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Hi Cory
I for one really appreciate the opportunity to be heard on this as a long term advocate of the product despite my very short amount of time with it . I actually fell in love with Toxik, coming from mostly an AE background and some time with Combustion, I felt that it had the interface, workflow and toolset that fitted perfectly to my pipeline and my eyes . At last years Siggraph the blow came that it would no longer be a standalone application and being a long time 3dsmax user I really had no desire to switch . This news drove me a bit mad . I even started bugging one guy (sorry Gary !) about it and actively persued the possibility of being a beta tester, but hell I’m always late for parties . I know I could have ordered Maya 2010 for Toxik alone, but I had a feeling or more of a hope that it would also become available with Max - and here we are, I got my wish .
Unfortunately though now that I have the full legally owned version of the application I became so besotted with, I am finding that it does not work, when both the previous trials did . The problem is something probably driver related and I created a thread to help diagnose that .
As for feedback though, here is mine .
I love this application and it is truly a shame I needed to wait this long to be able to work with it more . As I say, coming from AE and moving to a node based environment for the first time was an absolute breeze, extremely easy to comprehend the flow of things if you’re at all familiar with how compositing works . The interface is beautiful, things are where they should be and it all makes complete sense, it is pretty difficult to forget where an option is once you find it - not something I can often say about an application .
The one main thing that absolutely blew me away about Toxik/Composite was the Reaction node - a fully 3d compositing environment with support for 3d geometry, per node ! This is something I have only dreamed of having in AE . The creative potential explodes with this, especially for motion graphics work, even that the .fbx model can be animated and textured by anything that can be imported, generated or manipulated by all the upstream nodes you like ! There have been many times working on projects where I wished I didn’t have to render out passes of a 3d object from Max, losing the flexibility to make changes quickly or integrate the result better with the project composition etc, and save time . I posted an image in another thread of something I put together only messing around with that and I was thrilled with the result since non of it came from a 3d application aside from the original assets .
Although I can’t say much about the current release due to problems mentioned, I am extremely happy about the vector paint tools - an absolutely essential toolset for vfx work, I am somewhat surprised it never existed to begin with . I am also impressed that the options for example, cloning and offsetting are all fully exposed within this one tool and you don’t need several ones like you would in something like Shake . No need for a rotoshape to a move2d to a keymix etc etc here, it’s all handled by a single node, apart from the obvious tracker and that is excellent .
I didn’t see much difference beyond that, other than how it doesn’t insist on being fullscreen (although part of me did like that) . I do actually miss the project management front end ? Has that been completely pulled or is it optional ?
Stuff I’d like to see, I’ve mentioned before things like support for audio, more shader options for the Reaction node (MetaSL/MentalMill would be awesome) a bit more information about the PXL stuff and perhaps a repository somewhere and I remember being annoyed at the lack of documentation on the expressions .
I realise that Toxik/Composite is very much a tool for shot by shot work - but I would really like to see some sort of structure or support that allows complete sequences . Combustion had an Edit operator, which I thought was really nice and of course AE can ‘edit’ a sequence together because of its focus on layers in time, but really since Composite does have a timeline of a sort I think it would be nice to be able to edit in such a way that doesn’t feel so fiddly and would really open it up more to those who don’t work shot by shot . It is often I have to work on a sequence that is a few minutes long that never changes shots, per se .
There would also be a benefit in my mind to support other third party data sets such as XML from FinalCut (bringing in a timeline or perhaps building a comp based on that timeline), tracking data from third party applications like Mocha . etc .
I could go wild thinking up ideas for features if I put my mind to it and something like Flame’s substance/noise would be nice !
As crazy as it perhaps sounds I am extremely happy to finally own this product and I really see it becoming my weapon of choice on a lot of the projects I handle, constantly looking at less reasons to have to stick with AE !
Thankyou, Autodesk .
(I only now need to get the thing to work !)
scratch/post | Michael Todd
Independent Broadcast Designer + Visual Effects Artist
http://www.scratchpostvfx.com
3dsmax (3D Studio Max) r1 to 2013
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