Softimage hall of fame

[bb3d]

I think it's time to honor all the great people who made Softimage what it is today, contributing their talent, passion and time to it, making 3D modeling and animation an awesome experience

First of all I want to thank all the initial developers of Softimage XSI.
I don't know all their names, maybe somebody else can add them?

But in the last few years, it were the 3rd-party developers who kept Softimage alive and brought it forward, making it even more awesome, contributing addons, scripts and tutorials to the community.

The following list is not complete, so I want to encourage other people to extend this list...

- Helge Mathee (Mtools, Momentum and other cool stuff)

- Eric Mootz (emTools, emFluid, emPolygonizer...)

- Paul "Pooby" Smith (ICE fur, ICE tutorials...)

- Mathaeus (Kristinka hair)

- Holger Schoenberger (BA shaders, Royal Render)

- Thiago Costa (Lagoa Multiphysics)

- Michael Buettner (mbFeatherTools)

- The Redshift team: Nikolas Burtnyk, Panos Zobolas, Rob Slater (Redshift for Softimage)

- The Solidangle team (Arnold for Softimage)

- The Chaos Group team (Vray for Softimage)

- The 3Dlight team (3Dlight for Softimage)

- 3Dquakers (Forester)

- Exocortex (Slipstream, Fury, Crate)

- Hirazi Blue & Owei (Softimage Community)

That's from me so far. Feel free to reply to this thread and add more names

[Alen]

Oldies but goldies:
Alan Fregtman - shaders
TheBIG Muh - shaders
Kim Aldis - various plug-ins
Joseph R Saltzman - 3d tutorials

[Hirazi Blue]

Definitely more "1st party" than anything else and not a developer, but in any list commemorating the glory days of XSI Stephen Blair AKA xsisupport deserves a more than honorable mention, not just for doing his job very well, but for quite obviously going “the extra mile” to support us all.
;)

[Daniel Brassard]

Short of including all the names on the XSI Mailing List, SI Community, Softimage Blog or XSI Base:

Adam Sale
Adam Seeley
Ahmidou Liazidi
Alan Fregtman
Alan Jones
Amaan Akram
Andy Moorer
Andy Nicholas
Anto Matkovic
Ben Houston
Ben Rogall
Bradley Gabe
Byron Nash
Caesar Saez
Chris Marshall
Christophet Crouzet
Daniel Langlois (Founder)
Ed Manning
Eric Thivierge
Eugen Sares
Fabricio Chamon
Guillaume Laforge
Graham Bell
Graham D. Clark
Gustavo Eggert Boehs
Halfdan Ingvarsson
Helge Mathee
Holger Schönberger
Jared Glass
Jason Brynford-Jones (Chinny)
Jeremie Passerin
Jerome Couture-Gagnon
Julian Johnson
Julien Carmagnac
Kim Aldis
Leonard Koch
Luc-Eric Rousseau
Manny Papamanos
Marc-Andre Carbonneau
Mark Schoennagel (Mr. NoIcon Underwear and all around evangelist)
Martin Yara
Matt Lind
Matt Morris
Michael Isner
Miquel Campos
Mirko Jankovic
Niclas Schlapmann
Nika Ragua
Ola Madsen
Oleg Bliznuk (Mr. Core)
Paul Doyle
Patrick Boucher
Pedro Alpiarça dos Santos
Philip Taylor
Piotrek Marczaks
Raffaele Fragapane (Mr. Python)
Reinhard Claus
Rob Chapman (Tekano)
Sandy Sutherland
Sakana-Ya
Stefan Kubicek
Stephen Blair
Steven Caron
Tim Borgmann
Tim Crowson
Todd Akita
Vitaly Bulgarov
Vincent Ullmann

[Rez007]

If support (XSI/Softimage) is included, and I Stephen's name is already there, then I would like to add Manny to the list as well. He has helped me out in some crunch times significantly.

[luceric]

The main designers (not developers, program managers ) behind a lot of what you like in XSI, whether it's the animation mixer, scene explorer, typical XSI animation workflowd, the "ass kicker" for the general UI consistency, etc, is Rejean Gagne, also the creator (and oscar certificate recipient) of the Actor module in SI3D. The software would have never shipped without him leading the team's direction. He never touched modelling or rendering though.

Jean-Marc Krattli and Alexis Smirnov are the reason you have render passes/overrides and all the property inheritance so fundamental to XSI. Is there an XSI without first a Twister/Sumatra, I don't think so. if we had started with just animation or modeling, everything would work differently. Before a weight map can be a cluster property, someone has had to need that concept in the unreleased rendering-only app called Twister.

Then you need to add to that the "DS sauce", which brings all the property page workflows, lock recycle, and other UI elements, driven my Micheal Sheasby. Charles Migos did all the visuals. There were probably over 100 developers over the years.

Without these three parts, you may have gotten a 3D app, but it wouldn't be recongnizable as XSI.

---
at Microsoft, Avid and therefore Softimage Co., a program manager was a programmer that has grown to write the specs and design the application, for developers to implemented. At Autodesk, a program manager is a business person and the people who writes specs are called Product Designers.

[NNois]

Thank you for the insights

[mattmos]

Got to give a shout out to Raffael Dickreuter as well, XSIBase was a fantastic community for quite a few years.

[Alen]

Yes Raffael, his XSI base was great addon to XSI!

A

[Bellsey]

Ah Twister, I remember that. A great idea that was in many ways, ahead of it's time. Your could say (imho) a forerunner to the likes of Katana and Clarisse, before they were even twinkles in someone's eye. You could also say the same about Behaviour and Face Robot, great ideas and software, but too ahead of their time for people to adopt when they first appeared.

As for the hall of fame list, a good idea, but just too many names to mention really. But looking at the list here, there some obvious ones (imho) that are missing and just off the top of my head, Erik Goulet, Ben White, James Rodgers, Halfdan, André Foisy, Ronald Beirouti, Dave Lajoie, Hans Payer, Jeff Wilson, Phill Avanzato, Greg Punchatz, the whole Soft team in Japan.

[Rork]

I remember Twister as well, and was very impressed with those renders that came out of the beta program. The 'glass jar in front of window' render still is a vivid one.

@ Luc Eric: Is the passes/partitions system patented? Or asked differently, is there a reason we don't see this workflow in other 3D apps, like Maya or Max? (Max has/had a 3rd party script, so it's plausible for both to have this implemented....)
And no.... all that contribution maps crap is way too complicated and MR only. ;-)

I know some of the passes lost a bit of their meaning with AOV's now, but having the opportunity to 'extract' and 're-shade' parts of the scene with partitions is so useful.
I still think that Maya could benefit from this big time.

cheers!

rob

[Hirazi Blue]

I for once do not mean this cynically: "Team Singapore" deserves a lot of credit all of its own... ;)