ICE: For TDs only?

[Memag]

I hope that Softimage will work out for you.
And I wouldn't be worried about TD specific and "doom" rumors.
To say it's TD specific could be considered a compliment, cause ICE is that powerful, but at the same time SI is available to common people and artists.
And the "outdated" tools are still pretty much capable for a job. It depends of your 3d needs and skill.
However there are always updates to other corners of the software.

I hope they will never stop pushing it further, until Max and Maya are merely an ICE compound. >:)

Good luck and welcome.

[Tekano]

Can I just add, the company where I work as a freelancer here in London, Studio AKA, has about 30 Softimage seats and about the same again for the render farm and has used Softimage for everything (except maybe compositing which it still uses AE) since before it was owned by Microsoft way back in '98. Out of that 30 or so folk there are only one or two ICE users, (myself included) the rest are modellers, animators, TDs, Lighters etc. So in no way at can Softimage be called an FX app only....

[Chris_TC]

but im afraid that SI is moving to TD seat, and AD is trying to convert SI in a TD-VFX software to complement maya and 3ds max..In my office we use one software or try to do it for all the staff and we dont want to use the Entertainment Creation Suite (4 in 1)

I wouldn't worry about that at all, Softimage is an excellent allround application. Last time I tried to model something in Maya it was useless without installing a 3rd party plugin (MJ poly tools or whatever it was called).

I don't want to go down that road, so I'll just make a quick statement: to me, Max and Maya feel like boats that have been patched up again and again. They float, but I wouldn't want to sit in them. They're collections of plugins and scripts without proper integrations. Soft did the right thing. Every new feature feels like it's a natural part of the software. With ICE we have seen a steady progression. Slowly but surely it's receiving access to almost everything inside of Soft. And it doesn't feel tacked on, instead it's become a very solid core element. Because of ICE, Syflex is now much better integrated and faster than ever.

[Chris_TC]

I hope they will never stop pushing it further, until Max and Maya are merely an ICE compound. >:)

Hahaha, that is hilarious.
"I need some PaintFX."
"Sure, no problem. Let me just explode the Maya compound and find the node."

[Memag]

And because of ICE (...lagoa, momentum, Mootzoid stuff) many came to know about Softimage.
My spark of interest was tweak tool and proportional modeling I've seen in Aaron Sims videos back then.