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Is TrueSpace 7.5 ready for prime time?
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These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011.
They are retained here for archive purposes only.
Is TrueSpace 7.5 ready for prime time? // Roundtable
Post by tSplorer // Apr 26, 2007, 11:09am
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tSplorer
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Looking at the Captain's Blog you'd think that TS would rival those so-called "industry standards". Is TS really ready to invade Hollywood? Perhaps get some juicy roles for the next Spiderman movie? I mean c'mon, what better way to attract the crowd than engage in the mainstream film productions? Or would TS just remain for 2d illustrations and small time generic animations most people don't generally care about? The galleries look stunning. We all know that. Bottom line is are there any bigtime film projects that could seal the deal and will make people finally say, "this is it!" |
Post by nowherebrain // Apr 26, 2007, 1:45pm
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nowherebrain
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Very enthusiastic, but I am not so sure...it really depends on the project...Shrek, no way. South Park, too easy. Get the point. |
Post by Burnart // Apr 26, 2007, 2:05pm
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The new animation tools with keyframe physics interaction looks very exciting - Shrek maybe beyond tS7.5 but what about Jimmy Neutron or (much of) Monster House (using Mr Bones plugin!) or a bunch of other cool but not top rung films? The actual animation tools look much more impressive than the native tools of other apps with much heftier pro credentials (ie. Lighwave - at least what I know of its on board tools). The interface changes, interactivity, colloborative possibilities, realtime display, above mentioned animation, hair (doesn't look fabulous but a good start)etc. Things have come along way since the initial release of v6 and it feels good to be a tS user - I'm looking forward to the NEW review in 3D World - tS7.5 must surely get one.
BTW how many sleeps until I get my hands on tS7.5? (It feels like Christmas when I was a kid!) |
Post by Improv // Apr 26, 2007, 4:31pm
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Improv
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BTW how many sleeps until I get my hands on tS7.5? (It feels like Christmas when I was a kid!)
Well-Monday is the end of the month and thus the pre-orders.
We can only hope! :-) |
Post by prodigy // Apr 26, 2007, 6:29pm
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prodigy
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Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
NEW release date?!?!?!?!?!?!? :(
10 days!!!! :( 10!!! DAYS!?!?!?!? |
Post by nowherebrain // Apr 26, 2007, 6:33pm
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nowherebrain
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My point exactly, somewhere in between shrek and southpark(e.g. monster house/jimmy neutron).
BTW: You will know by the time you read this, but release has been pushed back until may 7th. |
Post by prodigy // Apr 26, 2007, 6:46pm
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prodigy
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I think im gonna need a extra large coke to handle this. :(
So sad... hope this looooooong wait be usesfull for TS.
I think Caligari loves Fridays.. |
Post by Improv // Apr 26, 2007, 7:17pm
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Improv
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I think im gonna need a extra large coke to handle this. :(
So sad... hope this looooooong wait be usesfull for TS.
I think Caligari loves Fridays..
The closer we gets, the more large cokes we needs! Arrrggg!!!
Omm! Omm! Omm! There-that feels better. We are at peace with our inner Caligari- Ommm! :D |
Post by brotherx // Apr 26, 2007, 10:16pm
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I was so psyched about getting it sometime on Monday then got this email today about VRay on the 7th - I was like 'noooooooooo'
oh well, better another week than a buggy piece of software. |
Post by jayr // Apr 26, 2007, 10:48pm
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jayr
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at least they've given us a countdown clock :o |
Post by tSplorer // Apr 27, 2007, 2:00am
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tSplorer
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I was just wondering because when I was just starting in 3d I remember going to a local bookshop a long time ago. On one section of a bookshelf there was 3d Max, Lightwave, TrueSpace, XSI and Cinema4D. All have been involved in the film industry except TS. I thought looking at a bookcover TS has the most promise. What happened? Now I'm thinking maybe TS7.5 will finally make it this time. Will it?
We need Roman's comments on this one. Or how about coming up with a film project like a short or something. Blender has Elephants Dream. |
Post by Steinie // Apr 27, 2007, 2:15am
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How in the world is a CEO going to tell you TS 7.5 is going to be used in a Movie project? Ask the CEO's of the movie projects if TS 7.5 has any features they can use.
Already there is interest from the Gaming market. Once there is a stable application out there and the word is spread by users like yourself, Magazine articles and actual Shorts by (how about YOU) then the product will start getting noticed Professionally. My opinion is TS has a bright future but in what Market is yet to be determined.
If there was only one word that you could use to promote TS professionally what would you pick?
I pick "Stable" |
Post by tSplorer // Apr 27, 2007, 3:19am
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That's the point. You can't rely on users alone. Believe me, I'm not one of those who hype so-called "open source" software so much. I still believe that commercial ones develop faster. However, the main reason why Elephants Dream was created was to check where Blender's weak points were and what area it needs attention to. Perhaps all you need is a 1 full minute Hollywood-like animation such as Spiderman crawling on the side of a building or swinging from one to the next. Can it be done? How will you know unless you (developers) try? And how in the world would you expect anyone to test it when you yourselves are not interested to. |
Post by TomG // Apr 27, 2007, 3:32am
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One thing here - developers are not 3D artists. They are programmers.
You say "how will you know unless the developers go and make it?" - that is like saying an architect can only know their house design is any good if they go out and get some bricks and mortar and wood and start building the house themselves.
Naturally, they would not be as good at building the house as people who build houses as their job :)
The test of 3D software is NOT what the developers can make with it. They are too busy coding and learning math and studying white papers on the calculation of movement through a skeletal system to be any good at making a convincing character model, animate it according to good rules of animation (note not good rules of what the tools need to do, but good rules for making an animation, which are two different things), and then render it using great rendering settings.
So, really it does come down to the artists to test how far they can push the software. While the concept is nice, we couldn't get into the business of hiring people specifically to be artists and make a movie. Just not feasible for us to do.
So Steinie is right, it comes down to those who use the software to see just how far it can go artistically. It comes down to the artists. And that could well include yourself! If you think a 1 minute video would be a great thing, then it is a good project to tackle - maybe one person can do it, maybe someone can put together a team, maybe someone can even take on a contract and tackle it, who knows what will happen!
From Caligari's point of view, our aim is to make these tools, make them good, and make them affordable and accessible to a wide and diverse range of people. Many other tools have focused markets, such as Hollywood movies, or games. This usually affects their price bracket. If you are selling to Epic or Square Enix or some movie house, well, they have budgets of millions for their projects, so what do they care if your software is several thousand?
Anyway, we don't single out particular markets, we try to make these tools available to any artist that wants them, whether they want to play around with them for fun, or design houses with them, or make animations and movies, or do product illustration and visualisation, or make a real-time environment for teaching - whatever they want to do, we want them to find the toolset here at a price that they can actually consider, but with the power required to do the job.
Naturally we simply can't invest our time in producing great examples of all the above, and investing in making a movie would be to sink money into only one market, only one type of people, only one type of use, which is not our aim.
Of course if users create such a thing, we'd be sure to provde them with coverage and exposure and as much support as we could reasonably provide! So if there are any takers out there for tackling just such a project, we'd be interested to be kept informed on how it is going :)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by W!ZARD // Apr 27, 2007, 4:02am
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Further to Tom and Steinies points I've often thought that there is an unrealistic expectation among many 3d artists whereby they wish to be able to easily make feature movie quality animations and cgi effects when in fact feature movie animation and cg special effects are universally created by large teams of highly qualified and well coordinated experts.
Knocking out stuff that compares with ,say, the Shrek, Monsters inc and LOTR movies with one program and a desktop pc is a VERY big ask and IMHO not very realistic.
Where there is a lot of scope and potential for trueSpace (and especially the upcoming tS7.5) is in animated shorts, advertising and music videos where a simplified or stylised artistic approach is appropriate (This is not addressing the games and online 3d potentials inherent to trueSpace 7.5's native strengths - can you say 'Second Life'?). See Tom and Steinies remarks about markets.
From a business perspective I would think that it would be simply silly for Caligari to try to reinvent Maya and other established big name movie based applications - which is (part of) why Caligari has always focused on a much less obvious target of innovative UI design, groundbreaking and intuitive toolsets and artistic flexibility and useability.
While I don't doubt that trueSpace could be used in many ways to contribute toward a feature movie type production it will only do so in conjunction with a wide range of other cg tools. While one can make a great little movie with a handheld hi-def DVD video camera the result can't be meaningfully compared with a feature movie made with steadycams and robocams and all the other specialised equipment that comes with it. In the same way what can be produced with trueSpace (any version) can be artistic and beautiful and economically valuable but can't really be compared to what can be produced with the full resources of a well equipped digital movie studio like Weta or ILM.
At least that's what I think. |
Post by Chester Desmond // Apr 27, 2007, 6:31am
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Well said Tom and W!zard..
just watch the credits for even a 5 minute Flash-style cartoon on Nickelodeon and it will soon make you realize that the "one dude feature film on a Dell" mentality is nearly impossible to realize. There are so many aspects to even the simplest production that to expect one app to do it all is expecting too much. I firmly believe that TS could do a lot more than we've seen and I also feel that the general perception of TS in the industry as being "hobby only" needs to be changed. Instead of focusing on how TS can't fit into a professional pipeline (due mainly to certain software being entrenched as the industry standard, often because of investment and comfort rather than functionality) we need to focus on making mind-blowing scenes that get noticed. TS may never become the industry standard and I don't see that this is even a goal of Caligari; their "mission" seems to be more of providing a well-rounded, entry level program. |
Post by TomG // Apr 27, 2007, 6:53am
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Note that there is no reason why trueSpace7.5 couldn't be an effective plugin for a large studio - plugins for these other applications often cost $800 or $900 or even more. That price wil buy you all of tS7.5 and V-Ray 1.5.
Could be a pretty affordable access to V-Ray rendering for some. Could be an affordable means of putting work into a real-time environment for others, especially with free truePlay. Real-time animation to file makes a great method for previewing scenes in high quality. Could be an effective means for collaborating during weekly review meetings for others. The character animation and integration with physics could be useful for yet others.
That is why we view formats as being of increasing importance too, and why they are on the cards for review and work after 7.5 is out :)
It is true that big movie quality stuff is rarely made by one person with one app - it is not uncommon that one 3D app is modeling, one is charactrer animation and scripting for crowd scenes, another makes the environment and lighting, and then having post process effects and particles added by another, before the whole thing is run through some other compositing program for grain matching and color adjustments etc.
That said - a lot can be done with tS and one person, and I think we'll see a lot more of that with 7.5. I also think we'll see 7.5 become a valid part of a pipeline like the one above.
As a final note, you'll see the images we use in marketing come from beta testers, rather than developers. Not to say anything bad about our developers, but it is only natural that the 3D artists doing the testing produce more and better artwork than the developers do :)
So - what can tS7.5 do? Just what quality can you make with it? Well... it's the artist and not the tools, so - that all depends on what you do with it :)
I look forward to finding out just what everyone creates as soon as we put it into your hands. It is going to be very exciting.
Thanks!
Tom |
Post by RAYMAN // Apr 27, 2007, 7:07am
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RAYMAN
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Yes Tom !
Import and export are way on top of the list of
features that get TS into the pipelines :rolleyes:
Another one is a multitude of existing shaders.
That takes me to my No 1 wish for TS 7.5 and VR 1.5
Please a symbiontfor vray ......
You dont know how many people use dartree ...... I love it ... many others do too. |
Post by TomG // Apr 27, 2007, 7:12am
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TomG
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Hi Rayman,
Simbiont and Dark Tree are not Caligari products. You'd need to contact them to discuss the possibility of a V-Ray version of their shaders, there is nothing we can do there as we don't have their code naturally to be able to do anything to adapt it for V-Ray :)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by RAYMAN // Apr 27, 2007, 7:27am
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RAYMAN
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Thank you tom for the fast reply !
I do think TS7.5 will be a great release
It just takes some time for the people in the "prime"
to understand that Ts is going towards animation - physics lego
and that we are at the beginning of a development-
time will tell-Its up to us users now to get the most from what we get |
Post by tSplorer // Apr 27, 2007, 10:43am
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tSplorer
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I think you'll all agree that Carrara is the closest competitor of TrueSpace for people looking at commercial apps. I don't know Carrara's history. They say it was the former Raydream Studio. Of course, all of these pioneers could easily produce stunning 2d illustrations. But is that really the main goal why 3d apps are developed? Don't you agree that animation is where the action is? XSI is the next app people will look into after Carrara and TS. With XSI you don't have to do some digging. However, there are many people like me who prefer choosing between TS and Carrara. Look at what Carrara can do (http://www.carrara3d.com/carrara_poser3.html) when it comes to its capability or I should say potential in films.
I'm not slamming TS down. I wish for its success just like any other app. In the end the whole 3d community benefits when developers step it up. That means we get more choices of powerful tools. |
Post by tSplorer // Apr 27, 2007, 10:45am
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tSplorer
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I firmly believe that TS could do a lot more than we've seen and I also feel that the general perception of TS in the industry as being "hobby only" needs to be changed. Instead of focusing on how TS can't fit into a professional pipeline (due mainly to certain software being entrenched as the industry standard, often because of investment and comfort rather than functionality) we need to focus on making mind-blowing scenes that get noticed.Well said. |
Post by jayr // Apr 27, 2007, 11:11am
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Well said Tom and W!zard..
just watch the credits for even a 5 minute Flash-style cartoon on Nickelodeon and it will soon make you realize that the "one dude feature film on a Dell" mentality is nearly impossible to realize. There are so many aspects to even the simplest production that to expect one app to do it all is expecting too much.
Just to throw my 2 cents in, when i was in college i did a 5 minute animation in ts 4.3 it took about 3 months to finish and i have to say there was a hell of a lot more to it than i thought, even though it was very simple. Still, i think one, or a small group, can pull off excellent stuff, just don't expect it to be easy or quick! |
Post by RichLevy // Apr 27, 2007, 11:48am
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RichLevy
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Studios will use full featured packages, and they need to be able to get their hands on lots of trained personnel that are well versed on that software. This is why the other packages will be the first choice of a large studio.
On the other hand a small indie shop, or just a couple of dedicated user's could get themselves a bit of recognition by using whatever software they can get their hands on and doing something with it.
The best CG is nothing without a good story and plot to work with... so create a good storyline to follow, and than do the best you can in your package of choice...
My 2 cents |
Post by tSplorer // Apr 27, 2007, 1:27pm
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tSplorer
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If there was only one word that you could use to promote TS professionally what would you pick? I pick "Stable"I agree with this. The other key to me, at least, is "Base." Strenghten the base first before putting any more features. I started with TS6.6. I discovered to my disappointment that it didn't even have a Tweak mode. Even Wings3d has tweak mode.
I'll definitely upgrade my 6.6 to 7.5 and give TS another chance. I really need a 3d app to grow and stick with. BTW, animation doesn't have to be as complex as character animation at this point. Caligari can't go on promoting TS for mere 2d illustration purposes. Camera walkthroughs and flyovers are animations. It's a demonstration how camera movement affects lighting, shades and shadows, as well as reflections. (http://www.lightwiki.com/downloads/LW9.2Demo_Final_h264.mov) |
Post by nowherebrain // Apr 27, 2007, 4:55pm
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I think you'll all agree that Carrara is the closest competitor of TrueSpace for people looking at commercial apps. I don't know Carrara's history. They say it was the former Raydream Studio. Of course, all of these pioneers could easily produce stunning 2d illustrations. But is that really the main goal why 3d apps are developed? Don't you agree that animation is where the action is? XSI is the next app people will look into after Carrara and TS. With XSI you don't have to do some digging. However, there are many people like me who prefer choosing between TS and Carrara. Look at what Carrara can do (http://www.carrara3d.com/carrara_poser3.html) when it comes to its capability or I should say potential in films.
I'm not slamming TS down. I wish for its success just like any other app. In the end the whole 3d community benefits when developers step it up. That means we get more choices of powerful tools.
Replace "Carrara" with "C4D". IMO |
Post by parva // Apr 27, 2007, 10:06pm
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Replace "Carrara" with "C4D". IMO
No, he is right. Carrara would be the closest competitor (if we can use this word) technically and in price.
Cinema has high improved in the last upgrades since v6 (also technically and price) and pushed itself in the list between 3ds and Maya (but no wonder it's a melange between both). |
Post by achilles // Apr 27, 2007, 11:19pm
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Hallo, I'm a recent user of TS, I'm not so expert in 3D.
I use other programs, like Realsoft, Shade and TS 6.6.
I find that each has its strenghts, some is strong in SDS modelling, other in Nurbs or animation, and got difficult in use for certain operations but are easier in others.
I tryied high end software too (XSI, Maya, C4D etc.), certainly they are very powerfull but too complicated to use having so much options and tools and without months in learning and schools is very difficult to use them.
I think that for home use and for basic tasks we don't need to pay thousands of dollars, mid price softwares are sufficient, remember that there are free software like Blender (i hate its interface) that are growing very fast and users can find every kind of resource on the Web.
Carrara is about like TS, but has a strange approach in modelling, for me.
My problem with TS is its interface without menues, if version 7.5 will be more immediate and friendly useable i think it'll be a big step ahead.
I'll wait for it, hoping that Caligari will respect the date of 7th of May and will give us more support, guides and free tutorials, because without helps and resources every software will be left apart by users.
Sorry for my english.
Bye from Achille |
Post by nowherebrain // Apr 28, 2007, 5:33am
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@achilles: I can agree with that...at least the first few things about the different packages. I apologize I do not have time to read the whole thing. |
Post by noko // Apr 28, 2007, 10:31am
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Personally I think tS stands on its own in many ways that no one else can match. Who else has the extraordinary LE or anything even close? It is incredible how you can link up so many different objects and even make usable interfaces or panels for operation! The real time display is incredible and works with all new animation tools and modeling tools too! I see many vast improvements in 7.5 and rate of progress is mind boggling for me, which for me is a testament to the strength and sound judgement used for the new architecture that allows such vast capability for improvement and growth. I believe tS will be making new markets and be a trend setter for others to follow. Now the UI for me has always been right on the money to how I like to work, visually, I think and work so much faster with images or pictures then with words as in menu after menu. Anyways this is very excitting to see. |
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