SPOILER ALERT - general Softimage 2013 description

[Hirazi Blue]

however when you're behind one you don't have any responsibility or consequences to what you say.

While it may be used by some like that, it is untrue (and to me personally frankly slightly offensive to say so). No one is exempt from responsibility and/or consequence for what they say on a forum like this. (They might be slightly harder to track, but that's a different story)
But okay, I'll let it rest...

[iamVFX]

250000 agents!

[flv]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5533643/Crowd/14_06_2011/TooManyActors_01.mov[/flv]

[kiwimation]

Just to change the topic does anyone know if Toxik has had any updates this time or is dev on it dead now???

PS I think the SI up date is pretty good, Not as flashy as when ICE or Lagoa was introduced but still pretty good.

[mattmos]

250000 agents!

[flv]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5533643/Crowd/14_06_2011/TooManyActors_01.mov[/flv]

That's pretty darned impressive.

[Firebird]

Very impressive.

Now export it to maya and see if it can handle it

[mixepix]

kiwimation: I think that the only update in Composite is that you can write to .mov now

[SreckoM]

@iamVFX Impressive! Now I can do my own LOTR

... I play with the cards that are dealt to me...

Well said. It is simple as that, we are users, and what we can do is to play with what is dealt to us or change table. No need to go too emotional into this.
We can not employ people for AD, we can suggest, but when we got answer that some things are not easy as they seems, that there are business rules that needs restricts, etc that is it. Some things you can not influence.

I agree that we should wait for release to judge it. XSI is great app, and one or two poor releases will not make it bad. I like what I see from this feature list, if i do not have Vray and Arnold licenses I would be disappointed with MR stuff. If there are new stuff great, if not I have alternatives. As ChrisTC said I thought that there is going to be more ICE modeling nodes, or something like PythonSOP in Houdini

BTW this is nice looking presentation http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0730856D716C7B06&feature=view_all

[Maximus]

Frankly i believe that being anonymous or not doesnt make any difference at all, pointless and out of context argument. No one insulted anyone here.
People that are disappointed with this release are mostly people that pay subscription by themselves, they dont have a studio that pay for them, so yes its pretty underwhelming, especially when you find out that after all this time you wont benefit from the upcoming new version after you got even an increase in subscription price, without a possibility of silver.

Of course you can say "then Softimage is not the software for you, move on", yes probably and that is what is being said here, in a negative way of course, because this release was a step backward in my opinion which i'm entitled.
No, most of us didnt try the software and still making assumptions and spitting out sentences based on what we saw. Now if things are different from what we saw then there is clearly some issue here from AD not showing the real possibilities and updates, cant sure blame on users that watch a 1 min long video of doubtfull so called "improvement".

As i said you cant please everyone, and its fine but there are some aspect in Softimage that are falling back and every year this comes up but still nothing changes.
It seems to me that every year the most important thing in terms of updates is bugfixes, while it shouldnt be like this at all, but since we're all so used, it passes unseen.
In my opinion this release isnt 100% bad, but it is not shining and it brought to the table debatable updates. I wont comment on how it was presented because that is pointless, AD will see the result of their presentation and how they exposed to the public their products.

Sure CrowdFX is a brilliant tool, hats off to the devs for putting together this awesome piece of tool, but it leaves me a bit doubtfull if it was necessary or even how comes it had priority on rendering/modeling/texturing department in softimage. It really seem a niche tool.
Anyway time to move on as usual, in my personal opinion its been another year wasted where i didnt benefit from updates and where i spent money on something that didnt bring anything usefull for my job and this is the bottom line, this is what makes me say this release was underwhelming. I'm more than happy for you people who will gain benefit from CrowdFx and for all the 2013 features. Glad for you. I'm still waiting features from mental ray 3.7 and we are at 3.10, then i hear comments about they get implemented when tested and stable, ok 3.7 was how many years ago? How many years you need to test and make things stable? Sounds a bit ridicolous and an excuse.

Enjoy your 2013 release everyone.

[mixepix]

I have my own studio and have to pay for the subscription and it is a good release for me. I think crowdFX is a smart move to get Maya users to start using SI and I also see Motion Graphic potential in it and as I said earlier the viewport and animation enhancements are a big deal to me. You are of course entitled to be depressed over the release but it bugs me that people tend to state their opinion as a fact. It all depends on what you need in your work. Maybe your dream release would be worthless to me.

[luceric]

Even if i'm on the negative side.
The list of improvements is right there and i can judge it. For me it's disappointing, can't even understand
what kind of customer they are targeting, almost....nobody in this forum.

I'm a little bit surprised by this, because essentially 60% of this release is work on the better viewport, which is the feature that should appeal to hobbyist and freelancer. (I can't tell I which group you are precisely because of those anonymous logins you guys hide behind.)

I think your exaggerating about the demo quality. maya has videos that don't even have audio on them (the GPU cache one for example). in any case, the softimage demos are the same as always. Chinny has been demoing Softimage in 1997, that 15 years, there was no reason for him to think he should have asked to hire a guy to do them. He has always been doing them, there is none of that filling in bullshit.

That motocycle scene is not a good showcase. I guess it's mean to show you can almost use the new stuff like an iray. I think we can't do a good demo of this feature, because it adds texture blending and quality that... the other apps already have and therefore not impressive at all technologically. we haven't touched the default viewport texturing quality since version 1! if you read the comments leading up to 2013, a viewport update was a HUGELY common request. this cannot possibly be the worse release when we finally addressed something we have had thousand of requests for. it did take a llllottt of resource and time to do that thing.

we talked to clients and they told us we need to fix bugs, add missing bits to the sdk, fix the viewport to have basic things people expect. nothing flashy, just get the stuff that's already there working. then we let Guillaume loose on ice crowd, which there was some interest for at a couple of lighthouse account that were already trying to do it and ran into lots of issues or didn't know how to do the motion blending et al. crowdfx is a box of tools you can use to do all sorts of ice based procedural animation with.

[Daniel Brassard]

This discussion on CrowdFX make me want it more now...

http://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list ... 2566c06947

The possibilities are actually quite wide. Something to give it a test!

[ActionArt]

a viewport update was a HUGELY common request.

Damn right! Almost EVERYONE was asking for that and now that it's here so many are saying it's not important.

I disagree. It IS important and if that was the only thing in the release I'd be happy. That's major work. Even if the demo of it was questionable there is plenty of evidence it's well done and performs well.

I do agree though that AD needs a good demo crew just for these events. It would seem wise for sales reasons. Freelance it! (I'm a freelancer by the way ;) )

Can't wait to try this!

[Kzin]

a viewport update was a HUGELY common request.

Damn right! Almost EVERYONE was asking for that and now that it's here so many are saying it's not important.

I disagree. It IS important and if that was the only thing in the release I'd be happy. That's major work. Even if the demo of it was questionable there is plenty of evidence it's well done and performs well.

what the users want is a viewport that connects between viewport and renderer. it makes no sense to have a pretty shiny viewportrender and the rendering looks totally different.
the example video shown uses a phong shader and 2 textures in times of more physical rendering with brdf, glossis and lightobjects? in addition, the renderpreview with mr is not that much slower then the viewport. THIS is a joke and everybody says that no one needs something like this (and i am one of the users who wants a more modern viewport).

i think we need a more realistic example of the viewport.

[mixepix]

Don't say everybody. You do not represent what everybody thinks.

I think it will make it much easier to tweak your lighting. I'm looking forward to try it out.

Here is another example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slMbd_M1dH8

[milanvasek]

now if we can see procedural shaders in viewport (even mixed, animated etc.) it would be nice to be able to use them in ICE to drive some effects... or is there already way to do it now that i missed? (i can think of rendering them to texture, using that as texture map and getting that in ICE, but was hoping for something easier)

[woodengun]

I think this new release sounds interesting. This is in no disrespect to the developers, just commenting.
As a VFX professional who has worked at a few studios, I can tell you that the new interface enhancements seem like a nice cosmetic addition but in the end I can't see it help anyone get the job done better or faster. I think SI has the greatest modeling toolset in the world. Its stunning how much faster it is than maya, yet most people choose to model in maya at studios to complete work from start to finish... Usually because there are 30 maya licenses to 1 SI license. In that sense I think the package deals are a great idea. Maybe it will get some younger artists, who think maya has the answer to every problem, a chance to see that there are some smarter options for things.

To be honest, the biggest attractions to me are ICE, Arnold integration, and the modeling tools. Using SI with Arnold is simply amazing and I wish it was more available to the public and openly supported by AD.

I hate to say it but it seems like the SI community and users have done more with ICE compounds, addons, and plugins than any updates from AD, which isn't a bad thing at all!

Sorry if I've upset anyone, but this software still has a heafty price tag. I think we should expect a lot for it.