The collected works of GIJoe - Page 4

as far as i know studiopaint 3d as in the 2D/3D paint/texturing hybrid with hardware brushes was not ported but abandoned in 2000. instead a new module that perhaps shares the name was developed as part of alias studio on other platforms than irix. but i believe that is strictly 2D and a concepting tool?

irix studiopaint functionality on the 3D/texturing side can be found nowadays in mari by the foundry (and a lot more, obviously). also studiopaint's interface seems to have been the inspiration for mudbox which also has some (unrelated) paint functionality and adopted SP3D's methods for adjusting brush resize/pressure with gestures as well as the shelves. mudbox also shares the very handy snap-paint-stroke-to-curve function with studio paint.

both programs have originally been developed at weta which was known as a place using studio paint a lot in the texturing pipeline for a good few years and way after the software was discontinued.

bkd wrote: It seems you're right and Studiotools only had 2D part of Studiopaint...

By the way - Studiopaint as standalone application on IRIX always included 3D part?

i think the paint module in alias is really an entirely different program. i remember seeing it in some alias training videos and it did not appear to have much in common with the full-blown irix application. i believe the developers of studiopaint 3d went on to create sketchbook pro for alias instead.

and as for the 3D part: it's not a separate mode or module or anything but rather the ability to load a 3d model into the document's layer stack, place 2D layers on top and merge those down onto the geometry, effectively baking them onto a texture - at least that's how i remember it, been a few years now - same principle as used by mari. most other 3d painters rather work with surface tracking for the brush and offer projection mode as a paint-tool instead. much faster/more intuitive to work with.

one downside of SP3D for me always was that it did not have photoshop-style layer blend modes beyond straight 'blend' nor did it have any layer styles. even in it's useful days this made regular roundtrips to photoshop necessary.

bkd wrote: I assume this is quantity of bits per one color channel(?). What advantage to designer give these 12 bits over 8? Or this is internal architectural extra bits that remove rounding errors and then in any case results output to monitor in 8 bit per color channel?? Does MGRAS (and VPro of course) exactly OUTPUT 12 bit per color channel through SGI 13W3 on monitors that support it?

choosing the 12 bit option should result in a higher quality and i think the systems did indeed output at 12 bits per channel which was considered their advantage. if the standard monitors were truly up to displaying that all that properly i would not know. for many cases you would probably not notice the difference to 8 bits anyway but for something like using soft gradients or taking the output into compositing and fiddling with the colors it would give extra headroom.
i vaguely recall an option to choose between 8 and 16 bit per channel document color depth in SP3D via environment variable. not sure how that's related. a yellow flyer in the booklet explaining the steps, anyone?

at any rate, stepping up the bit depth made things slower so it was all a tradeoff. i used SP3D mainly on a dual-600 V12 a few years after it's heyday so it was no issue. using that on a period-correct R5000 o2 in like '98 however might have been a different experience.

gijoe77 wrote: well i'll be darned! that worked! How did you come to the idea to set the date to 99?

mirai.jpg

so you never tried my tip from page 1 - written in may of 2014 - to set the system date back a number of years? i thought i had sufficiently hinted that that made mirai work again.
as i recall the culprit was the built-in lisp interpreter's license that expired at some point.

i'd be surprised to hear that these books actually exist for 4.0.

if i recall right, that version was an afterthought at the time - something they released to keep a handful of companies invested in SI3D happy - while they were generally pushing XSI front and center.

we had these books but they came matching with version 3.6 or 3.7 and were not replaced as far as i was aware. rather, starting with 3.8 they shipped PDF manuals. anyway, wow has it been a long time or what.