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Where is Truespace Headed?
About Truespace Archives
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.
Where is Truespace Headed? // Rants and Raves
Post by xmanflash // Apr 26, 2006, 4:50am
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xmanflash
Total Posts: 335
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I have been on Holiday and thinking a bit, so bear with me...
Where is TS headed?
Is it to become a top notch modelling tool for CAD? - Is it to be a world class renderer for stills, or a leading animation tool for video and film work?
From what I see I suspect it is being turned into a platform for building games. Realtime DX9 means little in the tv/film world.. i.e. How close are the Vray, lightworks or such renders to the DX9 shaders..
Has it been used in any large productions? - why would I buy it over competing products? - What are the competing products now, and how will it compare with the more upmarket products in the future?
Will it become more expensive, what is the pricing plan for upgrades?
After reading the forums, and buying the (3/4 finished) product, I cant work out where TS is headed commercially, and would like to hear from the horses mouth what the future of TS is going to be, as its important to my (and I suspect many others) investment. I will spend a lot of time and effort on TS if its really going places, but for me they need to be commercial places, not hobbyist, hence my questions... |
Post by Penforhire // May 8, 2006, 1:40pm
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Penforhire
Total Posts: 4
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I see you're getting as much response to your thoughtful rant as I did to something tangential I posted in another section. From the higher upgrade price alone I infer Caligari is aiming upscale. I do not figure they're out to intentionally gouge their loyal customer base. But they do have a different idea of the value they offer than I do. I read everyone's tS7 posts carefully and I get way too much "unfinished software"-with-a-teaser vibe.
I see tS as the up-and-comer and their pricing is now too close to some more established competition. By 'more established' I only mean attributed more often in commercial work. That has some value, not only to a pro (confidence it gets the job done) but also to a "prosumer" like myself who wants the coolest toys he can afford. Up-and-comers need to be more competitive in other ways (e.g. price or stability or tutorial content or after-sale tech support or ...) to stay attractive.
Yep, they're all just tools. None of 'em do it all and all of 'em are only as good as the user. I have no idea how many of you are like me but I can only afford one tool of this nature in this price bracket. |
Post by splinters // May 8, 2006, 9:35pm
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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I think the investment in new architecture and the licensing of vray show that Caligari are moving into more 'professional' territories. The ability to work collaboratively should also open up many new avenues...once the concept is established.
As an educator, I am keen to see how this one works...:) |
Post by Garion // May 9, 2006, 5:11am
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Garion
Total Posts: 116
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As I have said in previous posts, it's my honest opinion that TS-7 is an unfinished Hybrid app at a premium price. I am still waiting to see what TS-7.5 brings to the party, but it will have to be something spectacular with rock solid stabilty. The problem I see for people buying TS-7 now is that that IIRC the TS-7.5 update will be free to pre-order customers only, so it might be best to wait until its out before yoo make a decision, but that is of course up to yoo.
As to where TS is heading...... The jury is still out, but I suspect that with the DirectX 9 realtime view it may be more towards games. Which would not be a bad thing IMHO as there is a market there for for games design, especially in the Indie sector.
I know that some people here use TS professionaly. ranging from those that make game content to adverstising etc. I have used it myself in these areas, but the inherent instabilty of previous versions and broken features, are forcing me to concider moving on. I have not used TS-7 much yet for anything more than testing and won't reinstall it until TS7.5 is out, I just don't have the time to fart about with an unfinished application.
As far as Caligari moving into the so-called professional territories:
It will take more than a few gimmicks to rock that market, if by 'professional terrotories' we are talking about those occupied by Maya, 3DSMax, Lightwave and XSI etc.
We are living in intersting times and the market is not what it was, with the rise in price Truspace is more expensive than some of the competion, its a buyers market so yoo pays yer money and takes yer choice. I started with Truespace a long long time ago and have used it well over the years to make a few bob (bucks):)
But now..... well lets see what TS-7.5 brings to the party, meanwhile it's back to TS6.6 and..ahem other apps for the time being.
Still hanging in there.
CHeers
Garion |
Post by Gwot // Jun 6, 2006, 10:14am
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Gwot
Total Posts: 25
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It's not just an indie market that is there for the taking. There's plenty of room in the big money commercial side too. I've been working that side of the fence for the better part of a decade now and I can tell you that all the big apps that get used in different game pipelines are only just now scratching of the surface of real time capability WITHIN the app. Most real time testing has up till now taken place in the game engine itself - which largely sucks for doing character work unless you have a direct pipe right to the engine with no need to convert or export files and constantly load/reload the engine and use half baked camera controls to try to test deformation and motion in realtime.
I'd love to see more of the big studio apps taking the road that truespace is on. The combination of the link editor with real time interactive viewport capabilities is what drew me to TS7 in the first place. Nobody else has this and it is needed so very much for games work, previs, UI or other interactive design work or anything else that can benefit from a realtime, interactive production approach.
Though sadly I'm somewhat disappointed with the UI and a few other things like animation, particularly character stuff - I'm continuing to trudge through with it and opted not to get my money back within the first 30 days of using TS7. I'm really hoping that with the improved animation upgrade we see a bit more standardization of some basic interface issues like viewport navigation and transform widgets. I think trying to be too different from everyone else in these areas actually hurts TS' image in the eyes of professionals as the vast majority of us just have certain expecations of such common elelments.
Style based IK as well could be a great thing to have, and I've definitely taken a look at endorphin to see how it could be used in our studio, but by no means would I be willing to sacrifice basic tools and components of character building and animation for such things. I do hope to see some improvement there too. For realtime stuff, especially in fully immersed 3d environments with physics, even programs like endorphin are kind of useless when you are dealing with ragdolls.
No matter how realistic that stuff looks, you still have to bake it out for use as motion. You only do that if you don't have a ragdoll system in place. There are many shortcomings to that approach because then you have to create many motions to account for many different scenarios. For death animations in an action game for instance, it's far more desirable to trigger a short animated death sequence for dramatic effect and then blend to a ragdoll as the character dies. Or for massive impact/explosions you just let the ragdoll take over with fairly realistic results.
Unless you can fully integrate a system like endorphin into the game engine, you will always have to bake out the animation that it generates, which will lead to massive animation bloat for the characters in order to look even remotely as convincing as a ragdoll system.
Getting back to my point, I think TS would be a lot more useful beyond just indie work if there were some improvements made to the UI and general animation toolset. Rigging and animation are two of the biggest components that make an application interesting or worth building a pipeline up around. As a new TS user, and someone who is interested in this stuff on a personal and professional level I would urge more effort to be focused in this area.
Cheers,
James |
Post by GraySho // Jun 6, 2006, 11:33am
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GraySho
Total Posts: 695
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I totally agree, procedural animation of any kind should be easily convertable to keyframes for total control (and export). That has already been requested in another thread and I'm looking forward to see this feature (and other basic ones) in 7.5. |
Post by noko // Jun 6, 2006, 7:39pm
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noko
Total Posts: 684
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The realtime capability I too find the most exciting aspect of TS7 series. I havn't seen many if any tap into doing custom DX9 HLSL for vertex or pixel shaders yet which TS7 is capable of. A whole area open, wish I was much better with programing. Character animation upgrade I expect to be rather nice and very big improvement with what we have now. |
Post by Gwot // Jun 7, 2006, 5:04am
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Gwot
Total Posts: 25
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Speaking of DX stuff... I'd like to add that Caligari really should try to stay on top of the latest DX enhancements as they happen by adding tools and features that take advantage of them. TS7 has a good start already but falling behind can easily lose any ground you gain with this version.
'Next gen' is such a nasty buzzword now but I don't see its implications changing much in the near future. Technology windows close pretty fast so devs will always be racing towards the newest thing even as it emerges. The closer you can stay to this development path, with the realtime stuff, the more appealing TS will be for studio use. |
Post by noko // Jun 8, 2006, 5:44am
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noko
Total Posts: 684
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Another aspect with the DX9 area is that the brick structure allows using LE to construct materials with surposenly same versatility as HLSL but ease of joining objects together, encapulating blocks and linking everything together. So HLSL doesn't even need to be used to take advantage of DX 9 hardware. Looks like all of DX9 functions and what not are covered in the material editor libraries, now I just need to learn more on using more of the math functions. |
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