Q&A with Andrea Interguglielmi

XSI artist Andrea Interguglielmi talks about the challenges of working in today's mixed-tool pipelines, and how SOFTIMAGE|XSI can help.

Q: Tell us a little about your work history.

Over the last few years I've been working mainly on the rigging/R&D side of production for both movies and games. The challenges in both these fields are similar, if not identical, especially now that next-gen games have reached the complexity of movie productions.

I think one of the aspects of production that has become increasingly important is the creation and management of procedural assets. Rigs, environments and models are all so complex that even an entire army of artists could not completely satisfy production needs. To make things easier for artists we have set up a more procedural system of tools that they can use to generate their assets.

For this kind of workflow to be efficient, artists and TDs need many tools that can operate together. To achieve this I believe that pipelines must be based on flexible technologies that are able to cooperate seamlessly with one another. DotNet is an example of that kind of technology, and luckily it is very well integrated in XSI.

Q: From your experience what percentage of studios are working with Mixed Pipelines?

These days I think pretty much every studio needs more than one package to handle all the different types of assets. In most cases, choosing which packages to use is an artist-driven decision. Tools like Z-brush, for example, have become very popular and other programs like, Photoshop are always used.

Q: As a programmer what has been your biggest challenge when working in  mixed pipelines?

In my experience the lack of standards—from file formats to scripting languages—has been my greatest challenge.

I remember a time when each software had to invent its own technology and data formats. Scripting languages like Maya’s MEL or Houdini's HScript definitely don't make a developer’s life easy. The way I see it, it's like having Nutella and onions in the same sandwich, they simply don't work together! Technologies like COM were built to solve this problem on the Windows platform, but COM was horrible to use at the beginning, and not many people agreed on that standard. Surprisingly XSI was one of the first companies to use COM widely. These days COM has evolved into DotNet; a much cleaner and easier to use iteration of the same concept, so I feel that XSI ended up betting on the winning horse.

Q: Have any scripting languages made interoperability easier? 

Imagine that a game studio decides to write its main game editor using DotNet. Such a program needs to be written in C++ because it has to run fast, but that's OK because DotNet can compile C++ code.

Now, while the software engineers are busy building the game, the TDs can script all the components of the game-editor in XSI in order to build tools for the artists. They don’t need to rewrite the code of the game-editor or bind the C++ libraries to a scripting language (a process that usually involves one full time job). TDs simply have all the code of the game-editor available in any of the high-level languages supported by XSI like JScript, Python, C#; and they're able to very quickly script tools that are production-safe. This gives the artists fewer opportunities to break those tools, although they'll manage it eventually.

Q: What would you recommend new game companies  use to build their game development pipelines?

Using XSI will definitely allow them to spend less time creating the artist tools and focus more on the actual game. If the amount of assets increases drastically during the production, studios may also decide to use an asset management tool, like Alienbrain.

Q: If you were starting a new game company, and all of your best 3D artists and programmers were trained on MAYA and Max, why would Softimage still be the better choice for building a 3D game pipeline?

Max and Maya are widely adopted in the industry, and because of this, moving artists from one software solution to another can be very difficult. The decision to switch from MAYA to XSI, usually driven by the technical teams, can be attributed to the outstanding performance of XSI’s tools technology relative to its competitors.

The problem is that artists who are already accustomed to other software, such as MAYA, do not pay attention to what XSI has to offer. Their perception is that MAYA is easier, but that’s only because Maya is what they are used to working with. In my experience, MAYA artists learn XSI's tools in a relatively short amount of time, and once they get used to XSI it becomes their preferred solution.

Q: You mention ‘interoperability’ as the most important element of building a 3D pipeline & workflow.  Give examples of how bad interoperability can impact a production, and how good interoperability improve a production.

When interoperability is bad, a modeler might work on a character for ages only to find out that it moves and looks completely different in the game.

Good interoperability allows the authoring tool to use the same technologies as the game engine for things like muscle deformation and rendering of surfaces. The modeler can do his job once and then go smoke a cigarette and relax. That beats smoking the cigarette nervously, waiting for the programmer to tell him that the character looks completely wrong in the game.

You can see more of Andrea ’s work on his website: www.ray-t.net/