What if Softimage died?

[Falam]

Jump ship to one of the options now or stick it out, the attention given to Softimage, would make anyone think like this. Suppose you are a new studio, you want to stick with Autodesk. Autodesk shows you Maya and Softimage, not what is better, not what you would do, what is the best choice ?

[owei]

OK...some thoughts.

About the specification for Softimage Bellsey was talking about. I guess, to figure out a specification means to add some "life insurance" to Soft. So that could mean to develop in a certain direction and make existing tools better and bug free. I think that could be a good way to keep Softimage up and running...but what could the be? Any ideas??


@luceric

for ever
- print "Maya is better than XSI"
next



well, I guess you never worked with Maya nor with Softimage on a day-to-day bases like the guys around here do for many, many years. You might have the insights in the programming behind the curtain, but experience tells us, as we use Softimage and have the comparison to Maya, it is not true! Switching to Maya means to us swallowing a toad. Not because we don´t like Maya (in fact, we don´t), more because it does not work as good as Soft does AND has a crappy workflow...we are talking about tools, and Soft is a great tool where Maya simply isn´t...talking about usability and NOT what might be under the hood.

My experience is, that some studios, mainly using Maya, would like to use more of Softimage in their pipeline, but there is a lag of good and experienced freelancers to do the jobs. So mostly you end up with a mixed thing and have 2-3 Softimage guys and 10 Maya guys, where the softimage guys ALWAYS outperform the 10 Maya guys..because Soft simply works (mostly because ICE, passes, groups, overrides, operator stack AND workflow etc)! You can rely on Soft, as I already mentioned, to 98%.

2 years to see all the 3rd party Soft developers vanished? Well, maybe they are more about making a living and have a small revenue..? AD tries to squeeze the citron and get as much revenue out of it as possible. That might not be the correct strategy in nower times. So I guess, 3rd party developer for Soft are smarter...even as long as AD does not it´s job, but asking money for it. So people could start giving their money from the subscription to 3rd party developers instead to AD, because there might be a bigger value for the customer...

[Bullit]

Clearly and conveniently forgetting it's EXACTLY why Avid sold off Softimage in the first place. It was know by all that Avid's CEO was going to return the company to core values to bolster shareholder and Wall st confidence, it did that by asset stripping.

Softimage was sold to save Avid. They needed cash.
Avid was in red - living from debt, not making any profit- due to their arrogance they didn't noticed the world changed, a bit like SGI. So they had to sell or go down.

[Bullit]

So people could start giving their money from the subscription to 3rd party developers instead to AD, because there might be a bigger value for the customer...

Certainly compared to last releases an user would get better improvements buying motozoid, exocortex plugins in most cases.

[Eugen]

I was thinking Eugene was talking about "opening up software" generally, not just doing some ice.

Right, I like to promote the idea of 'opening' other aspects of the software, too, that are still too hermetic. That does not mean Soft is not a powerful and flexible Software already.

Telling nothing new - the concept in the nineties was more or less letting the users focus on the 'artist/aesthetics' part and protect them from the 'tech' parts, coding and fiddling with the internals. In the meantime, it became clear that the tech part is an art-form in itself, or simply a necessity for complex scenes, and the best work we see is of course a blend of both.

Maya had the opposite approach right from the start, but they forgot about, or failed, making it feel 'artsy'.
It's still clunky, but have the scene graph right under your nose. You would say now this is one of the strengths of Maya, wouldn't you, and if you don't need to look under the hood, just don't, but you can if you need to.

ICE was Softimage going 'tech', then, and saved it's neck, but it was somewhat patched on, and the scene graph itself is still a black box.
ICE is an operator toolset, not a scene graph toolset. All the pros and cons have been debated a hundred times.

All good, wouldn't there be the problem that the black box inside Soft is just a little too big to make it possible to write operators via SDK that are 'equal' to factory operators.
We could have a long debate now whether you should even have to use the classic SDK anymore or just ICE. Unfortunately, out of sheer ignorance of Autodesk, ICE does not complement all the geometry types, like curves. Also, visual programming might not be everybody's flavor, and you cannot do concepts like e.g. recursions with it.


So, all I'm advertising again here is making the black box less black.
You, Luc-Eric, recently mentioned the scene graph of Soft being more complex than e.g. Maya's, with hundreds of nodes having to be connected internally. This sounds a bit extreme, it would be very interesting to learn what's really going on in there, and why it is so complicated to expose more of the workings.

Of course this might be a costly thing to do, but these days, no matter what you ask for, it's too costly anyway. (Even the huge small annoying things wishlist is rotting in a corner as it seems, but ok, let's wait for the first beta drop.)
You estimated 2 months ago that the SDK API thing would be a task for one dev for one cycle, and now it's two years... is there actually anyone of the core architects of Soft still available to make an educated guess about this?


There obviously was no long debate on the Maya side if it would be costly to rework the whole UI to Qt, for example, or other huge changes. Maya should be promoted, and that's what is happening.
If Softimage falls short of substantial improvements under AD, it's solely because this is the conscious decision of AD, not because it's too complex a task.


That, combined with this vague, hesitant tone of the officials, or just utter silence, about the future of Soft is what is so f*ed up.

Bellsey, on second thought, coming down here and asking us if we are ok with getting Soft stripped down even further, is actually an insult...
You know how capable Soft is, and how much it's users enjoy working with it, and that it could be even much more, would there be the dedication to do so.

You guys do what you have to do, but stop acting as if we would have any influence on what's going to happen. You get good feedback all the time, from all the different user groups, what more do you want to hear?

But, for what it's worth, here's my opinion, again: among other things, open up the SDK further, because that will help Soft survive longer, if this happens to be what you want.

[Letterbox]

Too much doom and gloom... a dose of reality

There will always be clients that will pay for quality work, that breaks boundaries and values artistic input, just look at Polynoid's Nike reel, or without Eric's tools the stunning Nissan ad would not have been possible.

Does not matter what luceric says, does not matter what autodesk does, even if they abandoned it this year, next year or even later stopped development all together. They cant take the version you have away.

And so, irrespective, you'd still find the most Creative, Artistic and visually engaging work shown, be it at ÜberTage, Vimeo or Youtube and IS done in Softimage.

[Bellsey]

Bellsey, on second thought, coming down here and asking us if we are ok with getting Soft stripped down even further, is actually an insult...
You know how capable Soft is, and how much it's users enjoy working with it, and that it could be even much more, would there be the dedication to do so.

You guys do what you have to do, but stop acting as if we would have any influence on what's going to happen. You get good feedback all the time, from all the different user groups, what more do you want to hear?

But, for what it's worth, here's my opinion, again: among other things, open up the SDK further, because that will help Soft survive longer, if this happens to be what you want.

It's not an insult at all. I've just thrown something out there for debate, that's all. And as I said, I'm not conducting any official poll or survey here.

Although, not many seem to have really directly answered, lol. Forget about getting bogged down in changing the price, or selling off the M&E division, they really have no relevence to what I'm asking.
I've just suggested two stark choices for debate - survival or death, but to survive you have to chose an avenue of development. Many have said open up the API, which sounds ok, but in what area? It's not much good saying 'everything', when there needs to be a specific focus. Open the API, but with what focus and purpose for the product - modelling/texturing, rendering, animation, character animation, motion graphics, fxtree, simulations. There's no right or wrong answer, but pick one.

[Eugen]

In my world it would help opening the operator SDK.

Copypaste from the SDK help:

"PolygonMesh.Set
Sets from a complete data description of the polygon mesh. If you use it on an object with some clusters and you change the topology the burden of updating the clusters is on the user."

"NurbsCurveList.Set
Sets a nurbs curve list from a complete data description. This is only available from scripted operators, if you use it on a object with some clusters and you change the topology the burden of updating the clusters is on the user. For non-scripted operators this property can only be set if the object has been frozen."


This cluster thing.
https://www.si-community.com/forum/v ... s&start=20
Scroll down a bit, I've attached an image down there.


Custom operators have always had the restriction of being blocked from modifying/updating clusters (access denied error if you try).
Yet this is important, because clusters need their indices updated when the topology changes, as do factory/internal operators.
If you cannot update them, cluster consistency and thus the operator stack of an object can become corrupted, and this is bad.

Nobody outside your dev team knows exactly what is going on in there, it's not documented. Black box. Patents, secretiveness, what do I know.
It may be complex, and I can't estimate how much headache it would mean to wield such an SDK extension, but it's possible. Of course, it's working happily all the time with the factory ops.
It's something about keeping track of point/poly/subcurve indices, comparing them to some internal table and do some index shifting.

ICE circumvents the problem somehow. MaterialID attribute was introduced therefore, for example. I'm not proficient enough here to go into any details.


What would be the benefit of a better operator SDK? Well, 3rd parties can write custom ops already, of course, but then these would be watertight and solid, not a compromise bearing the risk of crashing your object.
We are used to nice and clean modeling tools in Softimage, and custom tools (ops) should be, too.
ICE is just not the perfect solution for all operator needs (no doubt it's a brilliant thing). It doesn't like curves, for example.

Prominent example for a custom operator (non-ICE): Creation Splice. You see the potential, don't you. Will suffer from the same restrictions.


So, is it possible to come up with a clean solution for this? Check it out with your team, maybe it's even not too complicated.
If it is, maybe you could introduce some inbetween layer to abstract the complexity from 3rd party devs.

We are not in a hurry, you can work on stuff like this slowly in the background, because others have very different ideas where Softimage should be pushed, but it would be nice if you started at all, because this issue is pending for how many years.

It would mean fixing one ugly handicap, and that can only help survive - or what twisted logic would say the opposite?

Thanks for listening!

[Bellsey]

nice answer, but maybe you're not quite getting what I'm talking about. I'm not conducting any official poll or research here, so I'm not bothered about getting into specifics and mesh sets, curves and materialsIDs, I'm talking about at a high level.
Reading your post, I'm guessing that you're saying that you'd push for Soft to focus on just modelling and texturing.

[Eugen]

You read that correctly - modeling, including curve modeling, texturing, rendering. Bread and butter for a freelancer.
Want to write more curve modeling stuff yourself now? Welcome. If not, open the SDK at least so others can.

But you mean, should we decide whether Soft to be a modeling OR animation OR effects package OR whatever package?
All of that, as it always was laid out, of course. If you do not have the resources - and I think I'm repeating myself - make it a platform (SDK) for other to write whatever tools are needed. It's happening all the time already, if you noticed. ICE is a platform, too.

Is that high-levelish enough?

[Hirazi Blue]

@Bellsey - When I read your original post on this topic, I assumed (perhaps wrongly), you meant focusing the software on a specific field of interest ("Film & VFX" versus "Games" versus "Archviz" etc.). That would be an acceptable idea. Pinpointing one element of Softimage to focus on (be it modeling, rigging, animation whatever) seems kind of strange. IMHO Softimage doesn't necessarily excel at any of those things (there is a lot of dedicated software that does much of this stuff better), it's the complete package that makes it all worth it. (2 cents, IMHO and all that).

[Bellsey]

But you mean, should we decide whether Soft to be a modeling OR animation OR effects package OR whatever package?

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. It doesn't matter about if we have resources, etc, etc. Push all that to one side, I'm just throwing this out there for discussion.

[Eugen]

We are discussing, aren't we.

Shouldn't you AD guys know best how Soft, given it got specialized on something, could fit in your portfolio? What's your suggestion, then?
ICE? Isn't that what you are doing already anyway? Why ask? Are we talking 'particle plugin' again?

Soft is used in many different places, because it is a general purpose 3D application. Set a (strong) focus on no matter what, and loose part of your user base in the mid-term. What, is totally up to you.

And what if you boiled it down to whatever you see fit, will you then happily continue it, longer than you are planning now?

[MauricioPC]

I would vote for "Advertisement and Games". (just created a new field)

But I guess all major freelancers use Softimage best for Advertisement and Games (huge market, next-gen, etc) that need good and advanced tools.


I'm guessing that the "VFX and Film" will always be a Maya/Houdini land. We should focus on the other ones. And I think in revenues, Advertisement and Games roll a lot more money than films.

Just my 0,000001 pieces of cents.

[Bellsey]

We are discussing, aren't we.

Shouldn't you AD guys know best how Soft, given it got specialized on something, could fit in your portfolio? What's your suggestion, then?
ICE? Isn't that what you are doing already anyway? Why ask? Are we talking 'particle plugin' again?

Soft is used in many different places, because it is a general purpose 3D application. Set a (strong) focus on no matter what, and loose part of your user base in the mid-term. What, is totally up to you.

And what if you boiled it down to whatever you see fit, will you then happily continue it, longer than you are planning now?

This isn't about us though, As I said, (ADSK hat off), I'm not asking in any official capacity. I guess I'm perhaps trying to turn the tables a little, as you guys are always quick to offer opinions to us, so I'm just asking - ok, what would you do? There's no right or wrong answer here, I'm just throwing it out there.

@Hirazi - I guess I'm meaning both things really. If someone said, for example Film/TV, would it be more TV for film. And something like TV can break down into commercials, vfx, motion graphics. As could film. I guess a better way to put it, would be an area of speciality to facilitate a market.

[Eugen]

Isn't it a bit difficult to pick those fields apart? The tools and workflows are mostly the same in Film/Ads/Games, and they overlap more and more.
Difference is maybe the visual standards.

General purpose...
Need a focus? -> platform