Random stuff

I’m now officially familiar with Silo. Tenfold of low-poly objects behind, got familiar with basic + some tools and starting to get in to proper speed with the modelling. Actually… I’d be a lot faster if… Let’s step a bit back:

Before I started to work with the project and Silo. I had great problems concerning my OpenGL display drivers. With the most current display drivers from my Radeon X800 (Yep. I have a 5 year old graphics card…!) all the OGL-based software crashed on initialization of OGL. I rolled back couple of versions of display drivers and ended up in a situation where the programs started but they fell back to software rendering. So no OGL again and Silo didn’t work at all with that. Then I rolled a bunch back again and found a display drivers from last fall that worked. I got it working but the rendering is very… very slow. So after I got over the “toddling”-period with Silo my modelling speed exceeded what the frame rate of the viewport gave for me. So that’s capping my progression with the speed and actually cripples my working speed severely.

First of all I’d really like DirectX-rendering for Silo but according to the Silo3d-forums that’s probably not going to happen in the near future. That would of course raise the complexity as the OGL backend helps covering both Win and Mac-platforms so it’s quite understandable. And if you red the last paragraph you probably realised that the real problem is in the AMD/ATI Radeon’s display drivers plus the fact that my card is already wayyy… old. So this is really pushing me for an comp. update. =/ I’ll need an update in any case. I’m very bound to both my CPU and RAM with my photoediting-projects nowadays.

Probably I just have to go for even older display drivers and take the performance hit until I get financially stable enough (after buying this) to buy/setup new comp. =)  Now I’m just stuck with >half a year old drivers and can not update at all. =/

Got over the first phase and started to take steps a bit faster. Actually I ended up tweaking the controls a bit. I was so used to using ctrl for adding to selection and alt for substracting that I was starting to get a bit annodyden on it. So I changed those. And of course because I was now using the Alt-key for substracting from selection, the Maya viewport controls had to go. So I’m now using 3dsmax’ish view controls and ctrl for adding, alt for substracting. Also I changed shift-key for select through as the MMB selecting started to annoy too.

But the outcome of the tweaks were a huge improvement in working speed and now I even got couple of first Silo low-poly models ready. Whee haw!

One drawback is the amount and severity of bugs in the software. I’m using Silo 2.1, which is the latest one around, and I’ve stumbled on several quite annoying problems/bugs in the first 10 hours I’ve used it. I’ll post more about them later on.

So I finally really-really started using Silo. I got a project to work on where they use Silo, got grab of their license of it and motivated myself to do stuff properly from start to finish with it. (!)

I had a familiar feeling of the UI though, as I have downloaded a demo of Silo every now and then and stared at it for a while. Although now I finally got over the first step to really-really model something with it.

I decided to not to change the controls and UI in any way for now. Just to push myself to learn the actual software – not just to trying to deform it into my comfort zone like I’ve approached it before. It was a humbling moment for a guy who’s past is 10+ years in 3dsmax and whatnot to start modelling with a totally new interface. It was SOOOOOOO slow to get going with it… Luckily the default view controls were familiar to Maya as I’ve used it a bit lately. After couple of visits to specific topics in getting started-tutorial videos and hints from friends I found out what I needed and got some basic shapes done.

I’m slowly getting used to the selecting visible-selecting through thinking. (I was used to selecting everything by default and switching to select only visible mode when needed greater accuracy, but it’s mentally other way around in Silo as the LMB is select only visible but MMB is select through the mesh.) Still having a bit hard work with the basic modelling workflow -> I hope I’ll find my 3dsmax-style shift-dragging type of revelation thing in a while. One of the biggest positive points was the context sensitive Cut-tool which seems to work fine. The only thing for now that I see that I probably have to change in the UI is the shortcuts for editing gizmos. Currently they are by default Q – Combo, W – Position, E – Scale and R – Rotate. I don’t know the logic behind this but concerning that even in the Silo’s own overlay UI they’re in the standard P-R-S-C order I think there’s something in it and I’m going to change it soon to QWER->PRSC.