Where is the community?

[Mathaeus]

Yet another personal. I'm in Houdini wagon, almost every evening in last four months. Down in pic, it's what some idiot (that's me) did in yesterday evening, so I'm trying to decipher this thing, now..... While it was a absolutely unpleasant experience to start with this H thing, for about last two months, somehow I'm able to live without looking back into ICE trees.Just for principle, I'm trying to do every 'non manual' operation in H . Also have to to admit that Houdini's weak and strength points, actually they are fitting better to my everyday tasks. This could be, slower than ICE when it comes to hair, deformations and basic particle effects, but faster when to comes to polygons, plus, well it has the all these solvers.

Now, the way how ICE is organized, imho this belongs to long Softimage tradition, let's define it as orientation to 'high middle class', power artist who don't hesitate to get technical, a little. It seems this was a bless and curse in same time. Great for people who want to learn more in easy way, I think I'll be grateful kid of Softimage XSI to the end of my life - but in same time, not enough accessible for hard core programmers, still overcomplicated for artist who want to stay only artist. Even before AD times, not enough of buyers to support the idea, so not enough of power to resist against policy of corporation. Maya is obviously a much bigger piece to chew up.

Long story short, I don't believe there is sense for any developer, to create a 'new ICE', when it comes to 'easy to use', simply because it is not taken as easy, by sooo much people - but still introduced a lot of compromises (I'd believe). What I can figure as Houdini principle here, 'learn to use this thing or go out', actually seems to be much better idea. At least, H is 'fitting' much better into habits of way better defined group of people, than 'power artists'. That is, coders.

Back to Houdini, this time I'm trying to do not go again into, let's call it, emotional relationship, like I did with SI. More damage than good of this, I think. Also, this time don't want to go into pointless 'defending' on public forums - also more damage than good, at the end. Have no plans to release something really complex for free, too. If I feel Houdini as not good enough for particular task, but Blender or Modo is good enough - I won't push it.

Regarding small Softimage ICE hair system I'm running, according to feedback, yeah the time of best popularity was around two years ago. "Best" means about one or two mails weekly, almost all by new or potential users. Since this summer, no one mail anymore. No new passengers aboard. For now, this small piece of ICE iceberg seems to follow the path of huge Softimage iceberg, floating in streams of ocean. Whatever happens, at the end it will became only thinner and thinner.

[McNistor]

...

My father died at 59 from Alzheimer's.
My terminal illness of choice for my analogy was random. Or, most likely influenced by a cultural norm, which unfortunately uses cancer for a doomed human condition.
What bugs me is this: do you have hard feelings (because you know why) towards me or you opened your mouth without putting too much thought into it? After all, chances are that no matter what illness I had used, someone would get "hit" by it, so why mention it at all? Oh right, no terminal illness analogy would have been my best choice.
See, I'm self-moderating, you can quit now.
Merry Christmas to y'all!

[Hirazi Blue]

Wow, that's an overreaction IMHO. In the spirit of Christmas I'll try not to respond in kind. I stated that I personally have problems with the analogy, not that you're not allowed to use it. And as to had feelings: you accusing me of opening my mouth without much thought is in this context a rather serious insult and no apart from this I bear you no ill will. As you should've been able to gather from recent interactions.

[McNistor]

For some reason I have the odd feeling that we'd be BFF IRL if we had the chance to meet each other.
It's just a feeling obviously.

[Bullit]

Yet another personal. I'm in Houdini wagon, almost every evening in last four months. Down in pic, it's what some idiot (that's me) did in yesterday evening, so I'm trying to decipher this thing, now..... While it was a absolutely unpleasant experience to start with this H thing, for about last two months, somehow I'm able to live without looking back into ICE trees.Just for principle, I'm trying to do every 'non manual' operation in H . Also have to to admit that Houdini's weak and strength points, actually they are fitting better to my everyday tasks. This could be, slower than ICE when it comes to hair, deformations and basic particle effects, but faster when to comes to polygons, plus, well it has the all these solvers.

Now, the way how ICE is organized, imho this belongs to long Softimage tradition, let's define it as orientation to 'high middle class', power artist who don't hesitate to get technical, a little. It seems this was a bless and curse in same time. Great for people who want to learn more in easy way, I think I'll be grateful kid of Softimage XSI to the end of my life - but in same time, not enough accessible for hard core programmers, still overcomplicated for artist who want to stay only artist. Even before AD times, not enough of buyers to support the idea, so not enough of power to resist against policy of corporation. Maya is obviously a much bigger piece to chew up.

Long story short, I don't believe there is sense for any developer, to create a 'new ICE', when it comes to 'easy to use', simply because it is not taken as easy, by sooo much people - but still introduced a lot of compromises (I'd believe). What I can figure as Houdini principle here, 'learn to use this thing or go out', actually seems to be much better idea. At least, H is 'fitting' much better into habits of way better defined group of people, than 'power artists'. That is, coders.

Back to Houdini, this time I'm trying to do not go again into, let's call it, emotional relationship, like I did with SI. More damage than good of this, I think. Also, this time don't want to go into pointless 'defending' on public forums - also more damage than good, at the end. Have no plans to release something really complex for free, too. If I feel Houdini as not good enough for particular task, but Blender or Modo is good enough - I won't push it.

Regarding small Softimage ICE hair system I'm running, according to feedback, yeah the time of best popularity was around two years ago. "Best" means about one or two mails weekly, almost all by new or potential users. Since this summer, no one mail anymore. No new passengers aboard. For now, this small piece of ICE iceberg seems to follow the path of huge Softimage iceberg, floating in streams of ocean. Whatever happens, at the end it will became only thinner and thinner.

I have to disagree somewhat.

What made Softimage survive for a more couple years was ICE, what made XSI show up to common users was ICE. Not anything else.

Second. The capabilities of artists are evolving, they don't stand still. Even the perception of what is an artist.

The issue with ICE was lack of consistent language and context issues. If context would/could have been fixed things would have been different. In the end ICE had too many nodes.

Third. Even with all that the low number of XSI users obviously was the major issue for ICE.

Fourth. Like many things in Softimage, it seems to be just one step away from greatness. For example they could have made an excellent cloth simulation Syflex+ICE but no, it remained limited. Instead of going for Lagoa which already had established competition, they could have made the best cloth simulation by miles and planting a flag for cloth simulation everywhere. Every studio could have a Softimage seat for that propose.

Regarding ICE again, i think the right approach for an animation system is Two Level like Particle Flow in Max with ICE capability for making compounds and plugins. The Compound was a way to not have two levels but the language issues with ICE prevented a consistent approach.

[Hirazi Blue]

What made Softimage survive for a more couple years was ICE, what made XSI show up to common users was ICE. Not anything else.

While that's obviously the general perception and one the developers for obvious reasons had to play into, pre-ICE XSI obviously was a serious contender (AFAICT from my limited vantage point) in the mythical land of "character animation", a side all the marketing fluff IMHO neglected somewhat after ICE had arrived...
;)

[Mathaeus]

The issue with ICE was lack of consistent language and context issues. If context would/could have been fixed things would have been different. In the end ICE had too many nodes.

Regarding ICE again, i think the right approach for an animation system is Two Level like Particle Flow in Max with ICE capability for making compounds and plugins. The Compound was a way to not have two levels but the language issues with ICE prevented a consistent approach.

Yeah I knew it will end up somewhere around Max ICE is visual programming system, Max particle Flow is a particle system driven by nodes. That's not the same. If I'm correct, Pflow constantly operates only in what's in ICE called 'per point context' - so no 'context issues'. Just like Silo has no problems with operator stack, as it do not have operator stack.

Now if 'context issue' means ICE's automatic switch into particular context, according to what you use as 'get' node (point location, node location, whatever) - we already read explanation here, this is exactly to reduce the number of used nodes. I'd say, also it illustrates what I said here: once there is system in middle of artist and programmer world, it became so easy to run into total confusion of expectations and criteria. Hundreds of requests, each one is oxymoron.
For small comparison, Houdini solution for ICE context is, to do not have solution. You have to tell Houdini on which class (class could be ICE context) you want to create attribute, later, you can tell him to 'promote' the attribute into another class.
And yes this wants more nodes to describe the same thing ( but not all the time). For my mind influenced by ICE, it was extremely annoying, I liked ICE way - but after some time, not a problem, also I noticed some advantages of Houdini way. Anyway, which is most important, one system less to manage by developers ( If I'm correct).
We also have chance to read here, that big, very important customers from Japan weren't excited by ICE - my wild guess, again because of ICEs 'in middle' nature.

[FXDude]

I'm not out to shit on people's moods or happiness and I'm sorry (not really ) if I'll manage to do just that, but in spite of the 's awesomeness there's one thing nobody can contest: XSI's days are numbered.

Just to re-post what was posted on the list.

[...] sure "at some point in the future", Soft would inevitably start having issues on newer setups,
when Virtual Machines would come into play.

*Yet*.. when do you think would that be?
Soft runs just fine on Win8, and would surely still run fine on the Win9 which is itself for some time down the line.

... if not also the OS after that.
(os ver. coming out every couple of years, quite consistently with 3 versions back compatibility modes)

So we're looking at at least 8, if not 12+ years.

On top of the fact that people rarely switch to new OS'es very rapidely,
like so many are on still on Win7 which many perfer to win8
(new, absolutely is not always necessarily better)

And there will also be the advantage of anything made to work with 2015 will work as long as XSI works.
(no previous version incompatability issues)

And at some point, Exocortex, Mootz, and other plugins would not surprisingly become either more accessible if not free...
Which would make it yet more "killer" than it already is.

And if for any reason there would eventually be licensing fails, it would by then be quite legitimate to just use cracks.

________________________________________

But similarly otherwise, concerning the Future, (concerning those that can choose what they use)
when would you think something will surpass SI's general strengths?

And/or rather -what- will it be...

If Maya could have potentially been a closer replacement overall, it would have involved making quite a few changes
in areas that hasn't been touched since even before the last FXTree Update,
and it would be quite unrealistic to think that such changes would ever happen.


So that leaves the introduction of new players.

May it be releases of production studio software,
Pixar Premo?, .. Dreamworks Apollo?
Buf's own is suppose to come at any time early this year..
(any/all of which, "production/artist friendliness" seemed to have come -first- from the very start)


Or... that some new thing comes out of the blue
(not unlike the new FlowBox Comp package)

Also look at Exocortex Clara.io, who made a basic yet more than just functional online DCC all within a really short time, with usability that feels alot like a hybrid or "the best of" Softimage and Max .


... it might even be a 3rd party making a DCC out of Fabric (since Fabric won't (.. ever want to compete with Maya))

So who (the heck) knows.. but if you ask me, it would be pretty astonishing if some (far) more comparable options wouldn't be coming (way-way!) before Soft would actually stop running just fine,
especially with just 1 (one) non-specialized/general-purpose (and rental only) DCC considered to be "HighEnd", the void is just screaming to be filled.

____________________________

But until then, concerning longevity, we recently spoke of Eddie, but this all SO reminds me of exactly EDDIE.

Where we only realized how good it was until... well at least Windows is unlikely to go bottom-up anytime soon.

With a feature-set and/or subtle qualities that made it YEARS before it's time.

Enough to make me say..
<< Would love to use it on a box with more than 500mb of ram
(and higher than 8 bit depth) >>

Well, it seems that it did have 16bit depth..


Also,
"Softimage Eddie supports network batch rendering, 32- and 64-bit multi-processing, and an open plug-in architecture for custom tools."

So on a fast machine with not even that much ram, (after all this time) I would have choosen Eddie as it was,
*definitely* over Shake (10 Years later) , AfterEffects (then -OR- now),
and .. also over Nuke today?
Well it would actually be a hard decision(!) only because of floating point.
(only for when dealing with values going over "1", in which simple tricks can be used to easily go without, similar to using Photoshop in 16 bit mode)

Meaning, it would not be by nostalgia that would make the decision hard,
it would be because it was really quite exceptionally Streamlined, Efficient, Straight-Forward while being uniquely advanced.

________________

Apart from the things formally posted, it also had color matching tools that with a few clicks,
whatever you were integrating simply fit with your background.

An NLE timeline (3.5) where you could sequence comp trees together,which is another thing that Nuke only very recently finally had (in the Deluxe ver. of Nuke 9)

Nuke now has a pretty good Vector paint, but Eddie's paint would still be way(!) more sophisticated hands down, it was an entire program on it's own.

And memory management was remarkable (by sheer necessity back then)

You would work with 2k plates with trees spanning several pages, and it would constantly save caches, flush, and go-on with a couple other nodes..
So It would sort-of always take -all- of your (comparatively insignificant amount of) memory or whatever remained of your 128-256Mb of ram, and satisfy itself with that, and just keep chugging along just fine.
So with 4-8-16 Gigabytes... it would be quite something.

While most Software typically become sssllooowww at best, if not almost basically stop running, if memory limit is reached
(very much including hungry-hungry Nuke, which can basically -only- go through -all- nodes -all- the time)


And apart from it's bullet-point features, the working experience with it was remarkable, only because of tons of little things, or because of extremely refined workflow details, as if everything has been thought-of and thoroughly tested, making it extremely sturdy and fluid, you could tell that it was developed right along people that used it every day (also ring a bell?) if not being comp artist themselves, over at AnimalLogic.

________

Also Eddie, was the literally the first, and has been the (software only) basis, reference, or parent, of subsequent *Discreet*Logic solutions, to which have historically been the only things that could more closely match it.

Eddie's history itself is all intertwined between Soft, Animal-Logic, Discreet-Logic, and then back to Soft again, and including TheFoundry.

Discreet Logic was founded in 1991 by Richard Szalwinski, former director of sales for Montreal-based Softimage, along with two Softimage coworkers, Simon Mowbray, and Diana Shearwood. Discreet Logic's first business was as a licensed distributor and developer for Eddie, a two-dimensional software program developed by Animal Logic Pty. Ltd. Eddie was associated with Australian software engineer Bruno Nicoletti, who later founded visual effects software company The Foundry, in London, England. In 1992, Discreet Logic entered into a European distribution agreement with Softimage, and shifted its focus on Flame, one of the first software-only image compositing products, developed by Australian Gary Tregaskis.[2] Flame, which was originally named Flash, was first shown[3] at NAB in 1992, ran on the Silicon Graphics platform, and became the company's flagship product.

By the way, while Autodesk may have only mostly "maintained" Flame, plus or minus some nice or okay things, Flame has mostly remained 90% of what it was, that fact similarly in no way takes away any of it's own (non hardware related) still very current and real awesomeness.


Nevertheless, the point is, if Eddie wasn't exclusively on SGI's, it would *absolutely* still be one of the most refined, if not -the- most refined and (both major and micro-)feature-rich on many fronts.. after ~20 years (!)

How do you explain that? Time-travelling developers? Magic?
well.. define "Magic".. (passion)

As Stephen also noticed, I couldn't even find a decent screenshot,
which may have to do with the fact that it was mostly before the internet.

Crop from one of Stephens FlashBacks ::

I personally took those screenshots for marketing by the way

But you know.. as long as they can run, Really Exceptional software don't become old,
they very much become timeless proportionately to their goodness,
not unlike any really good song from any time, they just stay really good!

Does this (below) look like "old software" ? lol ;)
(impressive bullet-point list which still barely makes justice to what made it what it was but..)

Just look at those paint features, and/or pretty-much any other section.. talk about "timelessness"


But in any event, XSI can also *absolutely/definitely* -- in very much in the same way and for the same reasons -- qualify as one of those timeless and exceptional masterpieces.
(with it's Passes/overrides system, Non-Destructiveness, ICE, a, very good/intergrated 2D side to it, Everything working with everything, Fast Easy and intuitive, tons of very refined workflow subtleties etc... etc... and while it can play well with others, it's also entirely complete, integrated, and self-sufficient )

So all that, except running on a pretty sturdy platform this time, while having been made current to the very latest OS,
until what could more easily qualify as the "next best thing" comes around.

So SI becoming "outdated"? Hum... ;-]

Cheers & Merry Christmas!

I also installed and tested XSI ModTool 4.2 (from more than a decade ago) on Windows 8 for the heck of it.
(without running it in any sort of compatibility mode)

Posed-up RedJaiqua, Going everywhere possible, and installed/superficially tested a bunch of addons.





Eventually noticed a minor selection box refresh issue when selecting empty space when nothing was selected,
(selection box remaining drawn until panning, reselecting or whatever)

Which I only noticed after a while since I rarely select nothing when nothing's selected.

But as far as I could tell, everything went fine.

Merry Boxing Week!

[FXDude]

Edit: removed this second quote from the same thread

[NNois]

@FXDude
from my point of view it's annoying these reposts from the list, i use to think everyone interested could just read it on google or on theirs emails

[FXDude]

Sorry, perhaps it's that you personally go read the list, but it was mostly because of a perceived disconnect between here and there. (many were unaware of Flowbox for instance which was discussed here, and that goes the other way around)

And perhaps because the latest active topics page was half a page long, (perhaps because of the holidays) some of which being about Max, Houdini, & Maya (which is fine but..)

But okay.

[Draise]

I don't mind the reposts, it's quite interesting. I usually only come to here, and sometimes the mail list (which I have no idea how to read archives) for info.

Thanks.

[druitre]

Interesting read, thanks Fxdude.

I can read the mailinglist too, ofcourse, but I rarely do. Mailinglists don't work for me, forums do. My perception is similar as yours that there seems to be not too much overlap between this forum and the xsi mailinglist. (Not now but also not when there was more traffic)