www.si-community.com

And how do you guys are doing about the transition? Hating Maya, liking it, thinking of other possibilities?

I myself am going more the C4D way I should say. Animation wise I guess is even worst than 3ds Max, but I like how the system is robust and crash-free (or sort of).

MauricioPC wrote:And how do you guys are doing about the transition? Hating Maya, liking it, thinking of other possibilities?

I myself am going more the C4D way I should say. Animation wise I guess is even worst than 3ds Max, but I like how the system is robust and crash-free (or sort of).

Not too bad, scripting is essential,but tuning it to meet my needs. So bringing things I like from softimage over by writing scripts. So happy enough. Biggest worry for me is crashes. Lots.

Yeah, crazy as it seems, Maya crashes a lot more than 3ds Max for me. C4D almost never crashes.

Enjoying Blender, it's like an unlimited fully functional demo... that will never expire. It's nice.

Switched Si composting to Blender, switched from Adobe editing to Blender (didn't like their cloud/rent system) and now learning sculpting and slowly delving into it.. albiet with it's quirks, but it's nice.

But for the rest, minus modeling, still working hard in SI, it's asset handling is that much better.

I'll dual XSI with C4D training. But Ill stay as long as I can... I have a friend who still uses Lightwave, so.... what would I miss?

I've been learning Houdini for the past few months. The UI is slightly overwhelming at first. It suffers slightly from the Maya problem of drop downs within tabs, within other tabs, within further tabs. All with slightly esoteric names. It really is just familiarity though as after a while it all just starts to click in your mind. Houdini doesn't treat you like a child, which is good in the long run. There are a load of shelf tools to get your started, tool tips for everything and very comprehensive help documentation.

The animation and modelling tools are not mind blowing but you can learn them in a couple of days and they are quite reasonable for most work. I get the impression that it's at this point that Softimage users give up and decide Houdini is not for them. There seems to be strong rumours that they are due for a big upgrade in the next major release anyway. If it's that much of a problem for you just do your modelling in Blender and import it in.

If your an ICE user then it does feel like the natural place to be. You can wrap up your own custom tools in a Digital Asset which is a bit like an ICE compound on steroids. The procedural workflow is very useful but you can take it or leave, although you will be missing out.

It's stable, has regular bug fixes and a very helpful community. If you want to do FX then it is light years ahead of everything else.

All in all I like it and i'll be staying with it.

Still have to start learning Maya, it's installed but untouched for the moment, si does the job fine.
At the same time I'm going to learn houdini.

At first I played with Maya ... it seemed like the reasonable place to be. But heck, I even prefer 3ds Max to Maya (workflow, modifier stack, etc). Since I don't own Softimage, I've uninstalled and am not using it anymore.

I'm still choosing ... the only thing I know is that after I choose (Max or C4D), I'll surely add Houdini to it because I love FX. But for jobs, there's an abundance of work for Motion Graphics and Max and C4D can shine on this. The only advanced I see in Max so far is very good modeling tools. Maybe I'm just used to it, but I really like some modes in Max that are really helpful in modeling (things that SI had) like proper edge constrain, screen mode, modifier, etc. Other than that, I'm in Grant Warwick workshops for V-Ray and Hard Surface and that guy is a hell of a good teacher, so I have to keep Max around to learn the way he do it before I can change it to my way (if I decide to go with C4D).

Anyway ... still deciding, but getting close to choose.

P.S.: I really don't like modeling that much and that's why I like Max with it's nice tools to ease the pain.

Migration is too strong word, here. Actually, sometime around XSI 6, I figured out that XSI won't be my only 3d. I believed the XSI Foundation will spread much more, but, in these times it was somehow clear, that this won't work. Regarding Maya, just downloaded the trial to take look, as I literally didn't touched this software for about eleven years. First impressions are close to impressions about XSI 4, looking from my perspective of 3ds Max in these times.
First, a lot of small annoying things in that high end 3d, but almost all can be solved by in some way. Here is main advantage of 'high end' 3d, imho, that everything *can* be done - well, in some way.
Second, big annoying things. Ironically in case of XSI 4, this was built-in rig and auto rigger. Decided to create my own, so finally felt so-so comfortable with, let's say XSI 6. Now with Maya, I feel motivated to destroy the entire interface and build something new, regardless of time it will take.

Anyway, I think I'll have something close to final direction, around spring 2015.

Mathaeus, like this it sounds like you hardly used si to it's full potential (can't believe this, with kristinka and knit the strand etc.), didn't you use the latest versions of softimage?

forton wrote:didn't you use the latest versions of softimage?

No. Had a plan to update with implementation of ICE kinematics, but, because it really wasn't what I hoped, did not updated. Now, I think it's really better to do not discuss about the 'full potential' . It's irrelevant, after all.

Since I'm working on a new project which requires me only to do some animations I'm currently doing the switch to Maya...

At first it looks and feel very awkward, but in few days I felt a bit more comfortable with it...

It has lots of neat tools and features, and since I was in the process of learning I subscribed to digital tutors to have an overall understanding on how everything works...
Good thing is that DT is full of Maya tutorials and more or less there are all the necessary things which I'm looking for...

What is surprising is that I see lots of users which suggest most of the time to code your own little tool to do something...the most amazing thing in XSI is that there are often multiple ways to accomplish a task using the existing tools available, and learning that in Maya most of the time you have to code your own is a bit depressing, but thats another excuse to learn a bit of phyton scripting ( which I'm sure I will never learn )

Anyway I miss XSI and I know that I can open it every time to do what I want to do, but I'm forcing myself to to it in Maya, so it'll be easier next time I need to do the same thing...

I choose Maya mostly because I'm doing freelance jobs and most of the time the send me stuff done by Maya and they want to keep it that way, but also because I see that the userbase is huge, and most of the time there are lots of usefull plugins/scripts which allows you to do what you need...
Regarding game development I think that right now its the best bet for me...I tried Houdini, but it was quite overwhelming, so I gave up on it...guess I'll stick to Maya until AD will shut it down