SPOILER ALERT - general Softimage 2013 description

[iamVFX]

ok, but where is the old developper of XSI team ?? where ?

Here

[Bellsey]

a few people have left and some moved into other projects. Some people have joined and overall the team is bigger, but the context is different now, there's collaboration and work done by other teams, that feeds into the various products.

[McNistor]

Underwhelming release, but this doesn't surprise me anymore.

[ActionArt]

Here's a quote from the list:

Just to ease peoples mind about preformance...yes it takes a while to compute the shaders... but once done you can scrub your timeline just fine. I had a scene with 20+ characters all with their own mocap in a HUGE environment and once Soft precomputed the shaders I was able to edit lights,animation and shaders quickly. Oh and there were 50 lights in the scene most of which had shadows.

So performance may not be the issue many people think it is. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

[Memag]

Surely it is highly dependable on the hardware.

[punchatz]

Surely it is highly dependable on the hardware.

Gforce 480s for that project...

[iamVFX]

Underwhelming release, but this doesn't surprise me anymore.

I think I'll be surprised when I start to dig into the low-level crowd compounds. I think there is a lot of hidden potential than at first glance (accessing action source clips at specific frame through ice, for example, sounds good to me, it means you can blend animation smoothly between several states now i guess)

Also python based synoptics is a really good feature! Hope to see python code in an ice compound someday

Not a bad release, but could be better

[Memag]

Underwhelming release, but this doesn't surprise me anymore.

I think I'll be surprised when I start to dig into the low-level crowd compounds. I think there is a lot of hidden potential than at first glance (accessing action source clips at specific frame through ice, for example, sounds good to me, it means you can blend animation smoothly between several states now i guess)

Also python based synoptics is a really good feature! Hope to see python code in an ice compound someday

Not a bad release, but could be better

"This is way more advanced than a simple ICE crowd setup. There's stuff going on that would never have been possible with older ICE.
You do have access to the rig per actor, through ICE. So it's perfectly possible to fix feet issues, or have actor's head look at scene objects.
Of course there's also much more advanced animation blending that was a PITA with ICE before."

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php? ... 8;start=75

[iamVFX]

All what I get is a mention of the video game "Binary Domain", which character is presented in a HQ viewport

[Memag]

question is why max has everything and maya doesnt have a s***.....

Same disappointment every year....

very disappointed . the Features list of maya 2013 its a joke a bad joke.
all the power that autodesk have and this is what they manage to develop?

Surely it's clear now that spending money with Autodesk is a waste of time..
There are some really nice options out there now days

If Max has two more releases like this one and if Modo two more releases like 601, we will have a different market leader. Sad to see Max so lackluster this time around. This version is a wake up call for me, I am going to start learning Modo to fall back on.

I would really like all the selection modes from XSI in 3DS Max, they were really good and easy to access and quick to use. Autodesk already own both programs.

I think it's quite obvious that as each year passes, Autodesk's yearly updates become less exciting and more of an annoyance. Silly little things get added, big things get broken, performance either fails to improve or improve so marginally it's not even worth it yet every year we see this marketing BS about how 'X amount of people say this year is X percent faster than last year'... The whole requirement to include that fact tells me there's a problem. Ok so we got some viewport performance upgrades last year, but the ribbon is still crawling and it still takes an age to fire up Max from a cold start.

So my big question is this; why even release every year? Because its tradition? Because its 'what you do'? Or is it because you're scared? Scared to commit to shipping an actual improvement, scared to commit to actually listening, fixing problems, developing new features that people want and making sure your target market are happy.

This culture of regular releases baffles me. It's like ZBrush and their ridiculous constant 'let's release an incremental update every time we think of something cool' rather than just waiting, putting it together and then shipping.

Imagine if car companies did the same; 'oh we found a way to increase the brightness of your headlights, but your mp/g is still awful and the battery still sucks - introducing the BMW 3.55r3'.

It's quite obvious that Max is squarely offered at the games industry, so why are so many people in this thread disappointed. You've added a bunch of such minor tweaks and barely useful new features that it just seems like a waste of time. You've even broken some things like pre-2013 scripts.

Just take time out, figure out what people really want, take a couple years and make it happen. The only people who genuinely want yearly updates are Autodesk themselves. The company is just becoming a set of cogs that 'keep running' for no other reason than to keep up tradition despite the many cries for improvement.

As Gir says, small time zero budget indie devs are catching up fast and if Autodesk continue to put out such negligible updates then they'll be overtaken. The difference is not budget, or time, the difference is that these people listen, then they ship. Autodesk only does the latter, and barely.

These 3rd party devs and scripts are around because of the very existence of Autodesks shortcomings and I think relying on your subscribers and market position to crap out yearly upgrades that are increasingly minor and increasingly disappointing is a foolish and naive way of working.

So, Autodesk, listen, build and then ship...in that order. We'll wait.

[Maximus]

whats this, moment where everyone posts nonsense things?

[McNistor]

I hadn't time to dig very deep into ICE unfortunately so I'll have to take your word for it and cheer to the welcomed new ICE features.
What bothers me - and although it isn't a dire matter - are these new little 'features' shoved in there so that max/maya users will feel more at home, that are made default. Having them as an option is one thing, but having long term XSI users browsing the preferences just to return to the good old reliable workflow that XSI was is annoying me a lot.

[Daniel Brassard]

From The NVidia website:

Hi all, Is there still no PTex support in Mental Ray?

Response

It's been announced in the comments for 2013 products that PTex is supported.

A major obstacle may have been removed, although untested and for Maya 2013. Just a matter of time before we see something from our community! Maybe Graham will return to his shader!

[jamination]

Modo must run with HUGE losses to be able to apply changes/enhancements to so many different areas of their program in 1 release, on top of that make SO many high quality videos. these last 2 releases have been a big disappointment (2012 sap/2013), and I think it is very important that Autodesk hears the bad along with the good. I think it is naive to on our part to trust that Autodesk will fix the lackluster areas of Softimage (Hair/Modeling,Rendering) in the next release, I think there is a plan (and it has been said before), Autodesk can sell only so many copies of each software, now it is time that the sell YOU the copies you don't have in the form of the suites, so if you need better modeling tools go to Max, etc. I really hope Modo picks up the ball and goes with it, I would love to use it more (right now only for modeling), but Softimage is just too far ahead in character animation at the moment and that is an area, and that is an area that has been stagnent for quite some time (and don't talk to me about crowdfx, that is very niche). I don't want to take my characters into another program to put hair on them or better cloth, all an one, I don't have the time to learn 3 programs. As far as being the worst major release...Well one of them has to be, as since I jumped ship from Max at XSI 3.5, i can safely say this is the worst release (for me). For all those who are happy with this release, great, and if you people are in the majority, that it is obvious that I am the problem, and in the next year or so I will have to make the Jump, but it won't be to another Autodesk product, I doubt they can see it from the inside, but the monopoly is really doing a number on inovation.

someone on cgtalk said the following and it says what I feel
"I'd love to praise every effort towards innovative and revolutionary new tool developments from adsk. But I'll say what I think should be said:

The idea of paralel development of a bunch of apps which basically try to do the same things in order to keep your established markets doesn't work.

It leads to an unproductive development pace that looses out to visionaries like Pixologic, SideEffects, Thefoundry, Luxology... You name it.
"

[bottleofram]

And the crowd goes wild!
Yeah, wildly disillusioned! (going straight to hell for this - should not take a dig at Chinny who is filling in because autodesk doesnt have a guy at tech dept. or whatever who knows softimage)

What you probably noticed is that all the videos start very abruptly, like he barely had the time to make them, let alone edit and prepare for release date. Dont get me wrong, i dont think the update itself is impressive, but the presentation did it a huge disservice, imo. Particularly if you take a look at mayas impressively build demo scenes with its dark interface (i know, lipstick on a pig, but still... looks modern) and flashy new toys... and than, because youre already there and certainly interested in other autodesk products, you look at softimage and it just pops out as an ugly duckling in comparison. That combined with the fact that the 2 biggest additions are making you wait for something to happen every couple of seconds (crowdFX to connect all that stuff, viewport to initialize and update...) and you've got yourself a mess.

Hopefully im wrong, but im afraid autodesk's neglect has hurt softimage too much too often for something like this to pass with no consequences.

[Hirazi Blue]

I foresee the "A Softimage Letter 2 - The Revenge of the Chin" in the near future...
;)