I’ve finally found the time to create an automated setup for SmartDuplicate and Wire. The next releases of Seamour will have an installer as well, of course. This is a service to our customers since installation, upgrading or uninstallation is now done automatically. Supported platforms are OSX and Windows for the time being, until I’ve found a way to create an RPM that will install nicely in a users home directory under Linux. Any hints?
During the past weeks there have been endless talks about the Generizer release and whether it should be an individual product or integrated into SmartDuplicate, the same goes for the Texture Deformer. The decision’s been made and we proudly anncounce a major update for SmartDuplicate (v1.3) which includes both of these fantastic new nodes. All customers that bought SmartDuplicate before July, 1st 2007 will have the opportunity to upgrade for free to this version.
Some of the major changes are:
That’s why, create!
It’s been a while since the last updates have been released. But as of today there are all new versions of Wire available with lots of new features inside and of course the promised support for Polygons, Combined Polygons and also Subdivision Surfaces is included. Speaking of SubDs: please be advised that users of Maya 8.5 need to update to Maya 8.5 SP1 since there is a bug in the SubD implementation in this version. You can get the update from here.
So what else is new in this release?
At the moment releases for OSX (Maya 8.5) and Windows (Maya 6.5, 7.0, 8.0, 8.5) (32-bit) have already been released. Versions for all other platforms are soon to follow.
Part of the Generizer plug-in will also be the Texture Deformer. This approach opens a lot of opportunities since you can now shape objects with textures, images and even movies. You may think of it as something like displacement mapping but with a real-time preview. The upper image demonstrates an early version of the deformer being applied to a NURBS plane. Plans are that this deformer will work on every object type that has UV coordinates. Since NURBS have implicit UVs this was an obvious example but a preview with polygonal meshes will follow.
Seamour has already become THE tool for generating flexible, high-quality seams in no time. According to customer feedback there is “not much to do but” one final feature: automated mesh splitting.
This would allow artists to easily create highly detailed structures like pinholes or slubs between pieces of garment that are sewn together. Of course you could fake things like this with displacement mapping but be aware that one would need a good UV layout for things like that and since most of our customers do not create there geometry in Maya but use CAD data that has been tesselated it’s most likely that the UVs are unusable or even that there aren’t any UVs at all.
Letting Seamour Pro split the geometry will give you another big advantage: real-time feedback. That’s right, drawing a curve on a mesh and splitting it along this curve will have never been so easy!
Pricing: Seamour Pro will include all features of the standard version plus the automated mesh split. Customers of the standard version will be able to upgrade to pro.
Availability: When it’s done.
Since the Generizer now has most of the stuff built-in that we collected throughout the internal alpha reviews we’ve now started the next phase. The image is showing some of the Generizer’s new possibilities like driving the generative modeling through a texture map.
