Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

I am currently in the US, home for the first time in 8 months. I had some packages here, one of which my now (ex)girlfriend had said was too important to mail to Germany, despite the sketch of a three headed monkey on the shipping box. Behold: the original Secret of Monkey Island PC game, signed by Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman! Tim was nice enough to arrange this, we met and he showed us around his studio, Double Fine, at GDC this year. I had to fight hard to hold back the fanboy-ness!

I grew up in the US though I now live in Europe. This is just a short post about something that I find really unfair and frustrating: International Pricing of High End Tech Items. Let’s check out the new Nikon D700:

Nikon d700 Germany: 2,599 eur

Nikon d700 United States: 2,999 usd – 1,825 eur

Nikon d200 Britain 1892 pounds – 2,383 eur

It certainly would seem that Germany is getting the short end of that stick. In many cases, people in Europe could fly to the US, buy electronics, and come back for the price of getting them here. And many people do.

Not to menaion many companies have better warranties in the US where the market is more competitive. (Example: Many Nikon cameras and lenses have a 5 year warranty in the US and 2 year here in Germany)

When the Wii came out int he US, it was 250usd, when it came out here, it was 250eur. The eur was riding high, in the US it was impossible to get a Wii, hwever, they were readily available in all stores here; leading many to speculate that it was because Nintendo was making 400usd per Wii (250eur) in Europe. This isn’t just about inflation, some items are priced 1:1 or a little over, 3dsMax below, but others are more ridiculous, Photoshop for example.

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3dsMax 2009

3dsMax 2009 Germany: 3,900 eur – (4,641 eur with mandatory tax)

3dsMax 2009 United States: 3,495 usd – 2,257 eur

Photoshop CS3

Photoshop CS3 Germany: 1,027 eur

Photoshop CS3 United States: 607 usd – 390 eur

Photoshop CS3 Britain: 500 pounds – 629 eur

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The above is just completely inane. Some companies will tell you they have to charge a premium on products in Europe because it costs extra to localize them. But come on.. Stuff like the above is ridiculous.

When you start looking at really high end tech, items that only have one distributor in Europe, but many in the US; like motion capture systems, the difference in pricing due to 1) inflation 2) companies just charging more in europe and 3) single distributors in a region having no competition, makes it inhibitively expensive (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars price difference). It would be cheaper to set up a company in the US just to make these purchases, and I am sure people do.

But seriously, Adobe, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

From Ideas to Reality with XSI’s Cluster Constraints

Thanks to my brother, Mike, for translating  this from the original japanese [here]

When asked about which features of XSI helped the most on this project, Hideki Sasaki (Facial Animation Set Up Lead) came back with the rather surprising answer, “There were many but in regards to facial animation, cluster constraints really saved us.” In our facial rig setups, every point-cluster of your target shape is tied to bones using cluster constraints. Cluster constraints also were extremely useful in the following situations:

Since in MGS4 we were really trying to lighten the processing, on the PS3 we employed a method where tangent colors change only with the rotation of bones. In other words, if simply constrained to coordinates, in animation it will behave correctly, but the tangent color will not change. Basically, you run into a dilemma where shading goes from its default state to a one where it will no longer change. However, by using cluster constraints to constrain both normal and tangent lines the correct rotation values will be input, and that’s how we accomplished the shading.

(this sounds really interesting, i guess they are talking about smoothing angle tangents? In many engines like the CryEngine, the smoothing angle is based on the character’s default pose at export and never changes. This makes it sound like that exported cluster data to ‘drive’ the smoothing angle in realtime)

Furthermore, nearly all fluctuating objects attached to the character’s clothing, in cutscenes and gameplay, are done by the PS3’s simulation engine. That being said, there are some cases in cutscenes with intense action where it’s difficult to simulate. In those cases we use animation simulated in XSI’s Syflex. The basic workflow in those situations is as follows:

1. To express fluctuations in the clothing, make a simulation in Syflex

2. Convert the cached simulation results into shape targets

3. Constrain bones to the points on your shape controlled object with cluster constraints

4. Bone envelope the final model to be used on the PS3 (Basically the same idea as a facial rig)

(Baking arbitrary data to bones ftw!)

The advantage of using this type of control is, even if you temporarily get a little caving in or some kind of flaw in the simulation result, you are able to apply corrections with “Secondary Shape Mode” at stage 2 of the workflow.

It’s possible to edit the shape’s geometry using vertex shift; you can also use smooth and push to fix little imperfections if needed. It goes without saying that the results of these intuitive adjustments will be reflected in the envelope control’s PS3 data as well.

Sasaki explains, “You can set cluster constraints for all components, vertex, polygon and edge. I believe XSI is the only one that comes standard with support for constraining both normals and tangents. Without the help of these cluster constraint functions we could have never accomplished techniques like cross-simulation transfer to bones, or our ideas concerning facial rig set up.”

(they export/sync cluster rig element data to engine)