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Polyhinge will be a handy tool... H20_polyhinge.mp4

Houdini 20 is finally released. There is a full day of live webinars tomorrow to cover the major topics. https://www.sidefx.com/products/whats-new-in-h20/

wires

The Content Library has the actual scene files that they used to demo the new features. These are free to download and play with for anyone, including Apprentice users: Content Library | SideFX

I think it would be fair to mention DITOOLS and JENNA in the history of MOGRAPH. Cinema 4D's MOGRAPH didn't appear "from nowhere"... MOGRAPH had two ancestors : the DITOOLS and JENNA Cinema 4D plugins. These plugins had both advanced deformers and generators very similar to the MOGRAPH tools. MOGRAPH took the idea further with the system of effectors, but the basic functionalities were already available in DITOOLS and JENNA. When I tested MOGRAPH back in 2005, everything felt extremely familiar including the tabs layout. We could see were it came from... Remotion's DITOOLS included: -A displacer, the "DiShaper". It worked with both procedural and bitmap textures, in any projection. It supported normal and depth maps. -A cloner, the "Dicloner". It included all the famous cloning method (Polygon, Vertex, Edge, Random, Area, etc...) and selection tags. It could modulate the clones parameters with tags and textures. It was a very powerful cloner even capable of generating TP particles. -A spline deformer, the 'DiSplineDeformer". This was exactly like the MOGRAPH equivalent. -And dozens of other tools, like the "DiTessa" (parametric tessellation), "DiSplineGen" (texture based spline generator), DiParserSpline (formula based spline generator), "DiParametric" (Formula object generator) or the Placement Painting (a clone painter). Per-Anders actually discovered these type of parametric tools with DITOOLS, as you can read in my 2002 thread on CG society: https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/english-resource-for-the-ditools-plugin-available/649184 "I’ve already learnt tons about these tools that i doubt i would have done by just experimenting alone… they’re just darn useful and i never did realise just how powerful they were!!!" JENNA had also strong mographing tools. There was NICKL (procedural shader displacer), ITERATOR and ALLIE (advanced cloners). The manual is still online, for the curious: https://davidpatrickfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Jenna_v2.25.pdf I'm not writing this to dismiss the work of Paul and Per-Anders. MOGRAPH is, without a doubt, an excellent tool. But it's sometimes important to put things in context, to acknowledge the programmers who paved the way and were never in the limelight. It's just like mentioning Lorentz and Poincaré when we talk about Einstein's Theory or Relativity.

Just for reference on the Premiere Pro front: you can hack the backward compatibility with a bit of file text editing. But here is a quick and easy option: https://joshcluderay.com/downgrade-premiere-project-converter/

I got tired of using the calculator each time so i made this 🙂 It's super manual. I guess i could add some python code to the xpresso to pull frame range from the scene settings. But I don't know how, so for now this is better than constantly opening a calculator to do it 🙂 https://ace5.gumroad.com/l/rendercalc

Fun little evening bringing this guy to life.

Typing paths now auto-completes

Solaris: Extremely handy new Sublayer Style menu for all SOP-related nodes. The "Merge SOP Layer Into Existing Active Layer" option is particularly handy:

The Geometry Spreadsheet now adapting into the Scene Graph Tree when you switch to Solaris is excellent. houdini_XAY5GHLrcr.mp4

Amazing. Thank you so much!!!

Hi, I agree, DITools and Jenna both came before MoGraph as did XFrog and a few other procedural modeling tools, but were not inspirations for it. Though Maxon having recently fallen out with David Farmer specifically requested I copy Jenna which I flat out refused to do as highly unethical and Paul agreed, and because as I mentioned I had my own needs as a Motion Graphics designer. We were of course aware of the landscape, of Cinema 4D just as we were aware of Softimage, Imagine, Maya and Houdini, the various particle systems out there and so on, all remarkable tools in their own right and all with valuable lessons to learn from. They are all antecedents. As I have always maintained there was nothing that MoGraph did that you could not do other ways, even in the base vanilla package. But it’s about the ways that MoGraph did it that sets it apart and is why Cinema 4D maintains its lead in the field even though you can duplicate objects, animate them with signed distance fields in every modern DCC and could even back then. The innovation is in the architecture and workflow, the concept, not in the ability to write clone = obj.getClone().

Hi, thank-you for the wonderfully kind words. You know ego, I talk about what I know best… and then I don’t stop talking! : D That’s a great question. So to answer, at the beginning absolutely you’re right, Paul was my partner developer and we shared the development burden equally and did a great deal of brainstorming together, I of course additionally architected the vision and within Maxon I because I had negotiated us in as a package deal, he was my ward. To my great and ever lasting shame and in no small part due to my own naivety and inexperience in a role that I did not realize at the time was lead I was not able to protect him fully within the system and he and Maxon parted early on, as seems to be an ongoing motif with Maxon - acrimoniously and in my estimation entirely unfairly. From then on I built up, maintained and updated MoGraph as well as of course implementing general workflow through many areas of Cinema to strengthen that Motion Graphics experience. However don’t believe for a moment that’s a sole lonely act, I would have failed completely if I hadn’t been able to build up a team, vision and direction and it had ended up just being me on my own every once in a while throwing out random tools that no-one used! While I was primarily responsible for MoGraph, Maxon is a company of over time an increasing number of developers. In my speech I mentioned those key, who had been instrumental in being a part of the MoGraph team helping bring my hallucinatory visions to life adding feature (such as Dynamics which Ole provided) and providing support in other ways, technical and design. At the same time It was also always something I had to fight for, far too hard against a great deal of resistance, I would have failed if I had not had the support of a few key players especially in the US and among our distributors who saw first hand the value return. Now as for the award itself. Well when the Academy Award came along the Academy itself interviewed many people, both in an outside of Maxon and made their own decision based on the testimonies given and their own incredible industry experience, and let me tell you just meeting those guys alone was an honor, serious industry heavyweights and incredibly fascinating minds! They decided exactly who the award was to based on their own evaluation, which fortunately for me, saw true.