The Product Manager told me, just now, that a Silver option is not planned.

Hm, pretty bad news for a lot of people I guess.
I currently don't care too much either way.

If I will need later versions of XSI for a job that pays for it, fine, if not, good riddance.

Cheers,

Thomas

P.S. Thanks for the infos Luc-Eric - very much appreciated!

So much for bringing Softimage inline with Max and Maya!

I can only deduce from this what we have suspected from the start, that Autodesk really don't give a stuff about Softimage users. Well, if I have to drop Softimage due to this, it won't be to move to another Autodesk product. I suppose I'd better dust off my old Lightwave licenses.

Luceric, could you pass onto the Softimage product manager what a crappy job I think he is doing, because regardless of whether a Silver option was introduced or not, I don't know of one person who has had an official notification of this price increase. Those of us who run companies have to budget for maintenance costs of software, and it's pretty hard to do without being told about things like this!

Thomas, may I ask what 3D software you are now using, or are you still using Softimage, just without any support or maintenance?

Hope has just been smashed on the rocks!

I expect the only thing that might change things is if lots of people don't renew their subscription?

Well done Autodesk - fantastic communication and PR.
Nothing like forcing pricing structures through without any explanation or justification.
In fact without any thought at all towards Softimage users.

Several, I'm still in a testing and evaluation phase.
For rendering, I honestly like Lightwave a lot and rendercost is unbeatable. Many other things in the app feel rather ancient, but the renderer is just as good and flexible as ever, if not better.
I also have Fprime - still amazing.

MoI is my translator and go to software for everything NURBS - with XSI in the pipe or not. ;-)

For rendering I also own Fryrender (not recommended because of a stupid company behind it), Octane and my current favorite for photo-real: Thea render - http://www.thearender.com

Then I'm heavily testing and learning Blender. There are so many brilliant projects going on with it since the 2.5 overhaul, it's breathtaking - 2.6 is just about to be released with some of the Summer of code projects in it.
I like a lot of what I see but there are also a lot of limitations, compared with XSI.
I guess in one or two years this could become my software of choice, maybe combined with Vray, since a real production renderer is what's missing most IMO - and that works already very well:
http://vray.cgdo.ru/

For visualization, a friend of mine is using Cinema 4D and jobs we do together may be done with that, for data transfer simplicity - It's definitely not my personal choice but it works and it's easy to use, if pretty bland - I actually started out with it before I switched to using mostly Lightwave back in the days...

And sure I'll keep XSI around. It's the software I'm the most fluid in ATM and ICE is pretty handy.

And no, an Autodesk software is not on the list of alternatives ;-)

Cheers,

Thomas

il be honest with autodesk now. Not putting a silver subscription option out there is a complete and utter fucking joke.

i will not be renewing my subscription as it is just far to much money.

is there any way we can get a petition going??

Daniel

IMHO this is the perfect time for someone (Like SideFX) to swoop in with a "3Democracy" type program and offer cross-grades to everyone who's pissed off.

I'd consider looking at Houdini, but right now it's not reasonably priced compared to other apps.

I keep hearing more and more about Blender in the professional world. Who knows... maybe one of these days their interface won't make my head explode!

Paul

This seems a pretty strange decision to raise prices in the middle of a recession. Talk about kicking everyone while they're down. The SI user base seemed to be growing nicely. Great way to stop that AD!