Autodesk Combustion 2008

[kimgar]

extremely nice of you panthon, i hope you know how much information like this is worth, especially on a forum where most info can be trusted - it's very very appreciated. imagine having to wade through and learn all of this software from scratch, it would take forever.

i am down to two apps now, fusion and nuke. and i'll have to see what toxik is all about...

this helps alot, thank you for sharing your hard earned experience!

[panthon]

Glad to help.
Im curious bout toxik too, but mostly about 2008 version, cos I heard 2007 was overcomplicated with the addition of the database. Toxik would sound like the right choice for an autodesk-oriented evironment, namely max and maya users, but for some reason, it's consistenly ignored by the big studios and by everyone in general. I like to think that's because toxik is just starting, but some people just don't trust Autodesk Compositing Department, apart from the Super High End apps (mostly Flame, now). It´s like Autodesk can't revamp combustion cos it would hurt toxik, but they cannot do toxik too powerful or it would make no sense for the user to invest on a hardware-based comp app like Inferno (in the past, an inferno seat used to cost 600.000 euros). Some users dont like to know that some companies improve their applications based on marketing strategies instead of technology possibilities.

[kimgar]

i hear you panthon, it's frustrating that combustion won't evolve, probably because of marketing policies. but i guess i can understand autodesk to some extent as well. with three products eating at eachother, whatever you do, someone will end up frustrated...

i've barely seen the splash screen of fusion and nuke, and man do i love them already! just the fact that they are a small cute 30 mb download does it for me

toxik looks like a bloated beast in comparison, will definately wait for a simpler 2008 version...

now all i need is time....

[joconnell]

Have a look at fxphd.com if you want to learn some comping stuff - it's quite cheap at $370 a year and they cover toxic, nuke, combustion, fusion and after effects - you either get a temp license of the program or there's a trial version out there so if you want to see which program suits you you can get trained in all of them rather than just fiddling around.

[^Lele^]

the demo is up for combustion 2008 on the ADesk site.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to have changed the splash screen at all!
And while throwing in that CC (which, in the wake of all the flame/inferno tools is a COMPOSITE tool, made up of more than one section, but i can see nthing that wasn't already doable with a few more operators), they haven't fixed the alpha premultiplication issue with HDR imagery: premultiplying clamps to 1, which is annoying to no end (And something Fusion doesn't do, for instance).

'tis a bit of a bummer, tbh.

Edit: applying a color warper operator (the new CC) to an rpf in FP format crashes combustion. Repetitively XD

[Morbid Angel]

fusion is excellent, and I highly recommend it, but its a tad on the expensive side.

totally agreed. I had to learn fusion on the last project and was super happy with it, aside some stability issues, it supports many great plugins like sapphire which makes comping a tonn easier.
Also is fast, with exrs and overall rendering...

[kimgar]

great stuff people. i'm leaning a lot towards fusion now, especially with 64 bit coming. although i must say i like the hardcore looks of nuke's interface, it just looks so efficient and speedy

not that it matters, but here's a rant from the web aswell:

I have used both in production and if your main tasks are compositing cg or film work, nuke has a serious advantage and is much faster in UI and processing. Fusion, can get bogged down very quickly.

...there's only one way to find out, hope i can manage to learn one of them - thanks joconnell for the tip on fxphd.com!

[panthon]

I agree with the rant about fusion getting bogged down. Although it cannot be compared, fusion seems to use an insane amount of ram when opening a big (10.000 pixels) EXR, whereas photoshop manages it much better. Im talking bout opening it. If u try to monitor it, memory goes up and fusion freezes. While Max crashes if out of memory, Fusion just stays there, sporting the "not responding" message. And i can tell fusion will eat all your ram pretty quickly on an average computer with 4 Gb. Fusion 64 and 32 Gb of Ram would be a powerful combo indeed.

On the other hand, opening a multichannel EXR in photoshop with PRoEXR can take minutes in a dual quad core machine, but in fusion is lightspeed.

The only thing I haven't figured out in the vray - fusion workflow is how to deal with the Wirecolour channel. You can use a magic wand to select your color and it will generate a mask, but in an animation, u will need to track it...not very convenient. The old combustion approach to Object ID integer channel was faster because u were in fact selecting numerical areas instead of color areas. Multimatte is great, but i dont know which elements will be changed in post, maybe it could be all, and I don't want to create mattes for everything and bring them all to fusion...that would be overkill! Any ideas?