Monthly Archives: February 2018

SItoA is open-sourced

Posted on by
Reply

First, here’s some Arnold renders of a few old-time Softimage models:

And now, here’s the announcement:

Softimage to Arnold (or SItoA), the Arnold plugin for Autodesk Softimage is being made available to the community under an Apache2.0 open source license at:

https://github.com/Autodesk/sitoa

This repository contains the official SItoA plugin source code. Solid Angle, the company behind the Arnold renderer, and now part of Autodesk, developed the SItoA plugin commercially from 2009 to 2017.

After the Softimage end-of-life announcement in April 2014, Solid Angle committed to continue the development and maintenance of SItoA for at least a year, and then extended this period until July 2017, porting SItoA to the new Arnold 5 API along the way.

Governance
 

Please submit your issues and pull requests on github, the old Trac server will remain available for a while as read-only but we won’t accept any new users.

We will continue to monitor and review pull requests submitted to this repo on a voluntary basis, but will not release official builds any more.

Acknowledgments

Before it was open-sourced, throughout the years, SItoA has been developed by:

  • Luis Armengol
  • Borja Morales
  • Stefano Jannuzzo

With contributions by:

  • Andreas Bystrom
  • Steven Caron
  • Julien Dubuisson
  • Steffen Dunner
  • Michael Heberlein
  • Paul Hudson
  • Halfdan Ingvarsson
  • Vladimir Jankijevic
  • Alan Jones
  • Guillaume Laforge
  • Thomas Mansencal
  • Helge Mathee
  • Eric Mootz
  • Holger Schoenberger
  • Frederic Servant
  • Jules Stevenson

Special thanks to all the users who passionately provided feedback, production assets, bug reports and suggested features during those years.

[mtoa] Using dirmap to update paths

Posted on by
Reply

How can you update the paths used to load textures, standins, or volumes? Use dirmap.

You can use dirmap to update the paths for the following nodes:

  • aiImage (Image Name)
  • aiStandin (Path)
  • aiVolume (Filename)
  • MayaFile (Image Name)

For example, if I have a scene file that uses Linux paths like /server/assets/textures/noicon.tx, I can do this:

dirmap -en true;
dirmap -m "/server/assets" "D:/Assets/";

After I run that, when I load a scene Maya will replace “/server/assets” with “D:/Assets” in all file paths.

You can test your directory mapping (dirmap) like this:

dirmap -cd "/server/assets/textures/noicon.tx";
// Result: D:/Assets/textures/noicon.tx //

So:

  • Enable dirmap with dirmap -en, and then create a directory mapping with dirmap -m
  • Load a scene and the dirmap is applied.

TIP For batch rendering, you can use a pre-render script to apply dirmap.

BONUS TIP: dirmap does not update a path if the path is valid. dirmap replaces paths that cannot be resolved.

[MAXtoA] Rendering XGen in 3ds Max

Posted on by
Reply

 

You can export an ASS file from Maya (with the XGen primitives) and then use an Arnold Procedural to load the ASS file into 3ds Max.

You need to add these two folders to the system environment variable Path:
  • C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2018\plug-ins\xgen\bin
  • C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2018\bin

For example, you can copy this:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2018\plug-ins\xgen\bin;C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2018\bin;

and paste it at the beginning of the current Path:

windows_sys_env_var

Restart 3ds Max after you do this.

Then add the MtoA procedurals folder to the Plugin Search Path:

maxtoa_plugin_search_path