Hi, folks!

What I really don't like about HALO is that you can't do any matte-painting or manual brush painting stuff - that is you can't paint your own masks or use any instruments like ‘stamp’ in Shake or Photoshop. So HALO is probably unusable for any noise-cleaning operations that involve this sort of manual (i.e. non-procedural) operations. Well yes - you can make your own masks in Photoshop or whatever - but why can't SESI include those features in HALO - to make it a 100% all-included composing software, like Shake or DF? Isn't it a shame that D&D uses Digital Fusion (afaik) as a primary compositing software, instead of using HALO as the choice of Houdini might suggest?

I know that HALO is all procedural and cool - but we all want to make our favourite software better, right?

good point …

Isn't it a shame that D&D uses Digital Fusion (afaik) as a primary compositing software, instead of using HALO as the choice of Houdini might suggest?

part of problem is that Halo has relatively weak colorCorrection and keying tools

What's D&D - you mean Digital Domain? If so, I seriously suspect the majority of their compositing is done with Nuke, their in-house tool(also for sale, btw).

There's a number of tools missing in Halo to make it compete directly with Shake, Nuke and DF…In addition to keying there's also tracking, and yup, some sort of procedural paint OP. I would argue that integrated tracking and keying tools are more important than integrated paint, since you can do that outside the package trivially, at least.

As far as to whether or not SESI adds that, I'm fairly confident they're not saying “you don't need anything else, we're done”, it's more like they have a limited sized programming staff and there's a lot of new things(primarily DOPs) coming out with the next version. Adding Paint, Tracking and Keying is a pretty big task. I don't disagree, I think adding these things are important, I'm just not sure if it's in the cards anytime soon. I guess more noise will help.

In the meantime, there are a lot of very nice features in there - direct support for OExr for one.

If I had to choose between more features in compositing and Dynamics Operators in the next version of a 3D animation package? No brainer.

Cheers,

J.C.

true true true… that is so true and obvious - that it's simply driving me CRAZY!!!