Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

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Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by perryharovas » 15 Mar 2014, 18:43

Dear Mr. Bass

My name is Perry Harovas.

You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
peers who having been using Softimage for up to 20 years.

I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.

I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that software (over Lightwave) into
feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.

I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".

I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that would allow me to create anything I could dream of.

Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the largest obstacles
with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.

A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG children's shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we plunged head on into doing it.

Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that our characters were coming
into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had all the animation we did gone?

Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that the animation curves were still there,
but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you will).
Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.

We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having similar issues. They refused to let us help.
We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a list of other things
so long that I can't remember it now.

Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being consistent, and endangered our whole company.

We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing to NEVER use Maya again.
We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.

Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which eventually became ICE.
This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing things that I could not believe.
I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon dog, in literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.

Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and then beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever used.

Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.

I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people. Imagine what a team of people could do?
Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from just the last few years:

-'The Lego Movie'
-The Mill's '98% Human' ad
-The Embassy's 'Science Project' commercial
-'Iron Man'
-'Pacific Rim'
-'Now You See Me'
-Subaru 'Car Parts' ad

These are just off the top of my head.

This software, the one your company just retired (also known as EOL, or End Of Life) is Softimage.
You remember Softimage, don't you? You bought it from Avid in 2008. I wouldn't blame you for not remembering,
it never showed up on your home page, it was barely promoted, and it was something that you had to hunt for in Siggraph demos.

Softimage, the software that gave rise to dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park' (in a previous, less powerful, incarnation of the software).
Softimage, the software that gave the world 'Terminator 2'', 'Death Becomes Her', 'Babe, 'Casper', 'Jumanji', 'Mars Attacks' and just too many others to list.
Softimage, the software that invented Inverse Kinematics.
Softimage, the software that Animal Logic used to create the number one movie in America at the time Autodesk made this announcement.

Of course, I could go on. But I am sure you get the point.

This is the software that your company just killed.
That really is the only word for it, KILLED.
Killed, because it is now seen by many as obsolete even though, as you hopefully know, it is the newest of the 3 DCC apps your company owns and far from obsolete.
It is now perceived that way because of this action.

I have been in visual effects and animation production my entire career, and a few years ago I also started teaching.
In 2007, I moved myself and my family from the East Coast of the USA to Illinois.
While there, I helped start a new college in Chicago called 'Flashpoint, The Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences',
which was renamed to 'Tribeca | Flashpoint Academy' when Robert De Niro's Tribeca,
purchased 50% of the school. I was the Chair of the Visual Effects and Animation Department.
I wrote the entire curriculum in my department. The software world was 100% open to me, I could use anything I felt would be appropriate.

I chose to use Softimage, not Maya, as the main application to teach the students.
I took on what I called an agnostic approach to teaching 3D software, in that students would learn the best tool for the job,
and hopefully not be as software biased as my generation was/is. The reason for this, as I told them, was because you never know when
your software will just vanish, the company will kill it, or go out of business.

Wow, I wish I wasn't right about that one...

Knowing how to use many applications, how to be aware of what was going on behind the
curtain of the software, was (and is) far more important and helped prevent being unable to work due to not
having skills in one application, especially if that application was discontinued.

Well, now because of the actions that your company took on March 4, 2014, that has happened, and I am in exactly that position.
I can continue to use Softimage for a couple of years, but as you no doubt understand,
the stigma associated with using EOL Software (never mind teaching it) is too great to bear.
The driver support would quickly become a problem, the renderer support would be an major issue, and before too long,
it will become impossible to use Softimage in production.

So your company has now given me, all of us Softimage users, a choice. We can use 3DS Max or we can use Maya.
Well, I chose not to learn 3DS Max as it relied too heavily on plugins, and Maya, well, you now know how that played itself out for me...

I will make a choice, but it will be to not use Autodesk products anymore.
I am choosing to learn an entirely new 3D DCC application, and I can assure you it will not be an Autodesk product.
I could easily go back to using Maya, especially with my history with the software. I choose not to.

See? A choice.

Even if I thought Maya was a great base of code on which to build the future DCC application that will rule the world (and I certainly do not),
I wouldn't use Maya based upon principal alone. Maya is not a great base to build upon, because as you are well aware, it is more than 17 years old and
wasn't written when multi-core processors were even a dream in the labs of chip makers. It is really like tearing down the 5 story building, in favor of making
a 10 story building on the foundation of a 17 year old house that has been patched together with one new idea after another. The foundation is showing its age,
the wood is starting to rot, and yet the plan is to build on top of this base. That is what I believe you are doing with your company's plans to build upon Maya.

A company that does this to their loyal customers, in my opinion, is a company that does not have the best interests of those customers at heart.
A company that does, what your company did in less than 6 years (killing a product) is a company that should not have made the purchase of
that product in the first place.

Was it not obvious, when Autodesk evaluated the purchase of Softimage, that having three DCC apps was not a good financial decision?
Was it not obvious that this fairly small market segment could not sustain development on these three apps?

If it wasn't obvious, then perhaps there is more wrong with Autodesk than anyone realized.
Unless, there was another reason to buy Softimage, but that would be pure speculation...

So, what now?

I now teach at another well respected institution, and continue to work in the industry very actively.
Will I still teach Maya? Yes. It is part of the curriculum, and will help these students get jobs in the industry.

However, I will be teaching another product as well, again, to prevent what has happened to me and my peers from happening
to these students that are just starting out on this career path.

Mr. Bass, I have seen interviews with you. I believe you are a kind person. You certainly seem to be in love with this business.
I hate the decisions that your company made, that you approved, but I don't personally hold any hatred for you.

I just wanted you to know that there are many, many artists out there that just want to continue to use the application that we chose to use.
We had a choice, and Softimage was what we chose to use. Taking away that option, your company has now asked us to chose software
that we could have chosen before, and did not. This isn't a choice, this is a hijacking.

I cannot speak for others, but, as you may now know, the overall sentiment of Softimage users is to chose NOT to use Autodesk products anymore.
I can only believe this wasn't what Autodesk, or you, wanted. We are a very passionate bunch, who now are passionately opposed to using Autodesk
products. Again, I can't speak for all of us, but the forums on your competitions' websites are filled with users looking to switch.

The most asked question on these forums seems to be something like: "How do I do this thing I used to do in Softimage, in your app?"

That should tell you something Mr Bass. The users of Softimage just want to keep using Softimage, its workflow, its amazing tools, and not be burdened by the archaic workflow
of your other two DCC apps. They want to do amazing work. They want to be able to feed their families and to keep their employees.

They are so hungry for this, they are looking for this workflow in the welcoming arms of your competitors.
The amount of money this may end up costing Autodesk in the not too distant future will most likely dwarf the amount of money it would have taken to just keep Softimage going.

I didn't go to business school, but even I can see this isn't a great way to run a business.

So, after this long email (that I actually edited believe it or not). where do I stand?

Well, I want to ask you to reconsider your company's decision.
This cannot be an easy matter, and I am sure I don't know all the legal and financial problems this may create.
But in a naive, passionate, and yes, tearful, way, I want to ask you:

Please bring back Softimage.

Please keep this software we all love going.
Please just keep it alive in the most basic way.
Keep fixing bugs, keep updating the support for graphics drivers, keep updating the SDK to allow the large
community of developers to continue to enhance it.

Please do this for us, the people who put their faith, their financial dependence, in the software
that your company owns.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Perry Harovas
3/15/14

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by angus_davidson » 15 Mar 2014, 19:58

Very well said.
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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Kzin » 15 Mar 2014, 23:00

perryharovas wrote: Will I still teach Maya? Yes. It is part of the curriculum, and will help these students get jobs in the industry.

let me translate for you what an ad manager is reading out of your comment.
"i will not use an autodesk product anymore, but i will help autodesk to get money for their software in the future with training people for their software."

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Rez007 » 15 Mar 2014, 23:14

Nice letter Perry, and Thank You for lending your voice especially with your experience.

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by perryharovas » 16 Mar 2014, 03:52

Kzin wrote:
perryharovas wrote: Will I still teach Maya? Yes. It is part of the curriculum, and will help these students get jobs in the industry.

let me translate for you what an ad manager is reading out of your comment.
"i will not use an autodesk product anymore, but i will help autodesk to get money for their software in the future with training people for their software."
I realize it looks like that, however, the reality is that Maya (as flawed as it is) is what most of the employers want students trained in.
To not teach them that would not only be a disservice to them, but would go against the curriculum where I teach.

I don't have to like it, and I don't, but there isn't really another option, at least where I work.

I cannot, unfortunately, continue to teach software that has been EOL'd.
I am learning Houdini as well, and when I feel confident and experienced enough to benefit my students,
I will gladly teach that over Maya.

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by angus_davidson » 16 Mar 2014, 07:33

perryharovas wrote:
Kzin wrote:
perryharovas wrote: Will I still teach Maya? Yes. It is part of the curriculum, and will help these students get jobs in the industry.

let me translate for you what an ad manager is reading out of your comment.
"i will not use an autodesk product anymore, but i will help autodesk to get money for their software in the future with training people for their software."
I realize it looks like that, however, the reality is that Maya (as flawed as it is) is what most of the employers want students trained in.
To not teach them that would not only be a disservice to them, but would go against the curriculum where I teach.

I don't have to like it, and I don't, but there isn't really another option, at least where I work.

I cannot, unfortunately, continue to teach software that has been EOL'd.
I am learning Houdini as well, and when I feel confident and experienced enough to benefit my students,
I will gladly teach that over Maya.
We are in exactly the same boat. For now.
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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Bullit » 16 Mar 2014, 09:37

What about Cinema4D, Blender?

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by angus_davidson » 16 Mar 2014, 10:42

Back then blender wasn't as polished as it is now and Cinema 4D just wasnt available to buy as an education product in South Africa and as an Institution back then we were not allowed to buy directly from the source (everything had to be done via accredited re-sellers).

From a cost point of view for us Blender and Maya are the same. Blender is free and Maya is likewise on the ARC Licenses. Our major issue is that the market share of Blender in this country is tiny and we have a responsibility to teach them industry standard software. Something they have a good chance of getting a job with. Like Carl we try and teach in a software agnostic manner however it is always easier for them to get a job with Maya experience over Blender currently.

We have had an offer from Maxon to install network licences for us to try. However its been 7 months and they haven't managed to actually come and install them so not particularly holding my breath.
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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Bullit » 16 Mar 2014, 11:13

Thanks for feedback

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Kzin » 16 Mar 2014, 13:20

perryharovas wrote:
I realize it looks like that, however, the reality is that Maya (as flawed as it is) is what most of the employers want students trained in.
To not teach them that would not only be a disservice to them, but would go against the curriculum where I teach.
and that is the reason why si had to be gone. its the competitor for maya but ad cant support 2 main apps for the same market when 1 is in the studios and 1 is a niche product and the niche product needs a big investment.

all the reactions now and especially the improvement ideas came way to late. i agree with some points in your letter. but i disagree in the most important one. maya is better then si, otherwise the studios would not adopt it and they did it really early and not "yesterday" and "over night". and that is the only reason maya is alive, otherwise it had to be gone before ad took over.

i can remember some discussions on xsibase more then 10 years ago were users wrote what si is missing compared to maya, but nothing happened in these areas and this was long before ad came in. avid did not a rewrite of the core and for ad it was to expensive for the small userbase.



and i also got the impression that most si users (or lets say the left users) dont want/need bigger improvements over the last couple of years. there was ice and the argument all is fine because you have ice and you can do alot of things with it. critique on ice was forbidden with "you have to learn it and all is fine". cant say how often i had to hear it. this for example made it impossible to improve the usability of ice because the users itself were against improvements here or lets say it was not on their priority list.
that is one example, the other is mental ray. its in general more widely problem because the users of all 3 apps were to silent and not demanded improvements over years. this and some other things resulted in the current situation. its more worse for si because it has now the worst integration of all 3 apps and this after it had the best of all three. a funny note is that users started to complain about mr when they switched away from it. especially for mr i asked users very often if they mailed to ad, describing the problem, making suggustions for improvements, and the awnsers were always, no. no because ad will not hear it, main argument number one. this was a good excuse for the user itself for all the years. it is not true at all, but that is only a sidenote.

the last passage was not for you perry because i dont know you, its more a general view from my experience. ;)

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by nuverian » 16 Mar 2014, 21:47

well said. I realy think you spoke for the 90% of SI users
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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Rez007 » 17 Mar 2014, 00:03

Kzin wrote:
...that is one example, the other is mental ray. its in general more widely problem because the users of all 3 apps were to silent and not demanded improvements over years. this and some other things resulted in the current situation. its more worse for si because it has now the worst integration of all 3 apps and this after it had the best of all three. a funny note is that users started to complain about mr when they switched away from it. especially for mr i asked users very often if they mailed to ad, describing the problem, making suggustions for improvements, and the awnsers were always, no. no because ad will not hear it, main argument number one. this was a good excuse for the user itself for all the years. it is not true at all, but that is only a sidenote.

the last passage was not for you perry because i dont know you, its more a general view from my experience. ;)
OT: I know how you feel about MR, I still use it and it is quite powerful, especially with unified sampling...not everyone refused to say anything directly to AD though, I expressed my feelings directly to them about this a while ago. Not that it seems to make a difference anymore, but you are right, MR used to be the best integrated in Soft and now it has one of the worst out of the other DCCs.

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Kzin » 17 Mar 2014, 00:20

the question at the end is will it change ad's decision to end si with letters like this, or from glasswork or other posted opinions?

beside that question its interesting to read them, no matter what comes.

but i think it would be better to post such things earlier. the eol could be foreseen since some years. the dev was not very active, more like little feature improvements here and there, some bugfixing, thats it. but there was no real big loud scream from the users. so for me its a suprise to hear all these things NOW and not earlier. ;)

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by perryharovas » 17 Mar 2014, 04:44

Kzin wrote:the question at the end is will it change ad's decision to end si with letters like this, or from glasswork or other posted opinions?

beside that question its interesting to read them, no matter what comes.

but i think it would be better to post such things earlier. the eol could be foreseen since some years. the dev was not very active, more like little feature improvements here and there, some bugfixing, thats it. but there was no real big loud scream from the users. so for me its a suprise to hear all these things NOW and not earlier. ;)

Myself and MANY others said these things in literally EVERY beta cycle. Sometimes things are fixed, sometimes they are not. There are priorities that don't always line up with
our own personal priorities.

I disagree that Soft has the worst mr integration. I think what it has is the least UP TO DATE mental ray integration.
Many of the issues we experience with Softimage are due to mr not being the same version that it is for Maya or Max.
This isn't always the case, of course, but it accounts for at least part of it.

Look, no software is perfect, not even Softimage. It comes down to how IMPERFECT is your software that is used daily.
For that, Softimage was winning the DCC race (at least for me and my peers).

It still means telling the devs what is wrong, hammering on the betas and complaining when we lose functionality (which we CERTAINLY complained about)
and letting AD know when we were scared, or it seemed that Softimage was getting shoved to the rear of the class (and believe me, I was doing that, as were MANY, MANY, MANY people
in the betas over the past few years).

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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by xsi_fanatic » 17 Mar 2014, 05:59

perryharovas wrote:
Kzin wrote:the question at the end is will it change ad's decision to end si with letters like this, or from glasswork or other posted opinions?
Hi Perry,

That letter was very well said. However, I would urge you to look at a Facebook chat that took place after the EOL announcement. Believe me I'm as hurt as you are and you can probably tell by my name. But it seems like the only way autodesk can be reasoned with is through money. I'm only making this judgement based on all their decisions and actions.

I would like to be proven wrong however.
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Re: Open Letter To Carl Bass, President and CEO of Autodesk

Post by Kzin » 17 Mar 2014, 11:41

perryharovas wrote:
Kzin wrote:the question at the end is will it change ad's decision to end si with letters like this, or from glasswork or other posted opinions?

beside that question its interesting to read them, no matter what comes.

but i think it would be better to post such things earlier. the eol could be foreseen since some years. the dev was not very active, more like little feature improvements here and there, some bugfixing, thats it. but there was no real big loud scream from the users. so for me its a suprise to hear all these things NOW and not earlier. ;)

Myself and MANY others said these things in literally EVERY beta cycle. Sometimes things are fixed, sometimes they are not. There are priorities that don't always line up with
our own personal priorities.

I disagree that Soft has the worst mr integration. I think what it has is the least UP TO DATE mental ray integration.
Many of the issues we experience with Softimage are due to mr not being the same version that it is for Maya or Max.
This isn't always the case, of course, but it accounts for at least part of it.

Look, no software is perfect, not even Softimage. It comes down to how IMPERFECT is your software that is used daily.
For that, Softimage was winning the DCC race (at least for me and my peers).

It still means telling the devs what is wrong, hammering on the betas and complaining when we lose functionality (which we CERTAINLY complained about)
and letting AD know when we were scared, or it seemed that Softimage was getting shoved to the rear of the class (and believe me, I was doing that, as were MANY, MANY, MANY people
in the betas over the past few years).
i cant comment whats going on in the beta because of nda, but my experience also comes from there, of course only from the last time. so i cannot say what went wrong as ad came in and the long time before and why basic things were not developed which maya had nearly since the beginning and alot of studios wanted to be integrated but they did not happen ( i think the deep mr integration and closed system for 3rd party renderers were one big problem for studios besides the whole scripting stuff).
this is only from a si in studios point of view, but as i wrote, this is why maya is still alive.

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