Softimage the best Autodesk tool against competition

[luceric]

I don't think asking here is asking the right audience. But in any case, I've heard from a source that Cinema 4D will be part of Adobe Creative Cloud, so people would be able to get it for a few dollars a month extra (something like 500$ a year). That effectively dries up the market opportunities for everyone.

actually, it's been announced that "CINEMA 4D Lite R14" is bundled for free with After Effects, plus direct import of C4D scenes in After Effects http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/201 ... -next.html. that kills the market even more

[McNistor]

How does it kill it, by forcing the competition to get... more competitive?
Granted, for Ad that might be a killer.

[Bullit]

Precisely, for the visionless Autodesk it is the end of the world. I even don't understand this hard cut compartmentalization that luceric makes of the market. As if studios today that have softimage, 3dsmax don't make motion graphics in projects that have 10%, 20, 40% , 70% of NOT motion graphics...Most commercials have motion graphics but the degree of it varies.
And a little help in that area may make a change for Cinema not worthwhile.
Like i said in another post Motion Graphics is everywhere. The market is giant. And a 3d generalist application unable to do it is a dead 3d generalist application.

[luceric]

How does it kill it, by forcing the competition to get... more competitive?

it dries up the opportunities for After Effect companion 3d products, because it lowers the amount of money people are willing to pay for that kind of product, and raises the investment and burden required to compete again the now commoditize class of product. At that point in the thread, I was talking about making some investment to go after new users in the motion graphic market.

[McNistor]

it dries up the opportunities for After Effect companion 3d products, because it lowers the amount of money people are willing to pay for that kind of product, and raises the investment and burden required to compete again the now commoditize class of product. At that point in the thread, I was talking about making some investment to go after new users in the motion graphic market.

It might be a language barrier or something that explains our circling around the tail... it appears to me that what you're describing here is exactly what means to get more competitive - raise investments, lower prices, offer better product.
Coincidentally or not, what is in your view a market killer, is also known to be Ad's approach towards markets that are already saturated (or almost) and I'm guessing they don't try to penetrate those precisely because you must be really competitive (as in innovative, low prices, etc.) to succeed, let alone the low prospect of achieving a monopole.
Case in point, big corporations loathe competition and Autodesk is no Prince Charming.

[Mathaeus]

How does it kill it, by forcing the competition to get... more competitive?it dries up the opportunities for After Effect companion 3d products, because it lowers the amount of money people are willing to pay for that kind of product, and raises the investment and burden required to compete again the now commoditize class of product. At that point in the thread, I was talking about making some investment to go after new users in the motion graphic market.

imho, it's not Maxon, here's the guy. As gustavoeb mentioned in another thread, this After Effects plugin made a lot of buzz, last year. Advertising encourages AE people to believe that they don't need any standard 3d, at all, everything is there for 160 bucks . Actually, it was a old school trickery, for example moving polygon islands away from center + some noise, so that's explosion. And so on. Fact, that 95% of content should be done somewhere out of AE and plugin, it was "you just import obj", in advertising. In real life, combination of tons of sliders + horrible AE camera +OpenGl shading trickery, hardly goes further than animated text in stile of '90. But, expectation is here.
So that's why I think the Maxon deal is honest offer. Bundled Cinema Lite seems to be really limited, btw.

[Bullit]

Yes Cinema Lite seems to have some limitations.
Edit: In fact if this true it seems more like a exporter/importer:

So what is Cinema 4D Lite anyway?
We can’t find a detailed feature comparison between Lite and other editions of Cinema 4D, but it seems to be a fairly heavily cut down version of the software.

Adobe’s blog describes it as “comparable to Cinema 4D R14 Prime”, but the (unofficial) video above mentions that it doesn’t include polygonal modelling, a full set of deformers.

Perhaps more significantly, like Prime itself, it doesn’t include key features used in motion graphics work, including the MoGraph toolset, advanced rendering options, and the Physical and Sketch and Toon renderers.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2013/04/after- ... cinema-4d/

[luceric]

It might be a language barrier or something that explains our circling around the tail... it appears to me that what you're describing here is exactly what means to get more competitive - raise investments, lower prices, offer better product.
Coincidentally or not, what is in your view a market killer, is also known to be Ad's approach towards markets that are already saturated (or almost) and I'm guessing they don't try to penetrate those precisely because you must be really competitive (as in innovative, low prices, etc.) to succeed, let alone the low prospect of achieving a monopole.
Case in point, big corporations loathe competition and Autodesk is no Prince Charming.

You know I just wrote a mail that I reminded me we sold XSI Foundation for 450$ for a few years, and only ever sold a few thousand copies. It had probably costed more than 20 mil$ dollar at that point to develop XSI, never mind promote and sell it.

The users also demanded upgrades for a maximum of 200$ and didn't want to shell out 450$ every release as the company originally intended, even though they got advanced warning of that. What does this all mean? Well, running Softimage Co. costed many millions of dollar a year and Foundation couldn't sustain that. Hell, it didn't pay for siggraph. It doesn't matter if you have an innovative product at low price, it's not enough. I think Softimage 5.11 Foundation was a pretty great product and innovative product. Yet, people bought other things. It's not necessarily laziness or evil that's keeping Autodesk from trying to compete in these race to the bottom.

[McNistor]

It doesn't matter if you have an innovative product at low price, it's not enough. I think Softimage 5.11 Foundation was a pretty great product and innovative product. Yet, people bought other things.

Why was not enough?
Until you come with some explanation, let me give mine: something went wrong.
For example the marketing was not good (and to most of us users still isn't). Why did people buy other things?
Or perhaps the price was not low enough or the other way around, the investment was not well administered (unnecessary spending). Also, keep in mind that although the XSI's development had cost X ($20mil you say) it was for the Full app, not for the Foundation. In the actual Foundation version went no extra investment (unless you want to consider stripping features dev. time) so this should be viewed in a different way - that is topping on the cake at no extra work.
I can draw another implication from what you're saying: once a product is settled in a market and thus a company gains monopole, nobody can do anything about it (otherwise why did people buy other things when XSI was innovative?), right? I don't think this is true. Not easy, sure, but far from "can't do anything about it".

[ojo3D]

It's not necessarily laziness or evil that's keeping Autodesk from trying to compete in these race to the bottom.

I agree with that. If you saw the features, the Cinema 4D Lite is only a teaser. Now ... if Maxon keeps the Studio version priced at $ 3.500, I don't think they'll sell many more copies. But maybe the Broadcast version is what will be bought, to extend even more the MoGraph capabilities.

At least there's some involuntary marketing about the software and that is always nice. Fact is it won't change the way artists design, but will give them more possibilities.

[angus_davidson]

You know I just wrote a mail that I reminded me we sold XSI Foundation for 450$ for a few years, and only ever sold a few thousand copies. It had probably costed more than 20 mil$ dollar at that point to develop XSI, never mind promote and sell it.

The users also demanded upgrades for a maximum of 200$ and didn't want to shell out 450$ every release as the company originally intended, even though they got advanced warning of that. What does this all mean? Well, running Softimage Co. costed many millions of dollar a year and Foundation couldn't sustain that. Hell, it didn't pay for siggraph. It doesn't matter if you have an innovative product at low price, it's not enough. I think Softimage 5.11 Foundation was a pretty great product and innovative product. Yet, people bought other things. It's not necessarily laziness or evil that's keeping Autodesk from trying to compete in these race to the bottom.

For those folks not on the Si mailing list ill just cut and paste

Theres one very big difference between then and now . At the time that that offer came out. The worlds economy was racing ahead. Money just wasnt so much of an object as it is now. People bought Maya mostly because it was all over magazines, websites etc. XSI was very rarely mentioned.

Now the worlds economy is mostly in the gutter so I can bet that if that a similarly valued offer was given again with some decent marketing it would be a very different story

[Bullit]

Softimage either version, Foundation or not had a dreadful Mentalray render at that time.

Foundation not sold much because Mentalray at that time couldn't old a candle to Vray, Finalrender in Quality. It wasn't not just being less friendly like it is today, it was outdated in every way. It was Quality pure and simple. Softimage couldn't do an image like Vray at that time no matter what.
I wrote it bold because i remember quite well being very disappointed, i remember a tutorial of a bathroom, there was even demo for the tutorial and i thought, what, this is what a pro does! this what it can do? 2 or 3 years earlier i was using Finalrender in Max and could do much better.
In short Softimage lost the Global Illumination bandwagon.
There wasn't either any Softimage widespread work to show off like today with spots with ICE that make it something worthwhile.
Mentalray only started to show something approaching Vray later - too late- and due only to CTRL shaders hacks circumventing the whole establishment or blocking from someone. Never understood what was going on. It seems render people in Softimage Avid was in another planet.
Maybe they were thinking only in big pipelines and at that time GI was a no no due to render times and hardware for big productions.
I don't think a generalist software can survive without looking for what the minions, the students are doing. What happens there gives a lots of hints about the future.
If Vray was available for it, with some show off and Foundation would have sold like hot cakes...

[Mathaeus]

For those folks not on the Si mailing list ill just cut and paste

Theres one very big difference between then and now . At the time that that offer came out. The worlds economy was racing ahead. Money just wasnt so much of an object as it is now. People bought Maya mostly because it was all over magazines, websites etc. XSI was very rarely mentioned.

Now the worlds economy is mostly in the gutter so I can bet that if that a similarly valued offer was given again with some decent marketing it would be a very different story

Yeah, exactly.... I remember few facility in these times, they just got Maya license, without any experience in any 3d. No one of these Maya seats survived, no users able to run such a complex software. At least, results weren't any better than Lightwave people were able to do.
Nobody will go with something like this, today...
But it's not only that, XSI had zero tradition, it comes like some space ship with extra terrestrials, while Cinema has a very good ground today... Entire XSI was a mix of good and bad surprises. I've been able to get setup for ambient occlusion baking in few days ( no one public available software was so good for this purpose, in these days). Building my own rig, which was original intention, this took much more.

Anyway, just to add something stupid..... AD was informed about this Adobe-Maxon deal, or not? I always believe there is a dark room in AD headquarters, full of screens, world maps and so. Let's say, ten screens for Adobe, five for Foundry ... and one which displays Hirazi Blue

[Bellsey]

I always believe there is a dark room in AD headquarters, full of screens, world maps and so. Let's say, ten screens for Adobe, five for Foundry ... and one which displays Hirazi Blue

Well, you've seen the war room from Dr Strangelove?.......... ;)

[Bellsey]

You know I just wrote a mail that I reminded me we sold XSI Foundation for 450$ for a few years, and only ever sold a few thousand copies. It had probably costed more than 20 mil$ dollar at that point to develop XSI, never mind promote and sell it.

The users also demanded upgrades for a maximum of 200$ and didn't want to shell out 450$ every release as the company originally intended, even though they got advanced warning of that. What does this all mean? Well, running Softimage Co. costed many millions of dollar a year and Foundation couldn't sustain that. Hell, it didn't pay for siggraph. It doesn't matter if you have an innovative product at low price, it's not enough. I think Softimage 5.11 Foundation was a pretty great product and innovative product. Yet, people bought other things. It's not necessarily laziness or evil that's keeping Autodesk from trying to compete in these race to the bottom.

For those folks not on the Si mailing list ill just cut and paste

Theres one very big difference between then and now . At the time that that offer came out. The worlds economy was racing ahead. Money just wasnt so much of an object as it is now. People bought Maya mostly because it was all over magazines, websites etc. XSI was very rarely mentioned.

Now the worlds economy is mostly in the gutter so I can bet that if that a similarly valued offer was given again with some decent marketing it would be a very different story

There's also another thing to consider here.
I wasn't working for Softimage or Autodesk at the time, but I recall Foundation being released, and I did think it odd. I seem to recall and assumed it was perhaps a move to maybe try and boost the userbase of XSI. In some ways it perhaps may have had the opposite effect in some peoples view.

If you have a product priced at X thousand, and then release a flavour of that same product (with much of the same functionality) for only a few hundred, there's a risk that you can kinda devalue the product, and/or change it's perception.
We might not always admit it, or realise it, but many people associate a cheaper price as lower quality, which in turn can effects peoples view as to whether the product as any credible value.

As for XSI 5.11, I thought it was a damn good product, and even now many user regard that build as a 'sweet spot' version. I also didn't think that Mental Ray was that bad either. If you knew what you were doing (which perhaps was the problem for some) then you could get good stuff from it. Hell, XSI 3.0 and 4.0 weren't too shabby either and with GI and FG.

[ojo3D]

I just know that if XSI Foundation was at sale again, with that price, I would buy it on the spot.