lighting models into the mix. Is the file format supposed to handle these cleanly as well?

Take raytracing out of the mix... play a DX9 game side by side on nVidia and ATI cards... guess what? They look different.

This is all pointless if you click *render* on two different packages and end up with different results (which, oddly enough I use to my advantage with Maya's choices of built-in renderers now). Unfortunately it's the nature of the beast, and not likely to ever change until high end 3D packages stop adding features (hair, cloth, dynamics, HDRI lighting, sub-d's, sub-surface scattering, volume caustics) with different or missing implementations on competing packages.

An exercise: Maya supports volume caustics via mental ray custom coded shaders attached to Maya lights and volume objects . The light coming through my stained glass window scene is absolutely perfect now. So I'm going to export the 'stage' into Max using this new holy grail format. What, Max doesn't support volume caustics? Not physical or shader representations? Well, all Max can do is put up a helpful error message (or nothing, knowing discreet... I digress) and ignore that data.

And now we're effectively back where we were at in the beginning. A whole lot of 3D file formats (plus 1) that are *mostly* interchangeable.

An Alias rep made a post regarding the sale on the Highend3D Buzz Board, second post down.

It looks like some of the Alias folks are working a deal where the investment firm will purchase the assets from SGI and then the Alias person(s) will then purchase those assets from the investment firm. The Alias folks break free of SGI and SGI gets some badly-needed cash.

I've since confirmed this via a party who Knows Things. So no black helicopters from Cuptertino or Redmond, you conspiracy theorists :)

Either way, they still have to figure out how to pay for R&D (or not) with a fully saturated market. We'll see.

OT but serious question here, is there any particular reason why you're using 3ds max?

If you're a freelancer then there are many different 3D packages that will run on Linux and OS X. As a professional, I'm sure you already know this but Maya being the closest off the top of my head with anything near 3ds max's capabilities, it will run on OS X and Linux(PPC-based linux not supported I don't believe though). Cinema 4D has great renders although colleagues that use it don't have near the animation capabilities of Maya or 3ds max. If you work for a company then there's probably not a whole lot you can do about the software package they've standardized on I'm assuming.

On a side note everything I've read about 3ds max pertaining to porting to another OS/arch is that it is closely tied to Windows and even if discreet wanted to port it to another platform it would take a complete overhaul. In other words, not anytime soon. That's all hearsay of course but I believe it. That's too bad, its a great piece of software on a crummy OS.

I guess I'm just curious as to why you're running max over the other packages. I don't do 3D now (tough industry to break into, you must be pretty damned good.) but I still play around with it occasionally.

I studied 3D animation and digital media in college and we were taught on x86 boxes running 3ds max on NT4 and SGI boxes running Maya. The school then switched to Win2k boxes for both. (They had standardized on Dell across campus, imagine that.) Irix was nice, I still daydream about it sometimes[:)] The school I attended treated 3ds max more as a beginner's 3D package and Maya as the be all end all of 3D packages. Turns out that is certainly not the case. Highend3d's Artists Gallery is certainly proof of that.

I found Maya's learning curve to be much smaller than 3ds max's but in retrospect I chalk that up to a much more capable professor. I've seen outstanding projects from both packages, that's for sure.

--

Here's the best one I've ever seen. Notice he's wearing a hat though and not moving. :)

Our brains are wired to recognize faces which makes recreating one especially difficult. The limits to doing a face now are mostly artistic. Most of the professional software these days has passed the point where it limits the artist. (Whether it can do it in time for a production deadline is another matter.)

Things that make a face not work are:

-Perfect symmetry. (check out Cameron Diaz's nose for how far you can go and still look beautifull)

-Not enough articulation in the forms. (Poser people are getting better but still look like mannequins - too much symmmetry also)

-The eyes and mouth look dry. No meniscus of water at the lids or on the teeth.

-Simple skin textures. The values and color of real skin have quite a range and more variation than most faces are textured/colored.

If you want to see how subtle expressions are, try doing a portrait in paint or pencil and change the shape of the mouth by 1mm or 2. See this link for a really cool article on how subtle and complex facial expressions are. (Bill Clinton makes a guest appearance)

I'm in the 3d biz and every now and again you see their ads on the Highend3d.com job boards They often look for graphics programmers and artists and animators in bunches.

So they either still have a huge staff and are working on something new or just have an even larger churn rate.

"This year's conference took place last week, and all of the big companies demonstrated vigorous recruiting efforts."

"If the sparse show floor weren't enough to remind you of the weak economy, a visit to the SIGGRAPH career center showed board after board of resumes, with job opportunities only posted in one small corner of the room."

"The job board was dominated with resumes from job-seekers but there were very few postings of jobs. Definitely a low-demand, high-supply type of market."

one of those big gray books you should have gotten with maya covers mel,and all the other ones make refernces to it. and of course, keep the script editor open when doing stuff. (gimp so badly needs this)

you can also find help at sites likehighend3d

The interesting thing is that while the movie in preproduction and production the coders have very little (read: 80 hr weeks arent uncomon) time to do anything but make their tools work. and the level of secerecy about the WHOLE PROCESS makes it imposible to leak any of what they have done out.

BUT

And heres the good thing. The people who work in the movie industry are very nomadic. They take one contract for a year or a year and a half then they take a break and work on their own projects. Then when they start to run out of money they grab another movie to work on.

If you want to look at the quality of the tools these people make in their own time while working on their own projects. have a look at the hundreds of free and often open source tools on sites like highend3d there you will find the industry's best minds working on tools for artists, under whatever platform you choose to use, be it NT, linux, irix, macos or osX.

Have a look at http://www.highend 3d.com/maya/tutorials/charcterSetup/setup_1.3d as well as some of the other tutorials on this site.

-deane
Gooroos Software: plugging you in to Maya