Asian Retirement POV?

[myara]

I'm from Japan but I've never been in any Softimage based big company, only small studios, but we are obviously concerned and upset because all of this. This is at least what I feel around my fellow comrades and my contacts in Twitter and FB.

We like SI as much as you do, and dislike Maya as much as you do. And some of us hate Max as much as you do. But people are already starting to prepare to move on and most of them will pick Maya, specially small companies and freelancers, and not because they like it, but because that's what will get you more job offers.

We are worried and undecided what to do, specially with the absurd migration option that doesn't let you use Softimage after 2 years. So even if you pick Maya as your next tool, you won't be able to open your old files, or work in Softimage. That's unacceptable to many, specially freelancers. And since a Maya license costs more than $5000 without subscription and without any campaign, it is a big decision.

Unlike this forum or the mailing list, people here aren't bitching Autodesk in Twitter or FB, well, just a little. I guess it's an idiosyncrasy difference.

A few schools that were Softimage based have already changed to Maya. I don't know a single one that is teaching Softimage now.

As a funny side story, a friend of mine was going to buy a bunch of SI licenses a week ago for his company. The retailer was already aware that the best DCC software ever was already sentenced to dead so he told him to wait. A few weeks early and he would have bought licenses of a dead software. Good for him, I guess.

Well, we still have SI projects and I guess we'll still have them for a while. How people and companies are going to use their licenses I don't know.

On the other hand, eventually, almost everything will be Maya in the game industry (I work in games mainly). It's always been the most used, and Softimage the second one.
Big companies like Capcom have already started to implement some things in Maya some time ago. Konami and Square have always used Maya and SI depending on the project so I guess they will eventually stick with Maya. I don't know what Platinum or other Softimage companies are planning to do but I guess they will change to Maya too.

3DS Max is a little weak in the game industry, I only know one company that uses it permanently (From Software). Although now that I think about it, I've been involved in one Sega title that was 3DS Max based in the past too ( I think most Sega titles are SI or Maya ). Max is stronger in anime though, mainly because of Pencil.

I'm not very into cm, movies, vfx production so I'm not sure how this is affecting them, but I guess is the same. All the "big" companies are already Maya.

I've been working with Maya and Softimage for a years, but since SI is so much easier and fun to work with, I've been using Maya as little as possible. So personally, I plan to increment my Maya skills.

I don't know if this is what you wanted to know, but we aren't going to have a revolution or holy war in the name of Softimage around here, that's for sure.