Spoiler Alert: NO SPOILERS ANYMORE

[t4d]

just stop paying I made the mistake of paying to 2014 it will be the last here and we'll sit in old versions of maya and SI until modo or fabric engine takes over what I use SI for..

Autodesk are playing the capitalism game very well your can only play by there rules..so stop giving them money

Buy every 3 or 4 version seem to be the only way to get value now. the Max and Maya guys are just as unhappy
so it's not a case of forcing us toward other AD products
it more a case of them maximising profit they will always do what customer will pay for,.. that is capitalism.

making a good software update has nothing to do with AD's Profit.

[Rork]

I understand your point, but not paying for the software means that the point of decommission will come faster than expected.
So if we all stop paying for upgrades and such, Softimage will be a thing of the past quicker than the rest of us would like to see.

Not promoting AD's way of sales in any way here btw...

[mirkoj]

so option is kinda, if assumption is true:
1: keep paying a LOT of money and receive almost nothing for them and "risk" killing software
2: stop paying, keep using version that you have, or last one, save a LOT of money and then in couple years, 5-10 when something better came up just switch if needed.

My vote would be second option really, because you will switch sooner or later when other programs catch up and leave current development in dust. So instead of paying and getting nothing you stop paying use what you have and save money for something else.
No brainer really.
1st option seems more ike a hostage situation.. keep paying blackmail or else....

[Hirazi Blue]

I've said it before (but hey, I like repeating myself): everybody should obviously make their own decision on this. But those of you who needn't make their decision/new payment soon, might want to wait just a little. Maybe, although it's doubtful, I admit, we can make Autodesk notice our plight and have them address our worries. This is something that won't happen overnight, but I for one am willing to take that route pro-actively, trying to "force" them to take notice and respond. At this point even a well-written "second coming" of "a Softimage message" ("click") would be a nice start.
But I'm afraid we won't be hearing much of anything until after Autodesks origami event.

Moderator edit: I moved azurecgi's obj import remark (and its follow-ups) to a separate thread - HB

[angus_davidson]

As HB said I think thats its a bit premature. We only have a week to go before we will know for sure.

after that It pretty much comes down to

a) They really show some decent stuff and we all get excited
b) Not much more on show then the leaked bits and people pretty much get upset.

Having been a part of big corporations before I can tell you that the only way to get their attention is to not spend money on their products. Petitions, Jumping up and down in groups,Meetings with product Managers never changed a damn thing.

The only real way is to not renew subscriptions, especially for suites. As mentioned above though it does carry the danger of they might just dump max and SI and only work on Maya going forward. As much as I think SI is the best of the three if they got all of the devs to focus on one product they could probably get some amazing results.

You need to be prepared to work on your current version until you find something else, which may take a few years. While I do have some sympathy for the new team, people have to realise that economic times are very hard, the VFX business as a whole is going through some pretty serious stuff, and charging a great deal of money for something that is not being actively bettered for the majority of its users is a model that seriously has to change. Subscription is a very valid model if and only if the updates are frequent enough and worthwhile. (otherwise buying a permanent licence just makes so much more sense) So far I feel ADSK has been letting people down pretty badly in that respect.

[Pooby]

Petitions, Jumping up and down in groups,Meetings with product Managers never changed a damn thing.

It would be useful if you could give a specific example of a petition you have seen come in and give your assesment of the corporation's reaction.

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

No member of the board will ever step in front of the shareholders and
say: "Hey what can we do to make softimage, maya or max a better product for all the users so thy come to like us?"
And the shareholders say "well let´s just give up a part of our profit so the devs can develop another killer feature."

Anyone can be a shareholder including you. A shareholder have certain rights. One way to make them notice is to warn shareholders of bad decisions.

As I said, for a shareholder it would be a bad decision to invest too much in development.
And as I said, as an subscription customer I am a shareholder, but without the right to vote, so my my voice is money.

I have nothing against a petition. But as you can see, it seems there is again more talk than action. Stop talking! Let´s do it! NOW! there is reason enough even without the next release.

Where do I sign?

[angus_davidson]

Petitions, Jumping up and down in groups,Meetings with product Managers never changed a damn thing.

It would be useful if you could give a specific example of a petition you have seen come in and give your assesment of the corporation's reaction.

One off the top of my Head. (I live in South Africa) We have petitioned our Major telecoms to unbundle the last copper loop so that any telecoms company can come and install a phone or a data point. Currently if you have an adsl line you also have to pay for a unused Telkom voice account as well.

Another one is We are unable to purchase games via electronic services like iTunes because every single one needs to be rerated by a company that looks after rating things to be shown / played / Listened too.

I work at a University so we have monthly protests that run the whole gauntlet from religious to commercial, and they only thing it ever achieves is to get students out of their watering holes and into the sunlight for a few hours.

The only way things have ever changed is if there is a financial incentive for them to change.

[acidkittens]

I'm not going to renew. I hope autodesk figures out what they are doing one of these days.

[bottleofram]

I understand your point, but not paying for the software means that the point of decommission will come faster than expected.
So if we all stop paying for upgrades and such, Softimage will be a thing of the past quicker than the rest of us would like to see.

Flawed logic. We've been told Softimage is doing great under AD. Better than ever before, with a steady growth each year, mind you. So why 2013 than? Why 2014?

Well, no conclusion should be made until the official release. I should be able to hold up my bitterness for a while longer...

[t4d]

Petitions, Jumping up and down in groups,Meetings with product Managers never changed a damn thing.

It would be useful if you could give a specific example of a petition you have seen come in and give your assesment of the corporation's reaction.

this is a major issues that goes beyond Autodesk past Adobe licensing ( there update value is falling too but not as much as Autodesk IMO ) to far into the big wide world of corporate business so you have to deal with capitalism and it's logic

ALL Major companies are driven by Shareholders and inside those companies it's Not the CEO or boardroom that is in charge it's the financial department. simply accounting decide IF the CEO can Buy X or invest in Y or spend more in Z.

so if you have a situation where it's clear Subscription rates are falling all the Marketing BS gets thrown out the window and it's a straight meeting between Financial records and Shareholders.. Clients are not paying.. WHY ?.. are product need more development money,.. answer ...?

it's easy to see not only Softimage but max and maya have gotten in the last 2 or 3 years,.. the work put into the updates is clearly a corporate decision. we are getting alot less and paying alot more ,. if people want to be sheep and think if we don't pay every time they ask,. the sky will fall and my software with disappear and I'll be animating in clay

NO that's BS,. I'm a artist it's a tool and I want the best value from the tools I spend money on.
if your making art this year on your current version it's not going to harm you to miss out on 2014 or 2015 or 2016 updates when you get nothing that really saves you time or makes you any more money, so why pay for it ?

C4D, Houdini, modo, Blender even freak'n Lightwave has major features and pages of major improvements to there software every upgrade that takes weeks to fully discover, use and learn

Autodesk gives us a coffee breaks worth on joy each update... and some want to keep paying for bubbles ?

Using a older versions of Autodesk software is NOT using old technology it's just waiting for Autodesk to give you something worth paying for.

[angus_davidson]

What it boils down to is value for money. Right now the ratio of what you get to what you pay for is very poor. As t4d said it is not just ADSK that is playing this game. While folks continue to pay for subscriptions or just for the rental of software (ie you don't even own the software you pay for) they are going to continue to do it as it makes very good money for them.

If you have a look at the difficulties the VFX folks are having. ie getting a very set fee for doing a shot. Currently that model (along with other things like underbidding etc) is driving places to close because they just cant get by on the money they get in. I am really sure there are a lot of Main TDs there that are looking at not renewing a great deal of their pipeline software just to try and stay afloat. Theres only a reason to if it brings big benefits in the form of the time=money equation.'ie if version 2014 allows you to do you job in half the time, the more shots you can do and the greater the chance you have of being competitive.

[Hirazi Blue]

For those of you who might "miss it", I just deleted my little side-thread (that was called ‘The “Dear Autodesk” thread') intended to focus/address constructive ideas to get Autodesk to notice and respond. I've deleted it because its pointless. I think it's obvious where this is going. And sadly that won't impress Autodesk at all.

[luceric]

In my personal opinion, this whole CEO/shareholder sub-discussion is complete nonsense and you should drop it. Autodesk is a company that made 2.3 billion dollars last year of revenue and it's one of the company that invests the most in research and development, with about 600 million $ in Research and Development. All of Media and Entertainment is about 200 million dollars of that revenue, btw. Those are all public numbers.

it's easy to see not only Softimage but max and maya have gotten in the last 2 or 3 years,.. the work put into the updates is clearly a corporate decision. we are getting alot less and paying alot more ,. if people want to be sheep and think if we don't pay every time they ask,. the sky will fall and my software with disappear and I'll be animating in clay
C4D, Houdini, modo, Blender even freak'n Lightwave has major features and pages of major improvements to there software every upgrade that takes weeks to fully discover, use and learn
Autodesk gives us a coffee breaks worth on joy each update... and some want to keep paying for bubbles ?

You may not have liked the features in Softimage 2013, but the facts are that a LOT of work into them. The viewport update especially ended up needing a lot people to translate all the built-in shaders into GLSL and do various other internal changes to update the old OpengGL pipeline. Updating the viewport is always one of the top request we get. Whether the actual work done in 2013 hits the correct points is another issue. My point is that it's not only the minimal amount of work was done. And we could look back at 2012 and go through those features again. One bullet point on the feature history page is often months of work.

Also, I'm not tracking Max, but Maya had a big 2013 release followed by two extension releases. all in the span of a year. Again, it's not like there is only minimal work going on. It's simply that it's easy to get swept up in the marketing of the other products, and probably didn't take these "weeks to fully discover" what any of the autodesk app delivered. This is in part due to how autodesk is announcing these things, with a press release that only talks about 5 points or less and frankly doesn't explain why any of these things are important. The other part is that when a product like Modo (or earlier versions of Softimage) has very little to begin with, adding something new like IK (a plug-in they are licensing called Ikenema) or dynamics is obviously big news. But it's also easy. Does it work, is it scalable, is there an SDK for it? Modo will also be in smaller spashy-announcement mode as soon as the basic module are all in place. These big modules are already in Max/Maya/Softimage. How often does any app introduce something like ICE in its lifetime? Maya/Softimage/Max got Bullet last year. Maya got a new nHair system, alembic GPU caching, softimage a crowd sim system (and now Max), and lot of core under-the-hood performance, viewport, sdk and framework enhancement that are necessary to keep the apps up to date and moving. It's well above bug fixes.

[mirkoj]

but there are a lot of big things in Softimage that still needs to be taken care of and a lot of people would agree that viewport should be way above crowd or couple additional ICE nodes for example. Viewport is main interaction tool and right now is it soooo outdated.
And Viewport is something that EVERYBODY in Softimage are in need of, and last couple updates are just for pretty small number of users really.
Let's face it.. people working in Softimage DON'T need maya interop, and don't need to send stuff to Max.
Inside Softimage things are waaay above on list for probably most of Softimage users.
That is final point when list of update is out it doesn't really matter if like 2 years is spen't on HQV and at the end of those years probably only small percentage of people ever used it. In a way those months of development are thrown away.
In short... everybody would like that focus on development is on things that are actualy used on everyday basis and affects productivity, viewport being a huge part of that, and not on things that small % will need.
Camera sequencer naming one of them....It is not a question if it is usable or not.. but a lot of people will never even notice it is there.

[Sil3]

The other part is that when a product like Modo (or earlier versions of Softimage) has very little to begin with, adding something new like IK (a plug-in they are licensing called Ikenema) or dynamics is obviously big news. But it's also easy. Does it work, is it scalable, is there an SDK for it? Modo will also be in smaller spashy-announcement mode as soon as the basic module are all in place. These big modules are already in Max/Maya/Softimage.

You are right, but there are tons of workflows issues that should be addressed that aren't even touched in all these years. I can name a few:

- Some kind of Sculpt Brush like Maya has since the dark ages. No... we don't need it to be Mudbox or Zbrush, a simple one like Maya is a HUGE helper in getting Corrective Morphs Shapes or helping smooth out vertices's... exporting an .obj to ZB/Mudbox to do those is awkward and it simply doesn't work to make corrective Secondary Shapes.

- Stepped preview... Maya got one... messiah has it since 1999.

- Motion Modifiers... having to hook expressions with Sines its... humm...

- Editing of Motion directly on Motion trajectories... yes theres now a free xsiaddon that does that... at least someone OUTSIDE AD is doing it (tks)

- Custom Color Keyframes Ticks on Timeline/Dopesheet... so we can separate what are Golden Poses from Breakdowns and Inbetweens... yeah yeah.. only few people asked for this for years like I already read it somewhere... but they asked

- UV Worflows enhancements like having Symmetry inside the UV Editor.. packaging of UV Shells (seems its coming...) Smooth brush inside the UV Editor would also be very very welcomed.

- Real Symmetry Modeling without Clone tricks...

- More Shadow Icons although Softimage takes the lead on this one, more wouldn't hurt

- Muscle System... even with the MIGHTY ICE theres no where something of this to be seen... oh theres a third party addon that only works with 2-3 muscles and has an horrendous workflow, but I was expecting something like this coming out of AD to be honest.. yeah Maya one was also a third party... but at least its functional and they have it.

- Onion Skinning on deformed Meshes and not only on Transformations.

How often does any app introduce something like ICE in its lifetime? Maya/Softimage/Max got Bullet last year. Maya got a new nHair system, alembic GPU caching, softimage a crowd sim system (and now Max), and lot of core under-the-hood performance, viewport, sdk and framework enhancement that are necessary to keep the apps up to date and moving. It's well above bug fixes.

True, but wheres our new Hair? or even Alembic (not counting the third party one)? Pretty sure those where a lot more useful than a Crowd and that thing called HQ Viewport that came out way to soon IMO.