SI 2013 sightings

[Hirazi Blue]

Softimage 2013 has officially been released for Subscription Customers.
After retweeting this message, Luc-Eric Rousseau had a little "bombshell" of his own:

I've handed Softimage dev management to a colleague to take a new opportunity on the Maya team, closer to film vfx.

(Quoted from here)

[Rork]

Don't read to much in that...

People were upset when Halfdan left the team to pursue other interests. Softimage didn't collapsed after that....
And isn't this normal? People come and people go within businesses, nothing 'conspiracy' going on there.

rob

[mixepix]

Maybe he got tired of all the wining. ;)

[Hirazi Blue]

Don't read to much in that...

Personally, I do not read too much into it, but it most definitely is "News".
It would be interesting to hear who replaced/will replace him though... ;)

edit: BTW I didn't claim to see any conspiracy. I relayed the info, called it a "bombshell",
a qualification it somehow seemed to deserve, and added a "sad" smilie.
That doesn't constitute starting a conspiracy theory or fear mongering or such in my book...

edit2: and I forgot to add, I personally and sincerely wish him well with his new adventure...

[ace63]

Meh - to me this sounds just like another one leaving the sinking ship

[Memag]

Maybe it's just better ship and crew.

[SreckoM]

Maybe he got tired of all the wining. ;)

It will not be much different there except much more people winning

Good luck there.

[IslandDreamer]

I installed SI 2013 this morning and I'm loving it so far. The HQV is much more responsive than I'd expected on my puny 768MB Nvidia GTX 460.

[Chris_TC]

Maybe it's just better ship and crew.

It may be a better crew, but it sure as heck is not a better ship.

[Fer]

No, nothing to worry about, Luc-eric is just helping the maya team "transplanting" an interactive Creative Environment for the next maya release

[ActionArt]

Seems like almost all of the original SI team is gone. Looks like most of them are working on Fabric Engine or Houdini and now Luc-Eric is gone. That's really sad. Could be the end of an era for SI. When this happened to LW they were dead in the water.

I just hope they've managed to find equal replacements for so many that left but it seems highly unlikely.

[McNistor]

Like others have said, Softimage could just as well be left dead in the water right now and in 5 years would still give a run for their money to most 3d apps out there.
I wouldn't worry much about good people leaving SI team, they left something behind anyway and I'm sure other good people will come.

edit_1: Well I'm not so sure that good people will come if I think more about it, but I really hope so.
edit_2: I'm surprised that no one mentioned the most probable reason for which luceric left there... Not that it's a bad thing or anything.
Anyway, he might be just around the corner ready to jump here and tell us himself. Or should we haunt him on the maya forums now?

[Hirazi Blue]

edit_1: Well I'm not so sure that good people will come if I think more about it, but I really hope so.

Well, there might be a new Autodesk policy: you have to work several years for the Softimage team
before you're allowed to join the Maya development team...

[jamination]

more than likely Maya is the preferred product to work on of the 3, he did mention there was a lot of R&D money being invested in Maya. Also, working in the Maya deptartment probably gets you more employment security.

[Fer]

Release Notes has landed:

http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/ind ... image_2013

[luceric]

Seems like almost all of the original SI team is gone. Looks like most of them are working on Fabric Engine or Houdini and now Luc-Eric is gone. That's really sad. Could be the end of an era for SI. When this happened to LW they were dead in the water.

I just hope they've managed to find equal replacements for so many that left but it seems highly unlikely.

A few loud mouths of the softimage dev team have moved to other things. However, that's a small part of the development team. One thing I find hillarious is how the community knows and talk about Jenifer, the Avid marketing girl, when she has had in fact nothing to do with making the product and knows little of 3D. The lesson is that the people you hear about in the community are not necessarily the people who do the most important things and make the product you love.

Over the years there might have been more than 300 people who can loosely say to have "worked for Softimage" at one point or another, in various positions. So it's not surprising that there are softimage people ending up everywhere, including Pixar, ILM, Max, Maya, Fabric. (Btw, except for one dev, everyone at Fabric only started to work on XSI in 2006, and left around the ADSK acquision. We started to work on XSI in 1997 and shipped v1 in 2000.)

We've been hiring and training a whole new set of developers for Softimage these last two years to replace the ranks. It brings new blood and new ideas. They will no doubt reconsider things us old ones have stopped considering. New people is a good thing, for example our main ICE guy had been hired only 4 years ago. We've always had success with new talents.