Available for work
It's looking like I'll be teaching at a university in the fall, but between now and then my schedule is open. I'm honestly willing to tackle anything that'll help pay the bills. So feel free to contact me off-list if you need someone to help out. The university job isn't set in stone either, so if another opportunity comes along I'm happy to hear about it. Thanks Paul Sent from my electric telephone machine -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
MSVCR110.dll - event ID 1000 crash
Softimage 2015 SP2 has suddenly stopped working for me with this error in the Event Viewer: Faulting application name: XSI.exe, version: 13.2.163.0, time stamp: 0x55fa73b1 Faulting module name: MSVCR110.dll, version: 11.0.51106.1, time stamp: 0x5098826e I've done a re-install of Softimage, run runonce.bat as administrator as well as doing a repair of the Visual C++ Redistributable and I keep getting the error. Any idea what else can be done? I'm running Windows 10 Pro. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral)
Re: MSVCR110.dll - event ID 1000 crash
Duhhh - I forgot the #1 rule of Softimage - delete your user profile. I just did it & fixed everything. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral) On Feb 9, 2016, at 4:51 PM, Paul Griswold <pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com> wrote: Softimage 2015 SP2 has suddenly stopped working for me with this error in the Event Viewer: Faulting application name: XSI.exe, version: 13.2.163.0, time stamp: 0x55fa73b1 Faulting module name: MSVCR110.dll, version: 11.0.51106.1, time stamp: 0x5098826e I've done a re-install of Softimage, run runonce.bat as administrator as well as doing a repair of the Visual C++ Redistributable and I keep getting the error. Any idea what else can be done? I'm running Windows 10 Pro. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://clz.es/r/RayI1iPB1fhKvkDwA4PsnvBCZLkz17cMumtNqs3cmeG9-DCPILCM1q9Vwn5RcEOd?l=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cloze.com%3Fkme%3Dm-referral)
Re: Can't reinstall Soft - help!
Thank you! I figured it was some sort of registry issue, but I know messing with the registry can lead to disaster so I stayed out of it. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral) On Oct 30, 2015, at 4:13 PM, Stephen Blair <softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> wrote: Just go in the registry and get rid of the Softimage Install entry. something like this: [http://xsisupport.com/2011/03/14/motionbuilder-error-reading-registry-key-during-uninstall/](http://xsisupport.com/2011/03/14/motionbuilder-error-reading-registry-key-during-uninstall/) On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Paul Griswold <[pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com](mailto:pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com)> wrote: Hi Softimage, I was trying to clean up my drive today by uninstalling older versions of Software, removing things, etc. and have run into a problem. Softimage is totally uninstalled, but when I run the installer, it tells me it's already installed and won't go any further. It's not listed in Programs & Fea
Can't reinstall Soft - help!
Hi Softimage, I was trying to clean up my drive today by uninstalling older versions of Software, removing things, etc. and have run into a problem. Softimage is totally uninstalled, but when I run the installer, it tells me it's already installed and won't go any further. It's not listed in Programs & Features in the control panel, so I can't do a repair. Is there a way to force the installer to re-install? This is the final SP2 version I'm dealing with. Thanks, - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral)
Audio question - sequencer?
Hey guys - quick sequencer question. Is there any way to play an audio track inside the camera sequencer? I have to match my cameras to the audio I've been given, but it doesn't seem like you can play a clip inside the sequencer. I managed to play audio with it, but each time there's a cut in the timeline, the audio starts over. Thanks, - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral)
OT: WebGLStudio.js
This has been on my never-ending list of things to check out, but I haven't had the time. I'm just curious if any of you had an opinion on it: http://webglstudio.org/ Here's the demo site: http://webglstudio.org/demo/ It certainly seems very interesting. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral)
Re: particles save - crash
I finally had a chance to get back to my scene that was crashing every time I saved. I've tried save as and still get the same crash. Today I went in and tried to figure out if one of the point clouds were the problem. I managed to find one point cloud where, if I try to delete it, Softimage crashes. If I try to freeze it, Softimage crashes. I tried opening that point cloud, deleting all the nodes but leaving the root in tact then doing a save-as, but still crashed. Might be time to go back to an older version of the scene and rebuild it. - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral) On May 15, 2015, at 7:49 PM, Matt Lind softimage@listproc.autodesk.com wrote: I've run into similar issues when developing tools. Try doing a 'save as...' instead of 'save'. Matt Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 12:55:58 -0400 From: Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com Subject: Re: particles save - crash To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Probably true - Process Monitor to the rescue! I
particles save - crash
I'm having a weird problem with a scene today. When I try to save, it gets down to saving particles and then crashes. When I check the debug info, it says XSI didn't have the appropriate access to write to a directory, but it doesn't say what directory. I've checked every directory I could think of and couldn't find any permission issues. I've already done the typical runonce.bat, but I haven't deleted my user folder yet. Any ideas what could be going on? There's nothing unusual about the scene as far as I can tell. Thanks, - Paul Sent via [Cloze](https://www.cloze.com?kme=m-referral)
Re: Lets Hope Autodesk Buys the Foundry!
Doesn't ADSK own Toxik, Composite, Smoke, Flame, FX Tree (Eddie, Media Illusion, Matador), as well as Elastic Reality (inside the FX Tree)? On top of that they have a fantastic vector paint program called Sketchbook Designer (not Sketchbook Pro, though that's pretty spiffy too). It seems like they already own enough technology to create the greatest compositor the world has ever seen. I wonder what the problem is? Leadership? Nah -PG ᐧ On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 12:58 AM, Marc Brinkley marc.brink...@microsoft.com wrote: I could see ADSK buying Foundry for Nuke\Mari\Katana. ADSK doesn’t have similar toolsets and that would be reason enough to shore up their tool chain. That would be the final pieces to their monopoly. *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Raffaele Fragapane *Sent:* Tuesday, December 16, 2014 3:05 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: Lets Hope Autodesk Buys the Foundry! It's owned by an investment group. They sell in a particular hurry ESPECIALLY when something is going well. You sell at peak value shortly after a round of re-valuing purchases and hype, when cash value is high for returns, and earnings prospects are high to entice buyers. As for who'll be buying, I'd be surprised if it was AD, but can't rule it out, a media group or an unexpected games-side player or something like that seems more likely though. Or maybe DS will decide to piss in AD's cornflakes buying it, but I doubt they are willing to shell out 200-250M pounds for such an unfamiliar patents package and software they have no cross-sales potential or sales network to merge and reduce in. On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 8:31 PM, David Saber davidsa...@sfr.fr wrote: Why is it sold? I thought Modo was going well... ? -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
primary ray visibility on polygon clusters?
Is it possible to override the primary ray visibility on polygon clusters? I know you can add a visibility property, but that's all or none. -Paul
Re: SemiOT: organizing images textures
...@gmail.com wrote: XNview here, previously acdsee. ive tried zoner and ifran and bridge, xnview just works well for me. remap the mouse to scroll images, put thumbnails at 192x192m change background to dark grey (turning off thumbnail shadow etc) and its quick too. I purely use image viewers as just that though, screaming through large collections of textures / ref images etc, then drag/drop into photoshop. I dont use any of the editing features etc. On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I might be taking back what I said about Zoner. I've been testing it FastStone today, along with continuing to use Bridge. Zoner honestly does a really good job of being not just a fewer, but an organizer. It's basically a cross between Bridge, Lightroom and XnView. It handles video, vectors, and all the normal bitmap formats. It also doesn't choke on HDRs - which Bridge can do. And, it has no problem with network drives. Although their website looked very spammy, I'm fairly impressed with it. The only real negative I can come up with at the moment is, the organizational options are limited to just favorites. I'd like to be able to create collections the way you can in Bridge. But beyond that, it's certainly worth a look. -Paul On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 7:01 PM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net wrote: For quick video viewing, I use DJView http://windjview.sourceforge.net/ I leave it on my desktop as an icon, and just drag the video file from my file browser onto the DJView icon. The reason that I like it, is because it will deal with a series of stills (even Softimage .pic files) I hope you find that useful. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:23 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: Doing a little research this afternoon. Xnview has one big problem as far as I can tell. If you try to favorite a network folder, it favorites it, but when you click on the favorite it freaks out and takes you to SkyDrive instead. Since all my images, textures, etc., are all on a server, that puts Xnview out of the picture. Irfranview doesn't seem to have any organization tools at all, but it's still a great little image viewer. Zoner Photo Studio came up in some searches. The first negative I see is, they require you to sign up to their website just to get the free version. It feels very pro-sumer in how they present it, but maybe that's just my impression. It's got a nice, Lightroom-like interface, but I'm just concerned it's one of those programs that attaches adware to your system, sells your email address, etc again - that's just the vibe I'm getting. FastStone Image Viewer was listed as an alternative to ACDSee. I've never heard of it have no opinion. I might give it a try. It can be found here: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I forgot about Xnview. I think it has some decent features. I'm not sure if it handles video, though. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Martin Yara furik...@gmail.com wrote: A few years ago I was using Windows Photo Gallery or Live Gallery or something like that, can't remember the name, a free app from Microsoft. It was interesting. I was creating my own texture library with tags, keywords and categories, but I couldn't finish it. It's just too much work. For just visualizing images I use Irfanview too. Martin -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956* sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: SemiOT: organizing images textures
I may end up writing something up and posting it to SI-Community. I'm waiting on client revisions so I spent the morning finding more packages to test: IMatch 5 Digital Asset Manager, Photo Supreme, DBGallery, and Phase One Media Pro are this morning's fun. Sadly, ACDSee started choking and crashing a LOT once I started point it to my full texture library on the server. I think I've got around 40,000 textures stock photos, which seems like a decent test for these smaller (not a full-blown asset management system) apps. They all have interesting approaches, costs, and functionality. Oh, and I too use Extensis Suitcase Fusion. It's ok, but not fantastic. Again, it somewhat chokes on the nearly 80,000 fonts on the file server. Yes... I'm somewhat of a digital hoarder. But I guess wanting things to be organized makes me a collector! -Paul On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net wrote: Thanks, Paul...good reviews. I just wanted to let you know that FastStone does not handle HDMI files. On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 10:42 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: Nice, I'm having a look. Thank you Rob ! Le 17/10/2014 16:25, Rob Wuijster a écrit : Suitcase Fusion -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
SemiOT: organizing images textures
I was curious to know what any of you out there who have huge collections of reference images, textures, etc., do to organize them all. I was watching one of Feng Zhu's videos lately and saw he was using ACDSee Pro. I personally like IrfranView for viewing images, but I've been using Adobe Bridge since the CC update to organize my collection. But Bridge still feels a bit clunky. It'd be great to have something like Bridge that was as fast as ACDSee or IrfranView, but supported video like VLC does and could handle thousands and thousands of images videos. Anyway, just curious to hear what people are using these days. Thanks, Paul
Re: SemiOT: organizing images textures
I forgot about Xnview. I think it has some decent features. I'm not sure if it handles video, though. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Martin Yara furik...@gmail.com wrote: A few years ago I was using Windows Photo Gallery or Live Gallery or something like that, can't remember the name, a free app from Microsoft. It was interesting. I was creating my own texture library with tags, keywords and categories, but I couldn't finish it. It's just too much work. For just visualizing images I use Irfanview too. Martin
Re: SemiOT: organizing images textures
Doing a little research this afternoon. Xnview has one big problem as far as I can tell. If you try to favorite a network folder, it favorites it, but when you click on the favorite it freaks out and takes you to SkyDrive instead. Since all my images, textures, etc., are all on a server, that puts Xnview out of the picture. Irfranview doesn't seem to have any organization tools at all, but it's still a great little image viewer. Zoner Photo Studio came up in some searches. The first negative I see is, they require you to sign up to their website just to get the free version. It feels very pro-sumer in how they present it, but maybe that's just my impression. It's got a nice, Lightroom-like interface, but I'm just concerned it's one of those programs that attaches adware to your system, sells your email address, etc again - that's just the vibe I'm getting. FastStone Image Viewer was listed as an alternative to ACDSee. I've never heard of it have no opinion. I might give it a try. It can be found here: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I forgot about Xnview. I think it has some decent features. I'm not sure if it handles video, though. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Martin Yara furik...@gmail.com wrote: A few years ago I was using Windows Photo Gallery or Live Gallery or something like that, can't remember the name, a free app from Microsoft. It was interesting. I was creating my own texture library with tags, keywords and categories, but I couldn't finish it. It's just too much work. For just visualizing images I use Irfanview too. Martin
Re: SemiOT: organizing images textures
I might be taking back what I said about Zoner. I've been testing it FastStone today, along with continuing to use Bridge. Zoner honestly does a really good job of being not just a fewer, but an organizer. It's basically a cross between Bridge, Lightroom and XnView. It handles video, vectors, and all the normal bitmap formats. It also doesn't choke on HDRs - which Bridge can do. And, it has no problem with network drives. Although their website looked very spammy, I'm fairly impressed with it. The only real negative I can come up with at the moment is, the organizational options are limited to just favorites. I'd like to be able to create collections the way you can in Bridge. But beyond that, it's certainly worth a look. -Paul On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 7:01 PM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net wrote: For quick video viewing, I use DJView http://windjview.sourceforge.net/ I leave it on my desktop as an icon, and just drag the video file from my file browser onto the DJView icon. The reason that I like it, is because it will deal with a series of stills (even Softimage .pic files) I hope you find that useful. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:23 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: Doing a little research this afternoon. Xnview has one big problem as far as I can tell. If you try to favorite a network folder, it favorites it, but when you click on the favorite it freaks out and takes you to SkyDrive instead. Since all my images, textures, etc., are all on a server, that puts Xnview out of the picture. Irfranview doesn't seem to have any organization tools at all, but it's still a great little image viewer. Zoner Photo Studio came up in some searches. The first negative I see is, they require you to sign up to their website just to get the free version. It feels very pro-sumer in how they present it, but maybe that's just my impression. It's got a nice, Lightroom-like interface, but I'm just concerned it's one of those programs that attaches adware to your system, sells your email address, etc again - that's just the vibe I'm getting. FastStone Image Viewer was listed as an alternative to ACDSee. I've never heard of it have no opinion. I might give it a try. It can be found here: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I forgot about Xnview. I think it has some decent features. I'm not sure if it handles video, though. On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Martin Yara furik...@gmail.com wrote: A few years ago I was using Windows Photo Gallery or Live Gallery or something like that, can't remember the name, a free app from Microsoft. It was interesting. I was creating my own texture library with tags, keywords and categories, but I couldn't finish it. It's just too much work. For just visualizing images I use Irfanview too. Martin -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: Mouse
Avoid the Logitech Performance MX mouse. Not because of ergonomics but because it eats batteries. It comes with an Eneloop rechargeable and can be used while recharging, but the problem I've had since day one is, it rarely lasts more than 4-6 hours. Logitech replaced mine under warranty and the new one performs exactly the same, so it seems like that's all it can do. I ended up just using it as a wired mouse, which defeats the purpose. Personally I have bigger hands, so I like to have a big mouse. The MX is large, but honestly not large enough. This image gives some good idea about sizes, but it hasn't been updated since 2012: http://cdn.overclock.net/1/1f/1fea65b7_Mouse-Sizing-Chart.jpeg Don't skimp on your mouse, keyboard, monitor(s) or chair. You use them all day every day, so why be uncomfortable. -Paul On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: I switched to a Wacom 12 years ago. I was still using an old typical Dell mouse for SI around 4 years ago. But since I started sculpting in Zbrush and going back and forth from Zbrush to Softimage, I started using the stylus more and more in Softimage. I still keep clean my old mouse but it is very fat now --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. 2014-09-30 9:54 GMT-05:00 Byron Nash byronn...@gmail.com: I'm with Gerbrand, I don't currently have a mouse connected. I've used a Wacom solely since the late 90's. I just wish Wacom made a dual monitor aspect ratio model. On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Gerbrand Nel nagv...@gmail.com wrote: I don't even have a mouse Wacom everything, even counterstrike and COD :) G On 2014-09-30 04:30 PM, Stephen Davidson wrote: I have used the Logitech performance wireless mouse http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/performance-mouse-mx for over 5 years. Good, overall. Complaints? needs recharging often. The buttons will eventually wear out over time. For the pricegood value. On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Martin Yara furik...@gmail.com wrote: Hi ! It isn't a very common topic in this list, but what mouse are you using ? do anyone use a trackball? or something else? like a 3d connexion space navigator ? My mouse middle button is kinda broken lately (double clicks when I'm single clicking or simply doesn't do anything) so I'm looking for buying a new one. Do you have any recommendation? I used to like Logitech mice but since they changed to a metallic wheel that is almost unusable I don't buy them anymore. The last one costed me $100+ and had to return it the next day because the new wheel was a piece of garbage. And since we use a middle click quite a lot, I'm looking for something that isn't extremely hard to click like those Logitech and some Microsoft ones. I'm using a Razer Deathadder right now and so far it was perfect, until my middle click started to fail sometimes. I would buy a new Deathadder, even if it is named Deathadder, but Razer's new cloud based drivers that require internet connection and an account are a deal breaker for me. Specially if there is a possibility that I'll have to work in my client's office. Talking about middle click, Surface Pro 3 doesn't have a middle click, and the stencil buttons are unusable in anything but Microsoft OneNote or something like that, and are not configurable. At all. /SP3 rant off. cheers, Martin -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956 * sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
randomly disappearing objects
I have a series of very simple cylinders that are being deformed by the ICE version of Deform by Curve. The problem I'm experiencing is, the cylinders are randomly disappearing as I scrub the timeline. There's no specific frame where they disappear, it only happens when you scrub. The problem is, this isn't just a viewport error, but it happens when the scene is rendered as well. I've gone through and checked everything I can think of, and can't sort it out. Has anyone experienced this? Thanks, Paul
Re: randomly disappearing objects
Honestly at the moment I have no idea why I was using the ICE version of Deform by Curve. We've got 2 very similar jobs for the same client going at the same time they've changed their minds multiple times a day for the past 3 weeks. I'm sure I had a reason, but at the moment I'm drawing a blank. I'm going to look and see if I can get rid of it in favor of the traditional one. On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Alok Gandhi alok.gandhi2...@gmail.com wrote: Most of this that I have seen before was attributed to viewport bugs but you have already ruled that out. Next I would populate the ice trees with fresh nodes. Another thing to check would any malformed geometry. If your meshes trigulated then make them quads. Also check for any corrupt deltas in case of referenced model. I would load the scene with geo operators disabled and enable them one by one. As a final resort, merge your scene into a new one. Sent from my iPhone On 26-Sep-2014, at 10:22 pm, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I have a series of very simple cylinders that are being deformed by the ICE version of Deform by Curve. The problem I'm experiencing is, the cylinders are randomly disappearing as I scrub the timeline. There's no specific frame where they disappear, it only happens when you scrub. The problem is, this isn't just a viewport error, but it happens when the scene is rendered as well. I've gone through and checked everything I can think of, and can't sort it out. Has anyone experienced this? Thanks, Paul
Allow XSI to run unsigned ActiveX controls?
I'm trying to get Alienbrain's integration running under 2015. I think the problem is, it wants to run unsigned ActiveX controls locally. When I load AB html pages directly into IE, I get a warning about ActiveX. I've tried setting my intranet security zone to allow unsigned ActiveX controls, but that didn't seem to do it. I also tried changing the webcontrol registry setting per this article: http://xsisupport.com/2011/08/25/netview-and-internet-explorer-9/ But that caused more problems than it fixed - I suddenly was hit with a lot of .js errors the moment XSI launched. (jatkinson mentions the same thing in response to the XSISupport article) The crash seems to happen with Alienbrain's ActiveX control tries to access the AB server on my local network. As soon as it gets to that point it crashes. It'd be nice to get the integration running again rather than running it as a separate application. -Paul
Re: Allow XSI to run unsigned ActiveX controls?
Thanks Matt! It really seems like it'll be more trouble than it's worth at this point. They had sent me an early alpha/beta version of the Softimage 2015 integration plug-in, but it just never has worked. Oh well. -Paul On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: Let’s start with the obvious: - Make sure you’re running 64 bit version of Alienbrain (can’t use 32 bit alienbrain with Softimage 2015) - Update internet explorer to latest version as newer versions handle problems better. - Reduce ActiveX control restrictions on your local computer. This can open you up to other things if you do sketchy stuff, but otherwise should be harmless. If you’re worried, use the setting that asks you to be prompted before a control is run. - Run as administrator (just until you get things working) All that said, please realize that Alienbrain hasn’t undergone significant development in many years. We’re using Alienbrain and discontinued use of the integration years ago. In our experience, even when the integration was working it created more problems than it solved because of poor design sending users and files into weird states resulting in loss of work. I scripted the necessary hooks for us to work efficiently and run them as events when files are loaded and saved. Matt *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Paul Griswold *Sent:* Thursday, September 25, 2014 8:32 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Allow XSI to run unsigned ActiveX controls? I'm trying to get Alienbrain's integration running under 2015. I think the problem is, it wants to run unsigned ActiveX controls locally. When I load AB html pages directly into IE, I get a warning about ActiveX. I've tried setting my intranet security zone to allow unsigned ActiveX controls, but that didn't seem to do it. I also tried changing the webcontrol registry setting per this article: http://xsisupport.com/2011/08/25/netview-and-internet-explorer-9/ But that caused more problems than it fixed - I suddenly was hit with a lot of .js errors the moment XSI launched. (jatkinson mentions the same thing in response to the XSISupport article) The crash seems to happen with Alienbrain's ActiveX control tries to access the AB server on my local network. As soon as it gets to that point it crashes. It'd be nice to get the integration running again rather than running it as a separate application. -Paul
Re: external material libraries.....
Holy cow, talk about deja vu! I was up until 2:30 am dealing with the same issue. Are you using Mental Ray or something else? I'm using Redshift on this project. The only solution that managed to work was to merge the dysfunctional scene into a new scene, make sure the external material library had all locks removed, and then save save save save as I fixed everything. I tried some of the solutions for the old disconnected shaders bug from previous versions of XSI, but all that did was crash Softimage. Merging was the only solution. -Paul On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:02 AM, Rob Wuijster r...@casema.nl wrote: Hi, Do people use external material libraries a lot? We tried them on a (now finished) project, but had some weird issues along the way; Objects loosing materials and rendering the default gray material, tons of non-used materials that magically appeard between sessions in scenes etc. In the end we made everything local again to fight the deadline. Any thoughts, tips on this? -- cheers! Rob Wuijster E r...@casema.nl \/-\/\/
Re: HDRI Light Studio for Softimage addon
If we could just get sIBL working for Redshift, I'd be thrilled. -Paul ᐧ On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.net wrote: +1 Redshift is amazing! Nice to see HDRI for Softimage works with Redshift. On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 3:15 AM, Arvid Björn arvidbj...@gmail.com wrote: We completely switched over to Redshift a while back, and this seems like a pretty awesome addition to the Soft+RS combo! =) On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 3:24 AM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: for those that didn't see the workflow; http://vimeo.com/106004756 http://vimeo.com/106004756 [image: image] Pretty amazing! On 09/16/14 10:40, Ben Rogall wrote: Yep. I'm spending some time with new applications (always have). But when it comes to my animation work I'm still much more efficient with Softimage and probably will be for a while yet. I updated the web page with a separate download link. I would really be just as happy if people try it out before donating because support cannot take my highest priority now. Cheers, Ben -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956*sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
Re: Pre-modeled Threaded parts
There's a plug-in for Lightwave called quickBolt. It was fantastic for this sort of stuff: http://www.iemedia.co.uk/product/plugins.htm I used to use it years ago for medical device animations where I had to match their threads exactly. Obviously you'd need Lightwave this plugin is 25 pounds, but if you do a LOT of this kind of stuff it might be worth considering (I'm sure you could pick up an older copy of LW for a song these days). -Paul ᐧ On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Ryan Maguire rpmagu...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Does anyone know of an online library or a add-on that allows for the creation or import of male female threaded parts real-world dimensions. Example* I have modeled a gear shift and need to add a precise female threaded part on the bottom. If I could import already made .. Then I could boolean to the poly model and export STL for 3D printing. I have always been a softimage poly modeler ...But I don't think softimage is capable of this kind of thing? Thanks, -Ryan
Re: Alienbrain 10 and Softimage 2015?
I haven't been able to get Alienbrain working with 2015 yet. They sent me some beta plugins to test, but with it enabled, Softimage would crash the moment I tried to use the Alienbrain explorer to check out projects. I'm not sure what Avid's plan is for AB these days. It doesn't seem like it's getting much love. -Paul ᐧ On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Matt Lind ml...@carbinestudios.com wrote: We’ve been using Alienbrain for years on Wildstar. We’re still on it, in fact, but are looking at options to get off of it. Problem is there aren’t too many options out there for asset management to support our particular needs. The scripting environment is quick and easy to use compared to anything else out there. It has a scripting object model and supports almost any ActiveX compliant language just like Softimage, but Alienbrain is not as reliable. Importing/checking in files has been a crapshoot. Server isn’t particularly fast either. Doesn’t scale well beyond 40 users. The supplied plugin causes crashes and synchronization issues with files sometimes putting them in a funky state. Anyway, Alienbrain is not EOL’d like Softimage, but it’s not actively developed either. I’ve been at Carbine since 2007 and only 2 versions of Alienbrain have been released since, and looking at the feature list I’d consider them to be service packs more than full releases. Technical support was so bad we terminated the contract. Pricing scheme is horrible. Whenever we add seats to our pool, we have to buy a current license (v10) and get charged extra fees for downgrading the license to 8.0 to match our pipeline. If we upgrade those licenses to 10.0, we’ll be charged again. Needless to say, we don’t plan to purchase any more licenses. If you need asset management, I’d take a look at Core from 5th Kind. If your needs are simple, you may want to check out Wormhole. Matt *From:* softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *David Rivera *Sent:* Thursday, July 03, 2014 11:02 AM *To:* Softimage Mailing List *Subject:* Alienbrain 10 and Softimage 2015? Hi, I was wondering if anyone has been using Alienbrain to manage assets for softimage? Foundry has some products about this, and I´ve seen others as well. They are well integrated with Maya. So If anyone could share some of their experience in using AlienBrain, I´d love to hear it. Thanks. *David Rivera* *3D Compositor/Animator* LinkedIN http://ec.linkedin.com/in/3dcinetv Behance https://www.behance.net/3dcinetv VFX Reel https://vimeo.com/70551635
Re: A freelance job.... really?
My favorite is (and I get this kind of email at least once a month): I have written a children's book and I need an animator to bring it to life. I don't have a budget, but you will get a lot of exposure and I will use you for all my future projects once this one gets off the ground. I only need a very short animation.. probably only around 15-20 minutes, so it won't take you very long to do the work. But it needs to be the same level of quality as Shrek or Toy Story, so I need your assurances that you'll produce high-quality work... Classic. Someone I've never heard of, with a book nobody has bought wants me to work for free so I can get the chance to have them hire me again someday once they hit it big... -Paul On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Everybody contact him, tell him exactly what he wants to hear, then start underbidding... -Tim On 6/27/2014 9:19 AM, Stefan Kubicek wrote: I was torn between flagging it prohibited and best of. Ultimately I couldn't resist but going for the latter :-) I know, that's why it seemed odd. Seriously though, is that a legit ad? On 6/27/2014 9:04 AM, Eric Thivierge wrote: No, that seems awfully typical. On Friday, June 27, 2014 10:03:46 AM, Tim Crowson wrote: That sounds awfully deliberate. :-D -Tim On 6/27/2014 8:54 AM, Stephen Davidson wrote: I just thought I would post this freelance 3D animation Job, from Craigslist, for our professional animation group's ammusement. I sure gave me a good laugh http://miami.craigslist.org/mdc/cpg/4529563953.html -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson** **(954) 552-7956 * sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com /Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic/ - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com http://www.3danimationmagic.com -- Signature -- -- - Stefan Kubicek ste...@keyvis.at %22ste...@keyvis.at%22%20%3cste...@keyvis.at%3E - Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3 A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien Phone: +43 (0) 699 12614231 www.keyvis.at This email and its attachments are confidential and for the recipient only --
Re: OT: 3d sculpting app choice?
3d Coat dropped the licensing terminology around 6 years ago AFAIK. I helped Andrew with one version of the English translation.Sent from Acompli On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 3:45 AM -0700, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: 3D Coat looks very interesting from a production stand point, Zbrush offers a multitude of remeshing algorithms and topology flow solutions, however it does not (last i checked), lend itself willingly to component generation or manipulation, (you can't draw vertex, edges and polygons, in a conventional manner) some might arguethat this goes against what Zbrush is for. 3D coat offers you what basically amounts to topogun like functionality, a suite of utilities enabling you to draw low rez topology on a hi rez reference mesh, it also has unlike topogun, full UV workflow and tools, as well as full texturing capability painting in layers workflow up to 8K which is nice. supports UV sets and UV tilling to some extend. It has a feature called Voxel sculpting, which is kind of it's answer to Zbrushes Dynamesh, allowing you to sculpt unhindered by topology. it is worth noting that 3D Coat works better with intel processors then AMD, it was optimized for an intel multi-threading model.So in conclusion, it doesn't beat zbrush at what zbrush does best by virtue of the fact that like mudbox it still deals with polygons, however voxel sculpting does a nice job of bridging the gap. also it's brushes are not as nice yet It definitely doesn't beat Mari when it comes to painting in supper high rez say 8 K, however it does a very decent job of 4K.It has great UV, and re-topology capabilities including remeshing algorithms. so all in all it is a much more complete tool then zbrush, mari, and mudbox, and costs much less, so great value, hence why it is very interesting, from a production perspective, it does everything very well. It is also worth noting that it has applinks with basically the same number of programs that Zbrush has, however, where you factor in that it can also send texture and uv information... :) Handling ? i'd have to admit i have no idea, i have quite a few other apps on my plate as it stands. however i have never heard anything bad, no ambiguity like Zbrush often gets.Of course one has to address the elephant in the room, 3D coat comes with a baffling and possibly unprecedented, Christian moral Clause as part of it's EULA agreement: You are not permitted to use it to produce content of a sexual or obscene nature, this includes to a certain extent nudity and depictions of hell.It is not entirely clear how encompassing this is and how it is enforced: for instance; would Hellboy from Darkhorse fall under such nomenclature ? Verily, it's not easy to ignore such a practice. and it is quite galvanizing, as you might expect from a perspective of artistic integrity. no one like to wonder if they are working there way into a law suite. :P Quality of work is not linked to the app, however speed and reactivity are.Also different apps offer different paradigms:- Zbrush drastically reduces the time frame required to produce a concept, this open up new horizons. - Mudbox makes texturing easy.- Mari takes texturing to the next level.- 3D Coat gathers many solutions into one homogeneous application. if you are a good sculptor chances are you will be good regardless what package, however some packages may allow you to go further in some aspects of production.quality is inherent to skill speed is inherent to App.On 26 June 2014 08:50, David Saber davidsa...@sfr.fr wrote: Thanks all for the input. I'm hesitating between Zbrush and 3dCoat. Sebastien how do you compare Zbrush and 3dCoat? Greg, do you think the quality of work is so linked to the app? Note; there was a mistake in my first post. The second line of my app list should read: - Sculptris (seems like a simplified version of Zbrush? Also from Pixologic) Greetings, David
Photoshop tree generator
Maybe this is old news to some of you, but I had no idea this existed. In Photoshop CC, go to the fill menu and then select Pattern. At the bottom there's a new option called Scripted Patterns. If you pick that, you'll have the option of Tree in the drop-down box which launches a tree generator. As far as I know there isn't a way to export a 3D tree, but if you need some flat cards and want some randomness, it seems like a quick cheap way to go. -Paul ᐧ
Re: softimage to modo
What do you guys think of Modo's nodal deformer layout? I just looked at that growing vine tutorial page and the splash page for the video shows exactly what I personally dislike. Their node connections seem to be really sloppy and IMHO could lead to a confusing mess pretty quickly. They've got connections that make circular loops, so there's no left to right or top to bottom flow like you'd have in pretty much every other node-based system I've used. I mentioned it during Brad's webinar and he kind-of brushed it off, but I find it really distracting. -Paul ᐧ
Re: softimage to modo
I wasn't really talking about the example, but instead the way they've decided to set up their connections. It often ends up a spaghetti mess of wires that make circular connections with the wires running behind nodes. I don't see the logic in it. Maybe I just like clean layouts. :-) I'm open to new ideas and ways of doing things, but it just seemed weird that no other node-based system creates these looped connections because infinite loops are bad (I understand they're not really infinite loops, but they visually appear to be) and again, it makes for a very sloppy graph. -Paul ᐧ On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Angus Davidson angus.david...@wits.ac.zawrote: Ones mans circular is another mans intuitive. ;) To me I found the example easy to follow and to duplicate and understand what was going on. That begin said a lot of it is down to putting what you are used to on the shelf for a bit and really diving in. It was only once I did that did I understand just how flexible it is. Your never going to innovate if your always trying to put everything in the same container, or doing things the same way. From: Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com Reply-To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Date: Wednesday 07 May 2014 at 4:22 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: softimage to modo What do you guys think of Modo's nodal deformer layout? I just looked at that growing vine tutorial page and the splash page for the video shows exactly what I personally dislike. Their node connections seem to be really sloppy and IMHO could lead to a confusing mess pretty quickly. They've got connections that make circular loops, so there's no left to right or top to bottom flow like you'd have in pretty much every other node-based system I've used. I mentioned it during Brad's webinar and he kind-of brushed it off, but I find it really distracting. -Paul ᐧ This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary.
Re: softimage to modo
Sure - http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/training/view.aspx?id=774 Again, maybe it's my OCD kicking in, but even a little graph like that shouldn't be such a sloppy mess. ;-) ᐧ On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 11:03 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.frwrote: Hey Paul, can you point me to the video ? Just curious. Le 07/05/2014 16:22, Paul Griswold a écrit : What do you guys think of Modo's nodal deformer layout? I just looked at that growing vine tutorial page and the splash page for the video shows exactly what I personally dislike. Their node connections seem to be really sloppy and IMHO could lead to a confusing mess pretty quickly. They've got connections that make circular loops, so there's no left to right or top to bottom flow like you'd have in pretty much every other node-based system I've used. I mentioned it during Brad's webinar and he kind-of brushed it off, but I find it really distracting. -Paul ᐧ
Re: softimage to modo
Thanks Tim! It's good to hear it can be altered. Maybe they'll consider having an option that lets you choose how the nodes are set up. I totally realize functionality is more important that visual style, but to me I want things as clear as possible so when a client comes back in 2 years and asks me to revise a project, I can quickly and easily make sense out of what's going on. ᐧ On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Even ICE Trees get messy. As for Modo, if you have a noodle circling back in Z fashion and it's distracting you (it bothers me too), you can select that channel in the node and RMB and choose 'Separate Channel' and it will break that channel out into a new node. It's still pointing to the same item, but now you have that channel as its own node and can move it downstream so things are easier to read. I do that all the time. -Tim On 5/7/2014 9:39 AM, Paul Griswold wrote: I wasn't really talking about the example, but instead the way they've decided to set up their connections. It often ends up a spaghetti mess of wires that make circular connections with the wires running behind nodes. I don't see the logic in it. Maybe I just like clean layouts. :-) I'm open to new ideas and ways of doing things, but it just seemed weird that no other node-based system creates these looped connections because infinite loops are bad (I understand they're not really infinite loops, but they visually appear to be) and again, it makes for a very sloppy graph. -Paul ᐧ On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Angus Davidson angus.david...@wits.ac.za wrote: Ones mans circular is another mans intuitive. ;) To me I found the example easy to follow and to duplicate and understand what was going on. That begin said a lot of it is down to putting what you are used to on the shelf for a bit and really diving in. It was only once I did that did I understand just how flexible it is. Your never going to innovate if your always trying to put everything in the same container, or doing things the same way. From: Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com Reply-To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Date: Wednesday 07 May 2014 at 4:22 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: softimage to modo What do you guys think of Modo's nodal deformer layout? I just looked at that growing vine tutorial page and the splash page for the video shows exactly what I personally dislike. Their node connections seem to be really sloppy and IMHO could lead to a confusing mess pretty quickly. They've got connections that make circular loops, so there's no left to right or top to bottom flow like you'd have in pretty much every other node-based system I've used. I mentioned it during Brad's webinar and he kind-of brushed it off, but I find it really distracting. -Paul ᐧ This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. -- *Tim Crowson **Lead CG Artist* *Magnetic Dreams, Inc. *2525 Lebanon Pike, Bldg C, Suite 101, Nashville, TN 37214 *Ph* 615.885.6801 | *Fax* 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com *Confidentiality Notice: This email, including attachments, is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient(s). If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage mechanism. Magnetic Dreams, Inc cannot accept liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of Magnetic Dreams, Inc or one of its agents.*
Re: softimage to modo
NICE! I might buy Modo today just because of that video. I'm in the process of working on a bunch of furniture models I'm dealing with seams, piping, etc.. I've been working in 3D Coat because it's great for organic shapes, but I wasn't really happy with the seams piping (3D Coat's spline tools are clunky IMHO). Thanks for posting that! ᐧ On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Steffen Dünner steffen.duen...@gmail.comwrote: The schematic in Modo is becoming more and more powerful. But with great power comes great responsibility! What I mean is, that it's equally important to have tools to cleanup and organize your node graphs as it is to add more features / nodes. What I currently miss most is something like a group comment in ICE or backdrop in Nuke. As well as sticky notes and comments. Tools to easily align / sort multiple nodes at once, tools to get rid of unused nodes etc. But I have high hopes that the Modo dev team gets a hint from the Nuke dev team to help them sort it out. ;) Apart from that I'm already positively shocked by what the schematic can already do. Sometimes it really feels like using the SI Render Tree and ICE Tree in one single tree, where all kinds of nodes can talk to each other. I just discovered that procedural noise textures (and there are a lot of them in Modo) can be used to texture deformers / falloffs. Or take a look here: geometry lookups can directly control shader attributes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzBIO4PPUuInU1RmTEw5OWdYNGc/preview?pli=1 Something I wished for in Softimage for a long time. Cheers Steffen
Re: Paint shader
Have you played with the toon shader at all? I'm betting if you used that as a base then modified how it was applied (maybe some noise that's modified by incidence that drives the different shading zones), you could get an interesting watercolor effect. You'd still need to do some post processing, but it might be a starting point. I think Kim Aldis wrote an article or did a video on doing NPR rendering that used the toon shader. It might be on RediVivus (sp?). -Paul ᐧ On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Ognjen Vukovic ognj...@gmail.com wrote: While thats not what i was referring to it actually could provide an interesting effect and i may give it a shot. What i was alluding to is what a water color post processing effect would give, sort of a watercolor shader so to say, i know it can be solved in post easily but i was wondering if it could be done in 3d.
Re: Center mode (was RE: humanize Maya, SOFT top 5)
How many of you are utterly shocked at how LITTLE anyone at all from Autodesk seems to know about Softimage it's capabilities? It's almost like they bought it never opened it (regardless of which Marc was in charge). -Paul ᐧ
OT: good simple linux distro for laptop?
I figure there are some linux fans here, so hopefully someone has a suggestion. My 70+ year old dad has a very old laptop that's still running XP. It's not worth paying money to update, but he still wants to use it. I figure linux was the way to go normally would go right to Ubuntu. But I know a few years back they started their Unity front end and I don't think my dad could handle it. Is there something super-easy that a completely non-tech savvy older person could use? I've heard some decent things about Mint, but know nearly nothing about it. If not, I'm just going to boot nuke the thing and tell him to give it away and buy a new computer. Thanks, Paul ᐧ
Re: good simple linux distro for laptop?
Thanks! I've been reading more about Mint it might do the trick here. The laptop is a Dell Vostro running a Core 2 Duo (not sure the speed). As long as it'll run Chrome he can listen to his 1950's streaming radio station, I think he'll be in good shape. ᐧ On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Jon Swindells jon_swinde...@fastmail.fmwrote: and by 'this Island' i mean Zakynthos. apologies to the non-psychics out there ;) -- Jon Swindells jon_swinde...@fastmail.fm On Tue, Apr 1, 2014, at 10:09 PM, Jon Swindells wrote: I have a good portion of this islands retired population on mint15/16 (most from xp). once people get over the slight bump that passes for a learning curve (it usually amounts to panicked text messages about not having antivirus) they couldn't be happier. i'd go for the ubuntu base if possible (deb edition is a lot faster but you'll need to go with sid/testing for wifi/skype phones etc) This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary.
Re: Everything's being said.
I am still somewhat hopeful that as the months go by, Autodesk will at the very least reverse direction on completely murdering Softimage and will at least continue to bundle it with Max and Maya as a particle plugin. That would give a much better cushion for the Bifrost team to build their product and allow us to transition workflows more seamlessly. -Paul *“I think it’s just a more reasonable view…. trying to allow customers to do what they want to do instead of being heavy-handed and forcing customers to do things that are in their best interest.” - Carl Bass* On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Max Evgrafov summ...@gmail.com wrote: this is what was lurking under the hood 2014-03-26 19:50 GMT+04:00 olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr: Yes :D Le 26/03/2014 16:15, David Saber a écrit : is all hope lost? -- Евграфов Максим.(Summatr) https://vimeo.com/user3098735/videos --- Хорошего Вам настроения !!! :-)
Re: Everything's being said.
So in 2 years if I want to buy an Ultimate Suite as a new license I will get Softimage included? If so, I'm slightly less ticked off. -Paul On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.comwrote: Uh... they are... if you keep your subscription current you have access to Softimage continually. On Wednesday, March 26, 2014 12:51:41 PM, Paul Griswold wrote: I am still somewhat hopeful that as the months go by, Autodesk will at the very least reverse direction on completely murdering Softimage and will at least continue to bundle it with Max and Maya as a particle plugin. That would give a much better cushion for the Bifrost team to build their product and allow us to transition workflows more seamlessly. -Paul *“I think it’s just a more reasonable view…. trying to allow customers to do what they want to do instead of being heavy-handed and forcing customers to do thingsthat are in their best interest.” - Carl Bass* * * On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Max Evgrafov summ...@gmail.com mailto:summ...@gmail.com wrote: this is what was lurking under the hood 2014-03-26 19:50 GMT+04:00 olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr mailto:olivier.jean...@noos.fr: Yes :D Le 26/03/2014 16:15, David Saber a écrit : is all hope lost? -- Евграфов Максим.(Summatr) https://vimeo.com/user3098735/videos --- Хорошего Вам настроения !!! :-)
Re: Everything's being said.
Right. That's how I understood it as well. My point was, this could have been slightly less of a PR disaster if they'd not completely murdered Softimage, but instead set it up as a graceful transition to Bifrost. Allow Softimage to continue to be purchased as part of the Suites program until the point at which Bifrost makes it obvious that ICE is no longer necessary. Instead they've set themselves up for a situation where Autodesk has absolutely no answer to Houdini at all for sale, and a promise of Bifrost being an amazing new technology. SideFX and The Foundry aren't going to sit on their hands while Autodesk builds Bifrost, so IMHO the best business decision would have been to try to mitigate any losses by keeping Softimage available to the public while Bifrost matures. You'd think after what happened with Sumatra versus Maya they'd have realized it's not a good idea to create a vacuum for too long. -Paul On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 1:27 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.comwrote: This has all been made crystal clear over the last few weeks. No, if you keep your subscription current you will be able to. It's a legacy subscription benefit. I think it's crazy for people to not keep their subscription up to date for at least this next year to be able to get Softimage 2015. -- Personal opinion. Eric T. On Wednesday, March 26, 2014 1:18:49 PM, Paul Griswold wrote: So in 2 years if I want to buy an Ultimate Suite as a new license I will get Softimage included? If so, I'm slightly less ticked off. -Paul
Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5
I think part of the problem with a lot/all of the devs working on Maya is - you guys use this stuff day in and day out and you already understand how why things are the way they are. I would strongly urge the entire Maya team to do some real user interface usability testing with a 3rd party testing service. Get people from all sorts of backgrounds and actually record them trying to use Maya to achieve specific tasks. My gut instinct says, most of the team will be very surprised at how unintuitive and difficult Maya is for most people that don't live in the Maya universe. As for top 5: 1. Text based everything - I hate the shelf in Softimage as well as the UV editor. Get rid of icons entirely. 2. Drag and drop divots simple expressions. 3. Consistent UI - this was my last wish for Softimage. I wanted the FXTree to be updated to match ICE and the Render Tree (and possibly the schematic view to get updated as well). There should not be more than 1 style of graph in Maya and all navigation should use the same mouse/key combo everywhere. Additionally, revisit what things are named. As mentioned in a previous email - why is there at tab called Renderer and a tab called Rendering, or a tab called Shading and a tab called Surfaces? Maybe to long-time Maya users that makes sense, but if you open the software for the first time, that makes absolutely no sense at all. 4. Sticky keys. 5. Middle-click repeat the last action. I use this every day of the week. -PG On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.comwrote: Text not icons I don't understand this one. Which part of the UI is this a problem with that it isn't in Softimage? You have the shelf at the top of the UI, but that's just shortcuts to things that are already in the menu. Hide the shelf if you don't want it (there is also a shelf in XSI) For the viewport (panel) toolbar, if you don't use it, you can hide it (shift+ctrl+m) - these are all shortcuts to the items also in the menu. It certainly would not make sense to turn that into text buttons, although they should be generally fewer and bigger buttons there. But again these are shotcuts to the text menus. Everything is menu-based in Maya.
Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass
You do see the frustration here, right Maurice? By nature I'd say most Softimage users are very logical, straight forward, thinking individuals who quite often either own their own business or work as freelancers and therefore have a good understanding of how to run a business. Every reason given so far for this entire situation seems to fall under the concept of plausible deniability because otherwise none of it makes sense. You have to believe that Softimage either A. had an incredible string of bad luck which, despite Autodesk giving 100% of it's effort to develop, market and sell the product, caused it to fail. or B. Autodesk bought Softimage for it's patents, technology and developers, then intentionally marginalized Softimage to the point of where a business case could be made to shut it down and force users to move to Maya. -Paul *I think...a more reasonable view...[is] trying to allow customers to do what they want to do instead of being heavy-handed and forcing customers to do things that are in their best interest. - Carl Bass * On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.comwrote: No, and we are going round in circles as multiple topics are getting meshed together. I doubt anything I can write will make you less furious. If you want to talk I am open to that. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Bk Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 3:55 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass So from the outset, you bought Softimage with the view to take all the engineers from it and put them onto another product? If that is the case why not just be upfront about it and say this was your 5 year plan instead of pretending you respected the userbase and pretending wanted to continue Softimage, then suddenly giving a months notice regarding the purchases of new licences? Ive been frantic all month trying to figure out what I can or can't do with my new as yet unformed company regarding buying licences. I'm sorry, but I'm still furious.
Re: Rendering alternative to mental ray needed..
The performance isn't a 1:1 gain, but it's still better to have multi-GPUs than not since licensing isn't based on the number of GPUs, but on the number of physical machines. It's much more cost-effective to put 4 GPUs in a single machine than spend the money on 4 machines with a single GPU per machine. -Paul On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.comwrote: We are interested in Redshift too, just wondering what is the performance different between having 2 titan in one machine vs 2 machines with 1 titan each? On 23/03/2014 12:05 AM, Ed Manning wrote: On the economic advantages of redshift or other gpu renderers. My current workstations are Mac Pro 3.1s which are left over from the company I shut down in 2009 (bootcamped into Windows). Essentially worthless from a CPU standpoint. Putting a single $1000 titan gpu into one of them makes it more efficient at rendering than any modern 16-core $8,000 workstation running any CPU ray tracer. Putting 2 titans in them is like having my old 162-core blade server renderfarm without the $5000/month electric bill. Not to mention all the IT overhead and license costs. I have never seen a single piece of software (in concert with the astonishing graphics hardware that is now so cheap and still getting cheaper) have such a cost-reducing impact. Plus they are fanatically hard workers and great communicators.
Re: Rendering alternative to mental ray needed..
For my money, 2 780ti's is a better bet than 1 Titan. But a Titan is around $1k and a 780ti is $730. Though they should be releasing more Maxwell based architecture soon, right? The GTX 750 is the first Maxwell card. On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.comwrote: I have 4 workstations that I can put a titan in but not sure about multiple titans since the power supply supply and the motherboard may not handle it. The titan is twice the price of a 770/780, is it better to have 1 titan or 2x770/780? Sorry if this have been asked before. On 23/03/2014 1:08 PM, Paul Griswold wrote: The performance isn't a 1:1 gain, but it's still better to have multi-GPUs than not since licensing isn't based on the number of GPUs, but on the number of physical machines. It's much more cost-effective to put 4 GPUs in a single machine than spend the money on 4 machines with a single GPU per machine. -Paul On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.comwrote: We are interested in Redshift too, just wondering what is the performance different between having 2 titan in one machine vs 2 machines with 1 titan each? On 23/03/2014 12:05 AM, Ed Manning wrote: On the economic advantages of redshift or other gpu renderers. My current workstations are Mac Pro 3.1s which are left over from the company I shut down in 2009 (bootcamped into Windows). Essentially worthless from a CPU standpoint. Putting a single $1000 titan gpu into one of them makes it more efficient at rendering than any modern 16-core $8,000 workstation running any CPU ray tracer. Putting 2 titans in them is like having my old 162-core blade server renderfarm without the $5000/month electric bill. Not to mention all the IT overhead and license costs. I have never seen a single piece of software (in concert with the astonishing graphics hardware that is now so cheap and still getting cheaper) have such a cost-reducing impact. Plus they are fanatically hard workers and great communicators.
Re: What use is ICE really?
I typically use ICE for motion graphics. I try to avoid simulation as much as possible so I can have artistic control over the results. To me, fluid simulation is the absolute last thing I would be interested in or need. -Paul On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 8:06 AM, Juan Brockhaus juanxsil...@gmail.comwrote: Hi, totally agree with Jacob. can't talk about the project at the moment, but... I'm building shapes/objects made out of dominoes. I made different compounds to stack and pile dominoes in different ways and methods. And if the shapes/objects I have to create (and even the domino) change, it is all instantly updated. Only right at the end I add a Sim node and the whole things collapses... (obviously controlled with nulls, forces, etc...) The Sim is the last 5% of what I use ICE for. and another non-sim-ICE use example http://www.themill.com/work/qoros/shredder.aspx in most shots ICE to shred the car, keep rendernormals intact, bind HiRes to LowRes, etc (no sim, this is all hand animated...) Juan On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Alastair Hearsum hear...@glassworks.co.uk wrote: sorry our website isn't playing ball. Its the wrong link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZZOUq-FoG0 1) ice crowd Alastair Hearsum Head of 3d [image: GLASSWORKS] 33/34 Great Pulteney Street London W1F 9NP +44 (0)20 7434 1182 glassworks.co.uk http://www.glassworks.co.uk/ Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk (Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729) Please consider the environment before you print this email. DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete this message from your system. On 21/03/2014 11:17, Alastair Hearsum wrote: Correction http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/model-britainsearch-type=brandterm=talkhttp://www.glassworks.co.uk/node/549 1) Ice crowd Alastair Hearsum Head of 3d [image: GLASSWORKS] 33/34 Great Pulteney Street London W1F 9NP +44 (0)20 7434 1182 glassworks.co.uk http://www.glassworks.co.uk/ Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk (Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729) Please consider the environment before you print this email. DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete this message from your system. On 21/03/2014 11:12, Alastair Hearsum wrote: Folks We had a chat with a senior chap at Autodesk. There was hint of surprise at one use of ICE that I mentioned in passing. I think we over estimate the understanding of what ICE gets used for and its all pervading usefulness. I'd like to invite people to share their ice work especially if its more obscure (without giving away your trade secrets obviously). Here are some starters for us. Please keep the explanations as short as possible to attract Autodesk to read them. http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/love 1) Fine feathers created totally with ice strands 2) Feather system created in ice 3) Cats fur : ice strands http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/tadpoles-master 1) Totally ice strand vegetation 2) Ice driven water surface 3) Render tadpoles have ice compound which auomatically detects the shot number and selects the correct cache http://www.glassworks.co.uk/node/3266search-type=brandterm=g-star 1) Ice creating the cotton balls unravelling http://www.glassworks.co.uk/node/549 1) Ice crowd http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/transformationsearch-type=brandterm=lg 1) Object IDs picked up in ice and use to assign materials of supermarket aisle items https://vimeo.com/87096859 Some holes aesthetically 1) ice rigid body pens transferring their attributes to lagoa ice fluid melted pens 2)Ice fracturing bottle http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/strewthsearch-type=brandterm=o
Re: What use is ICE really?
Someone PLEASE save all of this for the (hopeful) SIGGRAPH Softimage booth! On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.netwrote: I haven't seen Zybrand Jacobs posting here, so I thought I should post this: https://vimeo.com/48832905 ...a very useful set of grass growing Ice compounds On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Alastair Hearsum hear...@glassworks.co.uk wrote: Folks We had a chat with a senior chap at Autodesk. There was hint of surprise at one use of ICE that I mentioned in passing. I think we over estimate the understanding of what ICE gets used for and its all pervading usefulness. I'd like to invite people to share their ice work especially if its more obscure (without giving away your trade secrets obviously). Here are some starters for us. Please keep the explanations as short as possible to attract Autodesk to read them. http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/love 1) Fine feathers created totally with ice strands 2) Feather system created in ice 3) Cats fur : ice strands http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/tadpoles-master 1) Totally ice strand vegetation 2) Ice driven water surface 3) Render tadpoles have ice compound which auomatically detects the shot number and selects the correct cache http://www.glassworks.co.uk/node/3266search-type=brandterm=g-star 1) Ice creating the cotton balls unravelling http://www.glassworks.co.uk/node/549 1) Ice crowd http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/transformationsearch-type=brandterm=lg 1) Object IDs picked up in ice and use to assign materials of supermarket aisle items https://vimeo.com/87096859 Some holes aesthetically 1) ice rigid body pens transferring their attributes to lagoa ice fluid melted pens 2)Ice fracturing bottle http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/strewthsearch-type=brandterm=o 1) Intervened in Momentum ice plugin to extract vectors and modulate them http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/excess-baggagesearch-type=brandterm=benylin 1) Hair created from scratch in ice strands including clumping http://www.glassworks.co.uk/video/summer-sport-0search-type=brandterm=freeview 1) Ice rigid bodies combine with ice syflex and custom hand cooked verlet for the strings And many many more. -- Alastair Hearsum Head of 3d [image: GLASSWORKS] 33/34 Great Pulteney Street London W1F 9NP +44 (0)20 7434 1182 glassworks.co.uk http://www.glassworks.co.uk/ Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk (Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729) Please consider the environment before you print this email. DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete this message from your system. -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956 %28954%29%20552-7956 *sdavid...@3danimationmagic.com *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke http://www.3danimationmagic.com
SIGGRAPH booth
I just wanted to start a separate thread for this idea. Kickstarter is nice, but honestly for something like that you should look into either http://fundanything.com or http://indiegogo.com Both of those let you keep the funds regardless of how much you get, so if you don't get the goal, it still can be used. I'd absolutely be willing to kick in some $$$ to make it happen. -Paul
Re: Redshift3D Render
Agreed. The Redshift team listens and addresses things very quickly. They are currently supporting Softimage Maya with Max up next. After that I've heard they're looking at everything from Houdini Modo to doing something with Fabric. -Paul On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: They just recent added the RS Hair Shader. Rob did an amazing job. And again. They listen, care about the user and have an amazing support. Even that they are working hard to get the first release, they are always going through the bugs and wish list. Congratulations Redshift Team! A true game changer for Softimage. Here is a link to the docs. http://docs.redshift3d.com/Default.html --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. 2014-03-21 1:33 GMT-06:00 Daniel Kim danielki...@gmail.com: I have GTX 680 installed on iMac, and use RS with SI now. It shows me great render speed. It doesn't matter hair, displacement map or any expensive options, RS shows always stable and good speed :) We have 7 Arnold license but it's replaced to RS already :) --- Daniel Kim Animation Director Professional 3D Generalist http://www.danielkim3d.com ---
I'm still really PO'd and it's not getting better
I had some time away from the office today and while I was driving down the highway I started thinking about the situation and I'm no less pissed off today than I was when they made the announcement. I've been watching as many Modo and Houdini intro videos, tutorials, etc., that I can find and what I've discovered is, neither of them can replace Softimage today. If you're a TD, then Houdini is probably a great way to go, but I'm another one of those people who don't like to script and want to keep things simple. Everything in Houdini seems to involve writing at least a little script here and there. Modo on the other hand looks very simple and straightforward, but it's lacking a LOT of power. I noticed in some demos on things like instancing, the viewport REALLY slowed down. It doesn't look like it's ready for prime-time when it comes to dense scenes. The way everything you do is frozen is crazy these days. I can't believe if you extrude along a curve the geometry doesn't stay stuck to the curve. Until Modo makes some major moves, I just think it's a step up from Lightwave. I'm leaving Maya out of the picture because in all honesty, Autodesk is totally delusional if they think Maya will be a good fit for small shops working on tight deadlines. Maybe in 5-8 years Maya will finally hit its stride, but I'm assuming by then the entire ME division will have been shut down in favor of just licensing patents technology. (seriously - mark my words - I am confident the entire ME division will be shut down) I started thinking about most of the jobs I've done over the past few years, and I can honestly say I don't think I could do 90-95% of them in either Houdini or Modo as easily as in Softimage - if at all. So where I stand now is - totally screwed. I either have to put faith in The Foundry that they'll bring Modo up to Softimage's level in the next 2 years or I have to spend the next 2 years really digging in to Houdini to get myself up to speed again. In either case, I don't see a positive outcome. I'm not young and I have a family. I can't work all day, then spend the evenings learning new software. This BS about artists not putting all their eggs in one basket just is a slap in my face. I put my faith in Autodesk when they said the future of Sofitmage is bright! When I was told over and over again I was being a conspiracy nut when I said Autodesk was intentionally trying to destroy Softimage. Well, look where we are now. Murdering Softimage without having ANYTHING remotely close to replace it is like peeing on my face and telling me it's liquid sunshine! Maybe Autodesk is right. Maybe the all-in-one approach of Softimage is dead. Maybe I'm out of touch with how the world of animation VFX works these days. In any event. I'm a very unhappy paying Autodesk customer. I do not feel like my money has gone to anything I paid for. -Paul
Re: I'm still really PO'd and it's not getting better
No no no - he's a DIE HARD Softimage fan. He meant what he wrote! On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Angus Davidson angus.david...@wits.ac.zawrote: I sincerely hope you meant on your butt. ;) -- *From:* Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com] *Sent:* 20 March 2014 07:30 PM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: I'm still really PO'd and it's not getting better I will add. My battles are to continue to win projects in a more demanding and each time lower budget projects, while I deliver with quick response during the process, at final , and with big studio quality. The only loser in this war is Autodesk who just had its Waterloo. The only thing is that they still don't know yet. When they realise it, it will be too late. But you know what? I really don't care. I have the best tool ever for what I do and the way I do. Even if it stays like it is now. And that tool is Softimage. I am going to the Tatoo parlor for an XSI in my butt. This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary.
Re: I'm still really PO'd and it's not getting better
My contract will be up in January 2015. Unless Autodesk produces a miracle, there's no way I'll be giving them another dime. On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Michael Clarke m...@bluecstudios.com wrote: I feel it also, Paul. I've been trying to look ahead over the past few days, even trying to muster some enthusiasm for Maya; but every time I look back at what we are losing in Softimage, it feels like a kick in the gut. I am sort of settling back in to reality here. I will probably use Softimage until things start to break, or until a better option arises. Funny thing is that I have been on maintenance all these years. Once 2015 ships, I have to decide whether Maya is worth paying maintenance on, or if I need to bail on AD altogether. My contract is up in December, and I don't expect the signs to be all that clear by then. I would imagine there are a number of people in the same boat. If by December I don't see a coherent roadmap for Maya that suits me, I guess ADSK will lose a paying customer. It's a quandary. It flat out sucks. On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:55 AM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I had some time away from the office today and while I was driving down the highway I started thinking about the situation and I'm no less pissed off today than I was when they made the announcement. I've been watching as many Modo and Houdini intro videos, tutorials, etc., that I can find and what I've discovered is, neither of them can replace Softimage today. If you're a TD, then Houdini is probably a great way to go, but I'm another one of those people who don't like to script and want to keep things simple. Everything in Houdini seems to involve writing at least a little script here and there. Modo on the other hand looks very simple and straightforward, but it's lacking a LOT of power. I noticed in some demos on things like instancing, the viewport REALLY slowed down. It doesn't look like it's ready for prime-time when it comes to dense scenes. The way everything you do is frozen is crazy these days. I can't believe if you extrude along a curve the geometry doesn't stay stuck to the curve. Until Modo makes some major moves, I just think it's a step up from Lightwave. I'm leaving Maya out of the picture because in all honesty, Autodesk is totally delusional if they think Maya will be a good fit for small shops working on tight deadlines. Maybe in 5-8 years Maya will finally hit its stride, but I'm assuming by then the entire ME division will have been shut down in favor of just licensing patents technology. (seriously - mark my words - I am confident the entire ME division will be shut down) I started thinking about most of the jobs I've done over the past few years, and I can honestly say I don't think I could do 90-95% of them in either Houdini or Modo as easily as in Softimage - if at all. So where I stand now is - totally screwed. I either have to put faith in The Foundry that they'll bring Modo up to Softimage's level in the next 2 years or I have to spend the next 2 years really digging in to Houdini to get myself up to speed again. In either case, I don't see a positive outcome. I'm not young and I have a family. I can't work all day, then spend the evenings learning new software. This BS about artists not putting all their eggs in one basket just is a slap in my face. I put my faith in Autodesk when they said the future of Sofitmage is bright! When I was told over and over again I was being a conspiracy nut when I said Autodesk was intentionally trying to destroy Softimage. Well, look where we are now. Murdering Softimage without having ANYTHING remotely close to replace it is like peeing on my face and telling me it's liquid sunshine! Maybe Autodesk is right. Maybe the all-in-one approach of Softimage is dead. Maybe I'm out of touch with how the world of animation VFX works these days. In any event. I'm a very unhappy paying Autodesk customer. I do not feel like my money has gone to anything I paid for. -Paul Michael Clarke Design Blue C Studios 713-927-9835
Re: I'm still really PO'd and it's not getting better
I am really beginning to think Kim Aldis had the right idea. The perfect word that describes how I feel is mukatsuku. It's Japanese and roughly translates to feeling sick, annoyed, offended, and generally unhappy with the situation. Maybe I'll take the next 2 years to learn how to build iOS apps. FlappyDesk, AutoFlappy. -Paul On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Chris Marshall chrismarshal...@gmail.comwrote: Paul, I'm totally with you on this 100% Chris On Thursday, 20 March 2014, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I had some time away from the office today and while I was driving down the highway I started thinking about the situation and I'm no less pissed off today than I was when they made the announcement. I've been watching as many Modo and Houdini intro videos, tutorials, etc., that I can find and what I've discovered is, neither of them can replace Softimage today. If you're a TD, then Houdini is probably a great way to go, but I'm another one of those people who don't like to script and want to keep things simple. Everything in Houdini seems to involve writing at least a little script here and there. Modo on the other hand looks very simple and straightforward, but it's lacking a LOT of power. I noticed in some demos on things like instancing, the viewport REALLY slowed down. It doesn't look like it's ready for prime-time when it comes to dense scenes. The way everything you do is frozen is crazy these days. I can't believe if you extrude along a curve the geometry doesn't stay stuck to the curve. Until Modo makes some major moves, I just think it's a step up from Lightwave. I'm leaving Maya out of the picture because in all honesty, Autodesk is totally delusional if they think Maya will be a good fit for small shops working on tight deadlines. Maybe in 5-8 years Maya will finally hit its stride, but I'm assuming by then the entire ME division will have been shut down in favor of just licensing patents technology. (seriously - mark my words - I am confident the entire ME division will be shut down) I started thinking about most of the jobs I've done over the past few years, and I can honestly say I don't think I could do 90-95% of them in either Houdini or Modo as easily as in Softimage - if at all. So where I stand now is - totally screwed. I either have to put faith in The Foundry that they'll bring Modo up to Softimage's level in the next 2 years or I have to spend the next 2 years really digging in to Houdini to get myself up to speed again. In either case, I don't see a positive outcome. I'm not young and I have a family. I can't work all day, then spend the evenings learning new software. This BS about artists not putting all their eggs in one basket just is a slap in my face. I put my faith in Autodesk when they said the future of Sofitmage is bright! When I was told over and over again I was being a conspiracy nut when I said Autodesk was intentionally trying to destroy Softimage. Well, look where we are now. Murdering Softimage without having ANYTHING remotely close to replace it is like peeing on my face and telling me it's liquid sunshine! Maybe Autodesk is right. Maybe the all-in-one approach of Softimage is dead. Maybe I'm out of touch with how the world of animation VFX works these days. In any event. I'm a very unhappy paying Autodesk customer. I do not feel like my money has gone to anything I paid for. -Paul -- Chris Marshall Mint Motion Limited 029 20 37 27 57 07730 533 115 www.mintmotion.co.uk
Guillaume's Nanode?
I couldn't remember if Guillaume works at Fabric or not, but as everyone looks for an ICE-like replacement for the future, I was curious if anyone knows what happened to Nanode? It looked pretty nice at the time: https://vimeo.com/47540868 https://vimeo.com/47892648 There's more under Guillaume's account. Or is that functionality being added in to Fabric 2.0? -Paul
Re: How long will it take (?)
Hi Yang-hai, There have been plenty of great posts already, but I'll give my quick-n-dirty approach to whether or not an app is user-friendly. Can I open the application, create a primitive (usually a torus), add a material, a light, look through the camera view to set up an image and render a single still without any help? In Maya I could not. I had no idea how to look through the camera. It's apparently a common question because as soon as I started typing in Google, Maya how to it finished my sentence with look through the camera. To me, that's really bad design. Other things I wanted to switch from wireframe to a shaded view, so I click on View in the viewport. You would think that View would mean View, but it apparently doesn't. In order to change the View I have to choose Shading. I would have thought Shading had something to do with surfacing my object, not the View. I see a menu called Renderer think to myself, hey, I wonder what render engines I can pick?. No Renderer doesn't mean Renderer in Maya. It means something entirely different. Why does that menu even exist if it has nothing to do with rendering??? You then also have a TAB that's called Rendering (not Renderer) which is actually where you choose a surface?? Why?? And why are there lights under a Rendering tab?? Then there's a menu called Panels. Panels means nothing to me. Panels are what you buy at a home improvement store. What is a Panel? Why would anyone choose that name? It has zero meaning. I could go on and on, but honestly it is probably second only to Blender in bad interface design. It's not in need of a make-over, it should be completely and utterly thrown away and you should start with a fresh, clean slate. Allow the old-farts to boot up Maya in compatibility mode to keep all the garbage, but you should start with a totally fresh interface. Otherwise you're putting lipstick on a pig. -Paul On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Yang-hai Eakes yang-hai.ea...@autodesk.com wrote: Hi Perry, Honestly, your voice is more important than any internal user, and that's the main reason. What I'm really trying to understand is what you want/need as a user, as a workflow from Softimage, and that's why I found this thread so helpful. Yes, we have internal people that are helping us understand and will be helping implement some of these feature/workflows, but we also want to make sure we are listening the user, you. Thanks for not beating me up! Yang-hai From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Perry Harovas Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2014 3:11 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: How long will it take (?) Yang-hai,
Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates.
Not to add to the conspiracy theories here, BUT. could it be the plan of Autodesk all along was to give ME a try, but not enough to succeed? The reason being this - they want to emulate the IBM model. Buy patents intellectual property, then collect royalties. It requires no RD, no developers, no support team, nothing but lawyers and accountants. Think of all the tech Autodesk has bought over the years. So they murder Softimage, and give less and less attention to their products each year, eventually killing Max, Mudbox, Motion Builder, etc. And finally the proclaim Bifrost a failure, and retire Maya. IBM is still around because they are a patent machine, not because they make computers. -Paul On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Artur Woźniak artur.w...@gmail.com wrote: I thought Bifrost was something more than just a node striped Naiad shuffled in Maya . Is it more or just a fluid solver? I know just may not give its justice but still. Artur 2014-03-19 12:16 GMT+01:00 Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com: Have a look at the feature list of mudbox and motion builder (big shame as this tool is very very good) Totally and utterly abandoned. If that is caring about your customers this is not the way to show it. Jb Sent from my iPhone On 19 Mar 2014, at 08:39, Daniel Sweeney dan...@northforge.co.uk wrote: Not really impressed by these releases. But autodesk releases have not impressed for a while. Stagnant with A bit of bolted on tech. So OK stuff in Maya but once again seems like all bolt ons. I think max is next on the chopping board or they will just let's it sit and every release will get less and less. On Mar 19, 2014 8:17 AM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Its really nice research, and simple to implement, this is the kind of tool that will cost you peanuts to integrate in max and Softimage isn't it? I will certainly read the paper properly. Jb Sent from my iPhone On 19 Mar 2014, at 02:31, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Paulo César Duarte paulocdua...@gmail.com wrote: Agree, and the geodesic voxel binding skin algorithm, Blender already have at least 1 year ago or more. In other words, no innovation, only implementation of existing tools. Got a link to that? Geodesic voxel binding is research by Autodesk.
Re: A confession
While I agree with what you're saying Graham, you're not seeing it in light of current circumstances. Your argument holds weight if we were choosing to pick different software and learn it. I faced this when switching from Lightwave to Softimage back with XSI 4. I couldn't translate the LW way of doing things to Softimage and it was frustrating. But it was my CHOICE. Softimage users are being FORCED to move to another package because their chosen platform has been murdered by Autodesk. Since Maurice has made it fairly clear this was the plan for quite a while now, it is not unreasonable to have expected Autodesk to create as seamless, effortless, and easy transition as possible for us to move to Maya (or Max). But nothing like that has happened. There's no plan at all. There's no replacement for ICE, there's no Softimage environment or keymaps, there's no series of transition videos, nothing at all. Autodesk is the boss from Reservoir Dogs, It's my way or the highway!. -Paul On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Graham Bell graham.b...@autodesk.comwrote: I'm not being disingenuous at all, only that this is a common problem when people jump from one software to another. I've seen this many times from users where they start in another package and try to do the exact same workflow, only to then become frustrated. You can't jump to something else and expect it to work in the same way, you simply can't. It's a recipe for disaster. And it's all too easy to label something as being bad. I'm not saying that Maya's workflow is superior either. There are things I like and hate about Maya, but you could also say the same about Softimage and any software package to be fair. I think it was Luc-Eric who said in a previous post that apps have their set of compromises, which we essentially accept. Chris has mention on work starting to improve Maya's UI and I welcome that. And if there some Softimage goodness in there, then I welcome that too. From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alastair Hearsum Sent: 19 March 2014 12:45 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: A confession Graham I think its disingenuous to ascribe the difficulties people have in doing things in Maya only to the workflow being different. It was simple example I gave and I would have hoped that it would have highlighted the Maya workflow as being, dare I say, bad. I hope you don't mind the analogy here but the first step to an alcoholics recovery is admitting the problem. Marc Stevens went as far as he could in the webinar in conceding that there may be qualitative differences in the Maya/Softimage interface workflow scenario and that it is something that you are looking at So yes, different, but lets not shy away from calling a spade a spade. Alastair Alastair Hearsum Head of 3d [GLASSWORKS] 33/34 Great Pulteney Street London W1F 9NP +44 (0)20 7434 1182 glassworks.co.ukhttp://www.glassworks.co.uk/ Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk (Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729) Please consider the environment before you print this email. DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete this message from your system. On 19/03/2014 11:31, Graham Bell wrote: I've use both Maya and Softimage (XSI) for years, and the problem (imo) that many will make is that they're two different applications. You simply can't go into one and expect it to work in the same way to something else. This is no different to when jumping to Modo, Houdini, or Max. From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.commailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Martin Yara Sent: 19 March 2014 11:19 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.commailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: A confession You shouldn't rely too much on the outliners, they are nowhere near what SI Explorer is. But if you must, and want to open multiple outliners ala Softimage, you can do it with something like this: // MEL //- window -t Outliner -wh 200 500; frameLayout -labelVisible false; string $panel = `outlinerPanel`; showWindow; //- Yeah, you have to script a
Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates.
You can't be serious. Are they really using that phrase? Talk about rubbing salt in the wound!! Clueless. Utterly clueless... — Sent from Mailbox for iPad On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:12 AM, null p...@bustykelp.com wrote: What with this ‘IN WITH THE NEW’ banner for Maya i keep seeing? Am I being over sensitive because all my brain does is echo ‘out with the old’ and that winds me up. From: phil harbath Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 2:51 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. have all the problems been worked out. there was a lot of talk of issues, but no final statement of resolution. also, one of my concerns is that exocortex was debating not releasing it at all. From: adrian wyer Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:05 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. we just upgraded Momentum, V4 just shipped...it rocks...get some! a From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of olivier jeannel Sent: 18 March 2014 21:06 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. This I don't want to hear :( If Ben want to step in... Le 18/03/2014 20:08, phil harbath a écrit : I get the felling that Momentum is EOL as well. perhaps a bit prematurely. From: olivier jeannel Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:06 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. Well, at least Exocortex, Eric Mootz, and all the others have heavy schedule to make xsi keep-up :D Le 18/03/2014 19:59, Alan Fregtman a écrit : The Maya release feels like a list of plugins to me: Bifrost... former 3rd-party sw (Naiiad), acquired... XGen... 3rd-party Disney plugin, licensed... Bullet Physics... free 3rd-party library... OpenSubDiv... free 3rd-party library... The only thing I see that's kind of cool is the geodesic voxel binding skin algorithm, but I'd expect that kind of thing in a service pack / point release. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Ben Rogall xsi_l...@shaders.moederogall.com wrote: http://area.autodesk.com/march18
Re: Softimage webinar - Q/A - finally uploaded
Here's my vote for a challenge. Do each of these in Softimage and Maya using only the factory supplied tools. No external plug-ins allowed, no building custom C++, Python, etc., tools. Challenge 1 - build the game Space Invaders Challenge 2 - build a crowd system Challenge 3 - build a raytracer Challenge 4 - build a 2D tracking system Oh wait Paul already did those in Softimage using ICE. Ok Maya expert, your turn. -PG On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 3:41 PM, David Gallagher davegsoftimagel...@gmail.com wrote: I've been thinking of doing some videos entitled You can't buy this and showing the amazing things I can do with Softimage facial rigging. But sorry -- you can't buy this software. On 3/19/2014 1:35 PM, Bk wrote: I'd love for AD to agree to a First get an expert to do it in Softimage and get an expert do it in Maya comparitive workflow video series. It would be most entertaining. Especially when you start bringing ice into the equation. Ive had some experience of this before. One notable occasion went Me in ice -30 mins.. 2 guys in Maya- a week and a half, but to be fair, they would usually achieve things in under a week. On 19 Mar 2014, at 19:22, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I asked directly to Maurice to do some videos to compare the workflow of a single task using Softimage and Maya, similar to what Emilio Hernandez did for the Dorrito technique I really hope that they'll do that because right now I want to know how the workflow will change By the way, on the area blog there's no Softimage 2015 announcement... Jesus...even with all those request and question they just don't care about Softimage, not even a single line...except the farewell from Mark Schnnoegel 2014-03-19 19:55 GMT+01:00 Paulo César Duarte paulocdua...@gmail.com: What I don't understand is how they want me to make the transition to a software that doesn't have the tools that I used before? Such as ICE mainly, in Max or Maya 2015 I won't have my workflow again, so there is no transition. I will continue using Softimage as long as I can, and complement with Houdini, Modo or Blender when necessary... because these softwares are those that more listen to your users, and that is the future for me. 2014-03-19 14:23 GMT-03:00 David Rivera activemotionpictu...@yahoo.com: So I head onto: http://area.autodesk.com/products/features/softimage , right? and I skipped intro (in a 1 hour lenght video, skipping intro is going straight to the middle, after all the verbose). So what they´re doing? Talking about maya in a softimage video. Quitted. Closed the tab on browser. Go on with my life. Now I´m pissed, because at the last announcement there wasn´t even a word of consideration for 15 years career on softimage. Not even an apology for taking away the the one thing that supports families and pays bills... *David Rivera* *3D Compositor/Animator* LinkedIN http://ec.linkedin.com/in/3dcinetv Behance https://www.behance.net/3dcinetv VFX Reel https://vimeo.com/70551635 -- www.pauloduarte.ws
Re: Autodesk webinar
In Softimage we have a production-proven, solid tool. ICE works TODAY, not 2 years from today, not in a dream of a product called Bifrost, but right NOW. Are you telling everyone here who has based their ENTIRE business around Softimage, we should trust Autodesk to have a fully functioning tool ready that will do EVERYTHING Softimage can do TODAY by the time Softimage hits the end? We should believe that after you've just admitted that Skyline was a failure? These aren't a bunch of ideas or concepts here, these are our businesses! We feed our families, we pay our bills, we survive based on Softimage and now we have to hope that somehow Bifrost is not in the 99% failure, but 1% innovation? Do you seriously want us to bet our future on that? Would you go home and tell your significant other that rather than focusing on a tool that works for you, makes money for you right now, you're betting everything on a promise from Autodesk?? Who on earth does business like that?? Is Autodesk going to pay our mortgages or feed our families when Bifrost falls apart? Because unless that's the plan, I can't think of a single sane person who would go along with this Maya-only plan. This is absolutely a terrible way to do business and everyone at Autodesk knows it. They've just dug in their heels to avoid looking like they've made a colossal mistake. -Paul On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 12:08 PM, Adam Sale adamfs...@gmail.com wrote: Maurice, in all of this talk the one glaring omission is this. You guys are always trying to innovate. You have said success is often 99 percent failure to one percent success. Well, in the event bifrost falls by the wayside like skyline did, all of a sudden autodesk will have zero node based solutions to do the type of ice work we expect of a dcc product. How is that a wise move as a company? Its like throwing out the baby with the bath water and seems incredibly short sighted. So as we move to bifrost to begin our transition away from ICE, we may be in this same mess a couple years down the road if it doesnt pan out. Imagine the fallout then.. people will go absolutely nuclear on AD. Adam On Mar 18, 2014 9:00 AM, p...@bustykelp.com wrote: Last year was a watershed one for the industry for many different reasons resulting in many significant changes to our strategy Yes, the industry is changing. Budgets are getting smaller and work needs to be done faster. So surely, the wise thing to do would be to invest in the tool with the fastest workflow. I have spent the last 3 years demonstrating to my studio why Softimage needs to be what we are using to make our projects feasible, and despite the fact, I'm the only Softimage person there. I have managed to persuade them through demonstration and now we are setting up production with it. By making tools that perform complex tasks quickly ( Softimage and ICE combo ), There is a huge market to be explored doing movie quality work on television that would have been unfeasible a few years ago. How do you think it feels after all that effort, RIGHT before the project is about to start, to hear this news? Its utterly short sighted and I imagine it will be rather embarrassing when we reveal how we managed to pull this off , as its going to be a testament to the clear advantage given by Softimage over any other solution and I will take every opportunity I can to say that. There is no way I'm going to change tracks back to a tool I had to spend all that time proving Softimage was far superior to. -Original Message- From: Maurice Patel Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:21 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Autodesk webinar Hi Perry, At that time, although Softimage was not an area we were planning on investing more in, there was no plan to discontinue it. That decision was only made at the end of last year. Last year was a watershed one for the industry for many different reasons resulting in many significant changes to our strategy. At the time this statement was made we did not even have any plans for MayaLT. Unfortunately things can change very fast. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-bounces@ listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Perry Harovas Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 11:12 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Autodesk webinar Maurice, I know things change, but this statement from Marc was only a year and a half ago: Autodesk plans to continue to develop all of products mentioned [in this story]. These are all solutions that serve many different customer needs across multiple industries and in many different types of workflows. We are not discontinuing development on any of the products you mentioned but we will increase focus in specific areas where individual products are strong.
Re: Autodesk webinar
Thanks Maurice, So the information I have today is - most of my work is done with Softimage and there is 0% chance it will be continued. Autodesk has a 99% failure rate internally with creating innovative products. (your words) Autodesk wants me to move to Maya, an old, outdated package that cannot do what I need now, requires significant work (scripts, plugins, etc.) to make usable, is not conducive to small shops or freelancers, and there is no promise that it will ever be able to do what Softimage can do right now. Making that move not only moves me back to the junior level, but reduces my pay, lowers the quality of my work, and significantly hampers my ability to compete. Bifrost is being developed at a company with a 99% failure rate with creating innovative products. Bifrost is not an ICE replacement and may never be one. And, apparently in this industry you should not have all your eggs in one basket. Unfortunately Autodesk bought the goose laying the golden eggs and wrung it's neck. Now there's no more eggs. I also find it ironic that someone from ADSK just said we shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket, yet they want everyone to buy suites and are trying to emulate the Adobe model Or was that just something you say because there's really no answer for what Autodesk has done? Yes, I think I can make a decision based on that information. -Paul On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.comwrote: Hi Paul, Adam We do understand that people build their livelihoods on our software. This is something we take seriously, although (with good reason) you might find it hard to believe right now. Every year we spend significant resources maintaining legacy code so that the new features we add to our products don't radically disrupt customers workflows. We really do try not to take unnecessary risks with our software. And we have an incredibly long track record of developing software for the long term - one can just look at AutoCAD and 3ds Max. Even acquisitions like Flame and Maya have continued to be extensively developed at Autodesk as have other product acquisitions. We have stated and are committed both to developing our core products and to innovating. Our decision to focus on 3ds max and Maya was so we could continue to do both adequately (not one or the other). We are a high tech company so it wouldn't be realistic to expect us not to try to innovate even if the risks are high. That does not mean that is all we do. I am not denying that Softimage customers are now facing some challenging decisions. But several have said on the forum, and I would personally agree with them, that in this industry - as in any high-tech industry - it can be risky to have all your eggs in one basket, even if that means looking outside of Autodesk (and there are some very interesting solutions out there). Giants fall (look at SGI). We are not immune to that either. Personally, I do not think that will happen, but no one at Autodesk will ever make any explicit guarantees about the future. All I can say is make your software decisions based on what you see today - anything else would be, to a certain extent, vaporware and speculation, especially the farther out you look. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Paul Griswold Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:15 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Autodesk webinar In Softimage we have a production-proven, solid tool. ICE works TODAY, not 2 years from today, not in a dream of a product called Bifrost, but right NOW. Are you telling everyone here who has based their ENTIRE business around Softimage, we should trust Autodesk to have a fully functioning tool ready that will do EVERYTHING Softimage can do TODAY by the time Softimage hits the end? We should believe that after you've just admitted that Skyline was a failure? These aren't a bunch of ideas or concepts here, these are our businesses! We feed our families, we pay our bills, we survive based on Softimage and now we have to hope that somehow Bifrost is not in the 99% failure, but 1% innovation? Do you seriously want us to bet our future on that? Would you go home and tell your significant other that rather than focusing on a tool that works for you, makes money for you right now, you're betting everything on a promise from Autodesk?? Who on earth does business like that?? Is Autodesk going to pay our mortgages or feed our families when Bifrost falls apart? Because unless that's the plan, I can't think of a single sane person who would go along with this Maya-only plan. This is absolutely a terrible way to do business and everyone at Autodesk knows it. They've just dug in their heels to avoid looking like they've made a colossal mistake. -Paul On Tue, Mar
Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates.
So did Autodesk really try with Softimage? I see no evidence. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.comwrote: I want to be clear - my meaning was that innovation involves risk and we want to take that risk for certain projects. We do NOT accept 99% failure. If uou have a chance of 1 in 100 of succeeding on project X that does not mean you should not try it. But it also does not mean you should bet everything on it. This is true of any company small or large. The further out there you want to be, the greater the risk. Maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Greg Punchatz Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:13 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: [OT] Autodesk announces 2015 3D product updates. And shader effects are 3rd party I believe...and it only works for the view port... sigh Same with the modeling tools...just upgraded what they bought Here is the problem The folks in charge don't know that they have a problem... They accept a 99 percent failure rate as reasonable...smaller dev companies cant afford to fail nearly that much. I will say I am looking forward to that viewport... and geodeskic binding is uber cool. I wonder how long it will take some ICE wiz to make some of that for us :) On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Alan Fregtman alan.fregt...@gmail.com mailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com wrote: The Maya release feels like a list of plugins to me: Bifrost... former 3rd-party sw (Naiiad), acquired... XGen... 3rd-party Disney plugin, licensed... Bullet Physics... free 3rd-party library... OpenSubDiv... free 3rd-party library... The only thing I see that's kind of cool is the geodesic voxel binding skin algorithm, but I'd expect that kind of thing in a service pack / point release. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Ben Rogall xsi_l...@shaders.moederogall.commailto:xsi_l...@shaders.moederogall.com wrote: http://area.autodesk.com/march18
Re: Word from Cory Mogk?
I believe Chris V. took over for Cory. I don't know if anything was officially announced, though. -Paul On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nlwrote: Oh, I'm not saying we need him. I'm just saying that it is strange given his position as PM. -- Leendert A. Hartog - Softimage hobbyist AKA Hirazi Blue - Administrator @, NOT the owner of si-community.com
Movies, games, commercials or what?
Mentioned in another thread. Not everyone works in movies or games. What area do you work in and why is Softimage the best choice for what you do? I'm in commercials occasionally VFX for films. I am always working on tight deadlines it's almost always a mix of people using After Effects, Modo, Nuke, Fusion, and Softimage. Softimage is the Swiss Army Knife of 3D and it allows me to switch gears quickly and efficiently. There is nothing Autodesk offers that can replace it currently and I do not have faith that in 2 years they will have anything better. I intend on moving away from Autodesk products. -Paul
Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass
I imagine questions like, what is this 'soft image' and why should I care?— Sent from Mailbox for iPad On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Thomas Volkmann li...@thomasvolkmann.com wrote: What questions is he asking??? On Mar 16, 2014, at 1:24 PM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote: Just to let everyone know Carl got the letter and is asking questions and will write back when he gets into the office on Monday.
Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass
Leoung, I tend to,disagree that this is about greed. Softimage is less than a drop in the bucket of Autodesk's portfolio. Based on how it's played out, it's seems to be a situation where Autodesk believes it knows what's best for us and they're just forcing us to do it. Autodesk is our mommies and daddies and we are nothing more than helpless children who need them to determine what software we should use. We weren't intelligent or mature enough to move to Maya once they bought Softimage, so they've made the decision for us all. We should sit down, shut up and be good little children. Maya is the best choice. They're betting the future of the ME Group on it. -Paul — Sent from Mailbox for iPad On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Leoung O'Young digim...@digimata.com wrote: The more I think about this, the more angry I get, so much of society is driven by greed and money. It is not just AD, it is much of the corporate world. The bottom line is money. Who really care how many people this will hurt and turn their life upside down. One of the good thing that came out of this, is opening the discussion of the options besides AD products and the sharing of those ideas. It is also good for software like Houdini, MODO and C4D which are all the options we are looking at. What a breath of fresh air dealing with Brad from Modo, he seems to genuinely care about me as a user. People from Houdini also are very responsive. I do want to thank Maurice Patel at AD for answering all my questions. In the end we may still stay with XSI for the next few years and reluctantly sending money their way. We have over 20 years invested in the software, it is hard to just walk away. With MODO being so affordable we will definitely will add to our pipeline. Plus I really like the people there. Leoung On 16/03/2014 3:37 PM, Paul Griswold wrote: I imagine questions like, what is this 'soft image' and why should I care? — Sent from Mailbox https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox for iPad On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Thomas Volkmann li...@thomasvolkmann.com mailto:li...@thomasvolkmann.com wrote: What questions is he asking??? On Mar 16, 2014, at 1:24 PM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote: Just to let everyone know Carl got the letter and is asking questions and will write back when he gets into the office on Monday.
ICE to Fabric 2.0 - will it be possible?
I saw Leonard's Vimeo video and I was curious - when Fabric 2.0 comes out, will it be possible for people to port their custom ICE nodes, compounds, etc., from ICE to Fabric 2.0? Ultimately, for the non-TD, non-programmers out there, if Fabric 2.0 Splice can allow us to use an ICE-like system in the DCC of our choice, it makes Softimage's death a lot less important. And, it would make for a much smoother transition to something alternative. -Paul
Re: YOUR TOP 5
1. It is the only product on the market that allows a small shop or freelancer produce a project end-to-end without requiring a team of people. The smallest shop can still be a competitor. 2. Pass system. 3. ICE 4. Text-based interface that is logical easy to get up to speed with (ie. a Maya person can quickly learn be productive with Softimage, but not the other way around). 5. See #1 - Maya is not a tool for the freelancer or small shop. Without Softimage, there is NOTHING Autodesk offers that is worth buying unless you're a mid-large shop. On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Siew Yi Liang soni...@gmail.com wrote: 1. ICE 2. Procedural workflow mindset 3. ANIMATION TOOLSET (we have alt playback framerate, a fast motion trail , proxy parameters, viewport parameters, synoptic HTML support, HLE curve editing etc.) 4. render region in viewport and accompanying pass system 5. Modeling toolset and interactivity Yours sincerely, Siew Yi Liang On 3/13/2014 3:58 AM, Chris Marshall wrote: 1. ICE 2. FX Tree for compositing, migrating to other 3d software would require us to purchase other compositing software 3. Modeling ease of use and stack 4. Passes 5. Everything about it completely ROCKS! It's a complete toolkit in one package, basically, and there's nothing else like it. On 13 March 2014 10:46, Daniel Kim danielki...@gmail.com wrote: 1. Operator Stack 2. Great Modeling Interface 3. Animation Mixer 4. ICE 5. Totally remapable user interface On Thursday, March 13, 2014, Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com wrote: 1. non-destructive workflow 2. Scene explorer and organisation (operator stack, reference models...) 3. rigging and animation (weighting, GATOR...) 4. render passes 5. ICE On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Tim Borgmann i...@bt-3d.de wrote: Passes, Partitions, Overrides,Framebuffer - an good way to organize and manipulate your render output ICE - not only as a particle/sim tool, but as an overall allrounding toolset to create/prototype and/or manipulate Non destructive Workflow/Operator Stack Clean UI/Workflow Shadertree (including the connection to ICE) Thanks Tim Hello It seems as if I may have some contact with Autodesk shortly! I want to be armed with some points. What I'd like is your top 5 features that make Softimage great that we'd miss if we migrated to something else. Please don't give me more than 5 and please don't go on too long describing them (It takes a while to read all the posts). Thanks Alastair -- Alastair Hearsum Head of 3d [image: GLASSWORKS] 33/34 Great Pulteney Street London W1F 9NP +44 (0)20 7434 1182 %2B44%20%280%2920%207434%201182 glassworks.co.uk http://www.glassworks.co.uk/ Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk (Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729) Please consider the environment before you print this email. DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete this message from your system. -- --- Daniel Kim Animation Director Professional 3D Generalist http://www.danielkim3d.com --- -- Chris Marshall Mint Motion Limited 029 20 37 27 57 07730 533 115 www.mintmotion.co.uk
Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Autodesk had any idea who Softimage users even are before making the decision to take away our main tool. It's been said over and over again. If we felt Maya or Max were the best tool for the job, we'd buy it. But there are dozens and dozens of reasons why Maya or Max do not fit for many of us, and they never will. Since the day Autodesk bought Softimage, it's been one cruel joke. There has literally never been a single champion of Softimage at a decision-making level, right? It's been the red-headed step-child since the moment of the acquisition. Autodesk's marketing didn't help either. What sane marketing department thinks it's a great idea to only market the products that get the most sales? How does that make any sense at all? It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Softimage doesn't sell well, so we reduce it's marketing budget, reduce it's visibility, and make no effort to increase sales. Therefore sales do not increase and marketing is again reduced, and sales go down. Can anyone look at this process and say they think that's a recipe for success? Now an entire community is looking at Maya and Max and confirming what we all knew before - they can't replace Softimage and nothing on the horizon from Autodesk looks like it will come close for years. -PG On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 8:43 AM, Eugen Sares sof...@mail.sprit.org wrote: -- Originalnachricht -- Von: Maurice Patel maurice.pa...@autodesk.com An: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Gesendet: 13.03.2014 09:34:16 Betreff: RE: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer Hi Tim, I don't think anyone here at Autodesk would disagree with you there. Softimage and 3ds Max were designed very much to be out of the box. Maya was designed differently. But Maya users have been asking for more artist friendly workflows and tools out of the box and we believe we can do this and do this really well. We are looking for input from Softimage users too. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 Maurice, I frown a bit over this wording... shouldn't you say you are already looking into the input from Softimage users you already got? There's plenty of information and suggestions already, and after all, you have Luc-Eric Rousseau as Maya UI teamlead now. What else do you need to hear from us to allow for more educated guesses of what Maya needs, to make it artist-friendly (please get me right), that hasn't been discussed so many times of the last days, months, years? Let me picture this in a comic way: there's this king AD, lazily sitting in the throne room with his flock of minions around him, used to decide fates with the wink of a finger, and now just after there's riots and turmoil and burning villages outside the palace walls, he stirs a bit and with acted astonishment starts asking what is the matter with all the people, who's emissarys he brusquely sent away so often before... Respectfully, Eugen --- Diese E-Mail ist frei von Viren und Malware, denn der avast! Antivirus Schutz ist aktiv. http://www.avast.com
Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer
I suppose I should have phrased that There has literally never been a single public champion of Softimage at a decision-making level. Was there ever a SIGGRAPH, usergroup meeting, or anything of the sort where anyone with any sort of authority at Autodesk called for more exposure, more marketing, more anything for Softimage? On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote: Since the day Autodesk bought Softimage, it's been one cruel joke. There has literally never been a single champion of Softimage at a decision-making level, right? It's been the red-headed step-child since the moment of the acquisition. I'm not sure this statement is entirely true. The senior VP of ME at the time of the purchase was Marc Petite, originally from Softimage and one of the driving forces behind the early development of XSI. When he stepped down not long ago, I believe he was replaced by Marc Stevens, the former president of Softimage at the time of the acquisition.
No money for Softimage, but plenty for an IM client?
They kill Softimage, but invest in developing Autodesk Instant? http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/autodesk-instant/ Congrats Autodesk! An instant messenger! What an amazingly original idea! Next up they'll develop a WinAmp competitor or perhaps Napster for Enterprise. Genius! Look out 20th century, Autodesk is on the move! -Paul
Re: No money for Softimage, but plenty for an IM client?
I was being sarcastic. ;-) I just think it's the ADSK mentality as a whole. They're not innovators, they're followers. It's what happens when you run a company by listening to accountants lawyers rather than customers. -Paul On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.comwrote: It's not like this is a different behavior for AD. They've been acquiring for many different divisions every year. This one isn't even in ME. Definitely seems like you're reaching on this one. On Thursday, March 13, 2014 3:17:37 PM, Paul Griswold wrote: They kill Softimage, but invest in developing Autodesk Instant? http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/autodesk-instant/ Congrats Autodesk! An instant messenger! What an amazingly original idea! Next up they'll develop a WinAmp competitor or perhaps Napster for Enterprise. Genius! Look out 20th century, Autodesk is on the move! -Paul
Re: No money for Softimage, but plenty for an IM client?
If they could only merge a viewcube with an instant messenger. Pow! Instant Viewcube. On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: *Today, users communicate through any number of ways -- email, SMS, Skype, Snapchat, and a whole host of other messaging platforms. Autodesk wants to ensure that enterprise communications between teams happens in an environment that enterprises can control, and that would fit into its existing platform of applications.* Ohhh that is why they needed the dev team from Asia... And Softimage was not letting them focuse in this super new technology... Now Maya is having a chat window. Cool --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. 2014-03-13 13:17 GMT-06:00 Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com: They kill Softimage, but invest in developing Autodesk Instant? http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/autodesk-instant/ Congrats Autodesk! An instant messenger! What an amazingly original idea! Next up they'll develop a WinAmp competitor or perhaps Napster for Enterprise. Genius! Look out 20th century, Autodesk is on the move! -Paul
Re: A germ of an idea.
Hey Paul - sorry I didn't list my skills. XSI user since version 4. I'm mainly a generalist. My official title is director/animator, but I do everything from motion graphics to VFX (mainly particles). I agree, there needs to be some definition some sort of leadership. Otherwise it'll get bogged down in a lot of what if we.. I personally trust Pooby's skills, especially since he's already had a pretty big viral hit. So I suggest he sets up some way for people to pitch ideas directly to him, without discussion, and then he could pick out his top ideas for a short discussion finalization. -Paul On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Sandy Sutherland sandy.mailli...@gmail.com wrote: I can try and help where I Can - count me in - will also pass the word around Cape Town and ex-Triggerfish people. S. On 2014/03/12 12:10 PM, p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I think the documentary idea should be put to a different thread, as its really worth doing, but I feel that having multiple ideas in one thread will just serve to confuse all of them. It would be good to show both as one piece if they both get made. The CGI piece could work as a 40 second introduction to the other. So far, on the CGI idea, we potentially have these artists interested 1 Paul SmithGeneralist, ICE skills and character / mocap and animation 2 Artur Wozniak3D Generalist, non-character animation, rendering, some nuke, VFX 3 Perry Harovas I am a generalist, but have good modeling skills and lighting/rendering skills. I am also a Nuke user, and could help composite. 4 Francisco Criadogeneralist , can also do compositing. 5 Paul Griswold 6 Eugene Flormatageneralist, I'd prefer to animate something though. I never get to do that enough at work. 7 Emilio Hernandez 3D generalist, character-modeling, rigging. mid ICE level. Comp, editing and VFX here ready for battle. 8 Jason S Generalist/comp/matte paintings 9 Christian Lattuada 10 Rob Chapman ICE FX artist/TD, Softimage user for EIGHTEEN YEARS 11 Sebastian SterlingIm a Modeller, prefer characters but Multi-purpose. 12 Dan Pejril I am a generalist in Softimage with ICE skills, animation and rendering (recently I have been using 3delight and Redshift).I have a background in character animation and medical animation. 13 David Saber 14 Greg Punchatz I would be happy to edit it all together into a cohesive piece . Put music to it etc 15 Gustave Eggert Boehs generalist, leaning towards ice/fx stuff, can composite in nuke 16 Rares Halmagean 17 Alok Gandhi custom tools/ plugins development required, custom ICE nodes in C++ or any other tech stuff that needs to be developed. 18 Scott-turb-generalist 19 Jens Lindgren VFX Supervisor with broad knowledge of ICE and compositing in Nuke 20 Richard CostinI bring character and prop modeling, shading, lighting, rendering, and some animation. Storyboards, matte painting and concept design experience as well. 21 Nicolas Esposito 22 Arvid Bjorn cg sup and generalist, leaned towards lighting and shading. 23 Siew Yi Lianganimation *From:* olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr *Sent:* Wednesday, March 12, 2014 10:05 AM *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com *Subject:* Re: A germ of an idea. Thinking outloud here, I like the after life of pi format, very human very easy to set-up, a camera, a micro, a light. But not every one is an actor, and someone wrote somewhere that animators make their creatures do things they can't do in real life. So an open patchwork aproach is IMHO a good way to go, at least diversity should show richness. A little introduction of SI history, asking Steve Blair maybe, his the memory here, he could compile an efficient short intro. Imho, gathering the letters from Glasswork, Seshsusht, Mills, Janimation, etc. would make a strong backbone to the documentary with orbitting around intervention from Artist such as Tim Borgmaan to show the single/personnal level. The movie should show IMHO, the state of the today industry, the consequences/impact of AD decision at industry and personnal level. it should show how bad was the behavior of AD since it buy Softimage, with facts. Interviewing ex Coders should give good anecdotes I'm all for expressing the anger of people the one that is unpolite, not everyone can hold himself ...that's nature and that's entertaining. There's plenty to tell with a lot of logic and a common will . Le 12/03/2014 10:19, Nicolas Esposito a écrit : Thats would be lovely! In addition to what have been proposed, I was thinking ( since Softimage has been around for a very long time ) to do an action-oriented video thats shows the history
Re: SI and Houdini
It does seem to take a lot more effort for certain things. I'm intrigued by the everything's procedural idea, but quite often I just want to select an edge loop bevel it - or grab points and quickly drag them around (Softimage's M key). As I've gone through some Houdini tutorials, I don't think I've seen anyone actually touching vertexes, edges or faces in a traditional manner. It seems to all take place in the graph almost every video showed a need for an expression or two. On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Oscar Juarez tridi.animei...@gmail.comwrote: You should have a look at this ones, selecting components is not that bad as it appears. https://vimeo.com/user2030228/videos/page:12/sort:date On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 11:17 AM, olivier jeannel olivier.jean...@noos.fr wrote: The over day I started a tut to model a column. Selecting components, it was like having boxing gloves holding the mouse :( And that's not an hyperbole... Le 12/03/2014 11:06, Raffaele Fragapane a écrit : It was hyperbole :) On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 8:56 PM, David Saber davidsa...@sfr.fr wrote: it's only moderately more advanced than manually punching in vertices and edges by indices in a text file Did you forget the humor /humor tags or are you serious? -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
OT: Music for Pooby's protest film
I was talking to a friend about the Softimage situation. He's not in the industry (works in the medical field). After I'd explained the situation and had mentioned the Lego Movie, he replied to me Everything is awesome.. Everything is cool when you're part of a team. Now, thinking about Paul's protest film idea. How great would it be to have someone remake the song as a dirge? Seemed pretty appropriate under the circumstances. -Paul
Re: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer
I sincerely hope people from Autodesk are reading these letters because I think it describes the situation perfectly. If ADSK had just unveiled some amazing, next-generation DCC that combined all the good parts of Max, Maya and Softimage into one amazing package, I don't think you'd see nearly as many complaints or objections. But that didn't happen, so people are looking to what they feel are BETTER alternatives to what ADSK is offering. This entire situation was absolutely horribly conceived and executed. Rather than stubbornly standing by what is now clearly a bad decision, ADSK could gain a lot of good faith credibility by actually listening to their customers. -Paul
Re: A germ of an idea.
I'd be in just for a chance to work with an amazing talent like you Pooby! Add me to the list and let me know how I can help. -Paul — Sent from Mailbox for iPad On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Bk p...@bustykelp.com wrote: Hi I'm Paul Smith, If you don't know me, I'm an ICE enthusiast, having made around 150 or so tutorials on Vimeo. I also did the Greg Mutt blue hippy cats avatar review thing that went viral a few years ago. Now, this may seem like a hopelessly naive plan to many if not all of of you. However, I was thinking that what strength we do have as a group is the ability to make amazing imagery. I'm just wondering whether we could together, pull off a 1 min or so, film that expresses how we feel, done in a beautiful way that would be hard to ignore. I am pretty confident that between the lot of us, we could do something that would both highlight our cause, show AD what Softimage can do, and in the very least, embarrass them at killing it, and be a great tribute to Softimage and it's community. I know it would be hard to coordinate and agree on but I think it's doable. I certainly would be willing to put in some time. Any thoughts? Paul
Re: Open letter to Autodesk
Agreed - very good letter. Just have someone proofread it for grammar, spelling, etc. I assume you're not 150 years old. Also, in Gmail the format was weird. The first character of each paragraph was alone, then the paragraph started 2 lines below that. I am working with a semi-famous director friend of mine to get some contacts in the press that work outside of VFX/3D to see if we can get some publicity with the outside world on this story. I really think anyone involved in production that has Autodesk software needs to be aware of how this all went down so they can reevaluate whether or not ADSK is the type of company they want to be in bed with. I understand that business is business, but the other side of that phrase is - the customer is always right. -Paul ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:50 AM, Leendert A. Hartog hirazib...@live.nlwrote: Brilliant letter, only your age surprised me a bit... ;) Alastair Hearsum schreef op 10-3-2014 11:20: *nearly 150 years old now* -- Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator @, NOT the owner of si-community.com
Re: Open letter to Autodesk
Hi Alastair - It might be worthwhile to link to the article from the front page of your site. Perhaps put a large link right above the Glassworks banner? I think the entire Softimage community would appreciate it if other shops would take similar steps. For any sort of change to happen, this story needs to reach the general population (ie shareholders). -Paul ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Chris Marshall chrismarshal...@gmail.comwrote: If we knew who a letter like this could be sent to, we could all copy it into an e-mail and individually send it to that person. On 10 March 2014 12:13, Amaan Akram xsil...@warpedspace.org wrote: Alastair, brilliant letter. Here's hoping other studio executives will chime in. On 10 March 2014 11:44, Martin Chatterjee martin.chatterjee.li...@googlemail.com wrote: Alastair, excellent letter and spot on. Thanks for taking the effort. I hope this letter does not just stay inside this mailing list but gets more exposure as well. -M -- Martin Chatterjee [ Freelance Technical Director ] [ http://www.chatterjee.de ] [ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ] On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 12:35 PM, Morten Bartholdy x...@colorshopvfx.dkwrote: Thank you for posting this - my sentiments exactly Alastair - very well put. Softimage is the very reason why we can handle complex stuff with a very small crew. With Maya on the horizon we will be less effective and have to hire more freelance TD's to get the same things done = less money earned. Morten Bartholdy VFX Supervisor Gimmickvfx.com Den 10. marts 2014 kl. 11:20 skrev Alastair Hearsum hear...@glassworks.co.uk: Folks Dan Y and other folks, I hope this comes across as firm but reasonable. I will post it on other appropriate sites. Any ideas on that front? * An open letter to Autodesk. * Dear Autodesk My name is Alastair Hearsum. I’m a founding partner, director and head of 3d at Glassworks. If you haven’t heard of us, we are a small to midsized company which has been creating VFX and animation for TV commercials for markets around the world, for the past 20 years. We have branches in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona. We create innovative and multi award winning work and we use Softimage. Your announcement that you are retiring Softimage has left us saddened, disappointed and not a little angry. The anger for two reasons; that you have shot the racehorse of the 3d software world in the head in its prime but also that you didn’t consult with us about this assassination or discuss any of your plans for the future with us. We have no idea what the future from you holds. We are big and longstanding users of other Autodesk products as well as Softimage. The puzzling thing is, technologically speaking, there was no writing on the wall as there was with Henry and Flame, for example, or these days with Flame and Nuke. We have been punching above our weight, in London, for the past 20 years competing well with the much larger organisations of MPC, Framestore and The Mill. One of the reasons we have been able to do that, apart from the deep talent of our crew is, I believe, because of the software that we chose. I’m nearly 150 years old now but I still sit at the computer making pictures for TV commercials to the same arduous schedule that I always have. So I know what I’m talking about. For a period a few years back we had a 50/50 split of Maya and Softimage. We chose to go 100% Softimage. Its better for the work that we do and the sector we are in. Its no coincidence that all the finalists in the recent British Animation Awards (tv commercials) did their work in Softimage. Similarly, both silver and gold award winners in the 3d animation category at this year’s British Television Advertising Craft awards were Softimage companies. You may well go on to list major work that’s been done in Maya. Sure there has, and great work too. But Maya is used as a shell in the major film effect companies. It is heavily customised and unrecognisable as the product you ship. We have our proprietary software and tailored workflow as well, but Softimage remains pretty much untouched. It is lean, efficient, and the ICE environment is innovative and empowering. So you’ve done it. What’s next? Like I said we have had vague information about what the future holds. We hear rumours about bi-frost and that’s about it. From what I understand from various sources there are no plans to replicate the efficient workflow and full ice functionality that made us so productive. You have offered free transitionary licenses of Maya with the threat of having to discontinue using Softimage in 2 years time. The final thought is not just about what software is best for our future but also about what sort of software supply company we want to get into bed with. The attributes that come top of my list: listening to customers, acting on their
Re: Headus UV Layout
Not that it'll compete with a dedicated UV app, but 3D-Coat has always done a very good job with UVs for me. Andrew has just released a new beta with Globally Ungorm Unfolding in addition to the other methods: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10395hl= It has a Softimage AppLink so you can send models back and forth very easily. -Paul ᐧ
Re: [OT] Some musings regarding Blender...
The best news for Blender was after a prominent Blender contributor(?) Andrew Price, posted a video where he went through all the issues with the Blender UI and gave very reasoned, well thought out ideas on what was wrong and how it could be fixed. The Blender team heard what he had to say created a UI team to start fixing the problems. Here's the announcement: http://www.blendernation.com/2013/11/18/blender-foundation-announces-user-interface-team/ If Blender had a consistant, more industry-standard UI, I think quite a lot of people would pay more attention to it. -Paul ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Nicolas Esposito 3dv...@gmail.com wrote: I just saw the 2.7 release and man, they really improved since the last time I tried it! I'm also trying to see which software to use next to Softimage, and for now the choices are Maya, Modo and Houdini, but Blender, seeing how they improved everything and being open source, has always intrigued me I'll be honest, the most annoying thing is the navigation, I found it really awkward...I know that the keys could be remapped, but I would like to know if its possible to remap everything similar to the Soft layout, that would be nice ;) The features are really nice and the community is very active, so I really hope that this software will continue to be developed for a long timeunless AD buys them :-D 2014-03-10 14:08 GMT+01:00 Dan Yargici danyarg...@gmail.com: I started to write this post at the end of last summer and it sat unfinished in my Drafts folder, so I've just corrected a couple of things and I'm throwing it out there as is DAN I've recently (well, on and off over the last year or so and more frequently of late) started learning Blender and trying to integrate it into my workflow/toolset and far from being painful, I have found it to be quite a refreshing experience. I'm working on the premise that it's something I will always have at my disposal wherever I happen to be working due to it being free and on all platforms. As I don't work in large shops with rigid pipelines it's not really an issue in circumstances where the asset or shot can be worked on in isolation and it's in these situations that I've tried to incorporate it into my work. The obvious cost implications of working with a 'foreign' piece of software in a company, and the time required to get the myriad license systems out there working will not gain you fans in the IT/Tech/Engineering department. As Blender is free and easy to install (if you don't want to you can just extract and run it - I run it off my USB stick) you can also soften the blow with regard to company politics. Things as a Softimage user I like - here are some examples: * Sculpting - it works well for simple to moderately detailed sculpts. There are a wide range of sculpting tools available (all the usual suspects - inflate, crease, smooth etc...) and you can use all the tools for 'regular' modelling also. With the recent introduction of dynamic topology, it also became much more powerful. * Texture paint - not exactly rocket speed in all circumstances but I've been happily painting 4k textures on moderately detailed meshes using procedurals, stencils and regular brushes for a couple of weeks and hit very few snags. They are planning to merge in some improvements in 2.71. * Procedural Textures - can be used by everything, you can use them to texture, paint, mask, sculpt, filter particle emissions. Whatever you like. * Rendering - Blender comes with two renderers - 'Blender Internal' and 'Cycles'. Blender Internal is the older legacy renderer and Cycles is the GPU accelerated (CPU also supported) renderer being actively developed going forward. I won't write a ton about it, you can read a little more here http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.61/Cycles There are also a ton of alternative 3rd Party renderers. Even Vray recently announced official Blender support. Blender has a node-based Render-Tree like interface. * Smoke simulation - fairly well rounded and featured, with minimal issues and constantly being improved. Support for wavelet/FFT high resolution detailing, adaptive domains, the ability to advect the simulation with particles (and vice versa), and much more. VERY fast to render if you use Blender's internal renderer (however with the rather huge caveat of the lack of motion blur). Cycles integration expected soon-ish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYNr0ZtyD1c * Dynamic paint - same concept as Helge's pixel particles, but without the particles, and fast. Really well implemented IMO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWXFtnh2bk * Modelling tools - While I'll always prefer modelling in Softimage, some of the modelling tools in Blender are great and there are some that are really well-suited for re-topology. Soft's Alt-pivot is great, while Blender has the same idea (well, it's pretty
Deadline problems
Any Deadline experts out there? I am using 6.1 having a problem where the jobs, whether I manually submit or submit from Softimage, are ending up Queued, but they're never picked up by the slaves. The slaves all show an Idle status never pick up the scenes. Deadline is normally rock solid, and I've already submitted a support request, but I'm on a tight timeline so I figured someone here might have a suggestion. Thanks! Paul ᐧ
Re: Deadline problems
I thought so too, but I have all slaves set to take any job assigned to none for pools or groups. ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.comwrote: first thing that comes to my mind is pools and groups, sorry if it sounds silly... F. 2014-03-10 13:35 GMT-03:00 Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com: Any Deadline experts out there? I am using 6.1 having a problem where the jobs, whether I manually submit or submit from Softimage, are ending up Queued, but they're never picked up by the slaves. The slaves all show an Idle status never pick up the scenes. Deadline is normally rock solid, and I've already submitted a support request, but I'm on a tight timeline so I figured someone here might have a suggestion. Thanks! Paul ᐧ
Re: Deadline problems
Ah, nevermind - I just figured it out. Thinkbox released a new beta 6.2 the other day - but they forgot to update the licenses they've sent out. So all the slaves are reporting License server system does not support this version of this feature. -Paul ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.comwrote: another silly question, what about network paths to the project? F. 2014-03-10 13:42 GMT-03:00 Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com: I thought so too, but I have all slaves set to take any job assigned to none for pools or groups. ᐧ On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Francisco Criado malcriad...@gmail.com wrote: first thing that comes to my mind is pools and groups, sorry if it sounds silly... F. 2014-03-10 13:35 GMT-03:00 Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com: Any Deadline experts out there? I am using 6.1 having a problem where the jobs, whether I manually submit or submit from Softimage, are ending up Queued, but they're never picked up by the slaves. The slaves all show an Idle status never pick up the scenes. Deadline is normally rock solid, and I've already submitted a support request, but I'm on a tight timeline so I figured someone here might have a suggestion. Thanks! Paul ᐧ
Re: The truth about Autodesk and Softimage. Did Autodesk try?
Great Emilio! Can I make a request? It'd be a good idea if you could add some share buttons or like buttons right at the top of the article. I see them at the bottom of the page, but they're in the footer I'm not sure if they'd link directly to your article. -Paul ᐧ On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 12:20 AM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: http://e-roja.com/the-truth-about-softimage-and-autodesk/ --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation.
Re: Rendermap crashing
Mapify seems like a pretty good solution. I just wish it would let you name the sequence - or at least would pull the name from the pass name. I've been breaking them up by creating multiple directories. -Paul ᐧ On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 1:20 AM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Sorry I didnt see your reply. Mapify normally works pretty well. I don't know why there should be any problem just due for the constant material (the most basic), but you can also try the mray constant, or play around with the ambient settings to get a constant-ish result. Best of Luck On 03/08/14 16:26, Paul Griswold wrote: I'm actually rendermapping a camera projected animation, so I am mapping the texture to the incandescence and then the inverted alpha to scale the transparency. That gives me a baked rendermap that maintains the alpha and lighting from the camera projection. I don't understand why Softimage doesn't have a built-in ability to render animated rendermaps, though. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Hum.. intriging indeed.. so at least now you can put your lambert's ambient at 3.33 to make it constant (if your scene ambient is at default 0.3) On 03/08/14 16:08, Paul Griswold wrote: Looks like switching to Lambert fixed the problem. I don't understand why a constant material would cause a crash, though. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Does it work with a plain phong? if not, would eliminating all other objects do the trick? On 03/08/14 15:48, Paul Griswold wrote: I haven't been able to catch any messages unfortunately. I do wonder if it's because I'm using a constant shader on the object being rendermapped. Previously I'd applied a Lambert. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Have you checked the last Verbose messages before crashing? I would think it's probably due to a specific object in particular, and/or copies of it if the case being. On 03/08/14 15:31, Paul Griswold wrote: I have a ton of animated rendermapping to do, so I'm using Mapify from Sajjad Amjad. The problem I'm having is a LOT of crashes. I can't seem to find any consistent reason for it. I've been able to get it to render out 24 frames, 42 frames, and then sometimes Softimage will crash after just 2 frames. Is there a more stable way to render out a large number of animated rendermaps? Or is this a Mental Ray / Softimage problem? Thanks, Paul ᐧ
Re: Rendermap crashing
I'm sure there are folks who are far more qualified and experienced with rendermapping who'd have opinions on that. I honestly have never had a need for it until the project I'm on now. For me, I'm rendermapping multiple camera projections on the same object in multiple passes. Then I'm taking that output into Eyeon Fusion's 3D environment and re-applying them. Since I'm basically creating passes, I can use Fusion's tools to modify the rendermaps quickly and then output a merged UV sequence. So for this situation, I'm perfectly happy just being able to have a custom name. Anything else is a bonus. The one thing I would request is - rather than numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, using 0001, 0002, etc. Thanks!! Paul ᐧ On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Sajjad Amjad sajjad.am...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Paul, As you can probably tell, Mapify was written for a specific need. According to the help. After the path, I only append the obj.FullName. So if the path is C:\temp and you have a model Foo with a Bar inside it. The render map will be output to: C:\temp\Foo.bar\renderMap.1.ext Would you prefer it to be something like any of the following: 1. C:\temp\Foo.bar\custom.1.ext ? 2. C:\temp\pass\Foo.Bar\custom.1.ext 3. C:\temp\Foo.Bar\pass\custom.1.ext 4. C:\temp\Foo\Bar\pass\pass_custom.1.ext You hopefully get where I'm going with this. I'm willing to make some quick and dirty changes. Construct a path and i'll see if it qualifies as a quick and dirty change :-) Based on the experience I've gained in the last 5-6 years, it should be rewritten. Sajjad On 9 March 2014 18:52, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: My thoughts exactly ! :) On 03/09/14 14:48, Paul Griswold wrote: Mapify seems like a pretty good solution. I just wish it would let you name the sequence - or at least would pull the name from the pass name. I've been breaking them up by creating multiple directories. -Paul ᐧ
Re: Good point well put
The all in one mentality is pervasive at ADSK. Just look at how they took the Mudbox Softimage forums and jammed them into the one-size-fits-all disaster known as The Area. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: I agree 100% on one thing, if you are not willing to invest money to maintain the application it is the only honest thing to do. The problem I have is how is it possible there is no will to put the necessary work and money to make it happen? How is it possible someone pays $35M to buy a company and its product line and then bury it while still warm. Furthermore, the economic model that was sung to all of us countless time that has been working for years on other industries like the automotive where the Volkswagen group owns Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda and others and allows them to develop one engine for all the cars yet compete in the market while offering a distinctive experience (hello Softiamge) is actually very sensible too in this case. I don't need to tell you that many of the tools you are building for one app will end up on the others and a chunk of the cost will be saved. All in all the other thing I don't get is the associated risk, when you own the market is pretty much risk free! is like producing films and owning the distribution channel, it is impossible not to make money if you play it half well. The most amazing thing is that Softimage was a competitor during the last 5 years we would have been in a extremely different situation competing one to one with Maya for the top end of the professional market instead of being buried. Sorry to be a pest but this is an extreme situation for many. thanks a lot though for your the dialog without corporate BS, I really appreciate that Luc-Eric Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com On 8 Mar 2014, at 15:08, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com wrote: Nobody said its perfect, I am fully aware Softimage needs some truly major work done to keep it well into the 21st century, like Max and Maya and every other app, agreed. Regarding the number, you know we users are in the dark, everybody avoids answering that but from what I heard (and may be wrong) the development team never has been big, it is a different thing all the support, QA, documentation, etc... that is the bulk of the company. Regarding the point I was trying to make, are you saying the cost of development of Softimage was costlier than the PR, advertising, support, documentation, etc..? Its very sad LucEric... very very sad. It's terribly sad indeed. Many of us worked many years 6 and 7 days a week on this thing. We poured our hearts into it. If you agree that there is still tons of work needed to do - millions of RD, imho, plus a lot of risks of failure - to make that app modern in 5 years, then it doesn't matter if a few people can keep that app going in the short term, it's the longer term that's the problem. One shouldn't be asking marketing and the resellers sell a 3500$ app, plus 850$-1100$ a year in sub, if they don't have a 5 year plan and don't plan to have the investment to back it up. You cannot have schools continue to teach this app as if it's an equally safe choice for the future. So you shouldn't be inviting new clients only to have them end up in forum reading about dissatisfaction, lack of development, fear of the future. So Autodesk announced last week that their plans and investments are on Maya and Max. It's terrible news for Softimage, but at least the cards are on the table and people have time to adapt.
Re: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions
Not that I'm holding out any hope, but it does somewhat remind me of the NetFlix/Qwikster debacle or even New Coke - what a disaster that was. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.atwrote: I signed the petition but still we (you) guys should maybe start thinking about stopping the daydreaming. AD made a decision and this decision is a final one. The only thing which could happen is: Okey guys we will continue to have Softimage in our product portfolio without developing for it. Is that what everyone wants ?? Staying with a software which isnt further developed ? In that case we can simply keep our old versions no problem. If you want anything else, you will not suceed anyways. It will end up working on a dead software, whatever we do. It is too late. Companies who are working with softimage will migrate to other software. Even if autodesk changes it's mind. So no more SI jobs will lead to the need to migrate to a new Software anyways. Just my 2 cent. And don't think I am not sad about what happend. 2014-03-08 19:30 GMT+01:00 Nick Martinelli n...@nickmartinelli.net: I apologize for labeling this as URGENT, I really feel that this should be read by all regardless of side. The outcry from the community is staggering both on here and the petition (3520 in only a couple days!). I seriously doubt that AD's reps were prepared for such a backlash. They are being bombarded with emails right now, some full of warranted CG rage and others making valid points. Due to this, it's very easy for them to get overlooked. I'm not defending them, but I know that if I was in their shoes I wouldn't want to sift through a bunch of emails putting me down. This isn't to say that those thoughts aren't warranted, I know I'm fighting back some rage words as I'm typing this. If we want answers, we unfortunately need to be diplomatic. This thread is intended to group all of our questions together in a way that they can't go unnoticed. I have seen some fantastic inquiries that haven't been addressed. So please word your questions concisely and clearly here, also do your best to refrain from any insults or harsh language. Lets organize everything in a polite and strategic way, if they still go unanswered then they really aren't listening. -- Nick Martinelli (201) 424 - 6518 www.nickMartinelli.net n...@nickmartinelli.net
Rendermap crashing
I have a ton of animated rendermapping to do, so I'm using Mapify from Sajjad Amjad. The problem I'm having is a LOT of crashes. I can't seem to find any consistent reason for it. I've been able to get it to render out 24 frames, 42 frames, and then sometimes Softimage will crash after just 2 frames. Is there a more stable way to render out a large number of animated rendermaps? Or is this a Mental Ray / Softimage problem? Thanks, Paul ᐧ
Re: Rendermap crashing
I'm actually rendermapping a camera projected animation, so I am mapping the texture to the incandescence and then the inverted alpha to scale the transparency. That gives me a baked rendermap that maintains the alpha and lighting from the camera projection. I don't understand why Softimage doesn't have a built-in ability to render animated rendermaps, though. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Hum.. intriging indeed.. so at least now you can put your lambert's ambient at 3.33 to make it constant (if your scene ambient is at default 0.3) On 03/08/14 16:08, Paul Griswold wrote: Looks like switching to Lambert fixed the problem. I don't understand why a constant material would cause a crash, though. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Does it work with a plain phong? if not, would eliminating all other objects do the trick? On 03/08/14 15:48, Paul Griswold wrote: I haven't been able to catch any messages unfortunately. I do wonder if it's because I'm using a constant shader on the object being rendermapped. Previously I'd applied a Lambert. ᐧ On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Jason S jasonsta...@gmail.com wrote: Have you checked the last Verbose messages before crashing? I would think it's probably due to a specific object in particular, and/or copies of it if the case being. On 03/08/14 15:31, Paul Griswold wrote: I have a ton of animated rendermapping to do, so I'm using Mapify from Sajjad Amjad. The problem I'm having is a LOT of crashes. I can't seem to find any consistent reason for it. I've been able to get it to render out 24 frames, 42 frames, and then sometimes Softimage will crash after just 2 frames. Is there a more stable way to render out a large number of animated rendermaps? Or is this a Mental Ray / Softimage problem? Thanks, Paul ᐧ
Re: Listening
A-men Stephen. Seriously. I don't think Autodesk really considered how much of a shockwave this will ultimately be. I've already talked with friends who are Max-based and they're looking to move away from Autodesk because clearly the word of AD means nothing. If Autodesk would have simultaneously unveiled SoftiMaxya 1.0, then maybe things would be different. But the way things are now, it really has sent a very clear message to the entire industry. -Paul ᐧ On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Stephen Davidson magic...@bellsouth.netwrote: That is like saying the government is not made up of people. Every corporation, be it large or small, is made up of individual people. Without taking any personal responsibility, within that corporation, these kinds of things happen. The crap flows up-hill, till it gets to a level of person that has no idea about actually making a product. Upper management looks at the numbers and hears the crying stockholders and makes a decision, not even understand how many of the people in the entertainment creation field (common workers) it will effect. I really think that AD has underestimated how many people this will effect, in the long run. On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Maurício PC goneba...@gmail.com wrote: Come on ... is not like he has the final say on things. Attacking him personally won't solve a thing. Let's all act like grown ups. I curse AD as a company ... but as a company it has employees and most of the time they don't have a fault on how things worked out. Anyway ... just chill out on the personal attacks. On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Mihai Iliuta mihai...@gmail.com wrote: You are listening?? Ok, listen to your own bullshit: The first is to flatly call out that the rumor that the eol of Softimage and 3dsmax is upon us is totally false. Cory Mogk is now also responsible for Softimage and we have been working with the team on the future of the product with lots of key customers. We understand people make their living from this software and that they make huge decisions about their projects and companies and we take that responsibility very seriously. Again the door is open to contact us or challenge us. Please let everyone you know their products are safe. So today, we can safely say you are a lying piece of shit. You have no dignity, you have no character, and you have no word. I can't imagine any developer feeling any pride anymore working for you or this fucked up company. What you have done here and HOW you've done it, is irreparable and you and your company is from now on going downhill. You expect anybody to ever trust you or your company again? Is that worth anything for a business? It's worth everything. Nobody finds it in the least suspicious why SI was killed now? When the whole community around SI and the nr of independent developers working developing tools for it was at an all time high??? I don't know when you lost your balls and your word Mr. Vienneau, but good luck regaining both. Piece of shit. On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Perry Harovas perryharo...@gmail.comwrote: While Dan's heart is breaking (and so is mine), I still have (at least) one nagging question: Clearly this has been under discussion for a while at Autodesk, so why were the following comments from September 5th of 2012 made: *The rumor that the EOL of Softimage and 3DS Max is upon us is totally false.* So, if I understand this correctly, what I get out of it is that when Autodesk assures customers that their product is not on the chopping block, that statement is really only good for about a year and a half (less if you take into account that this EOL must have been decided a while back). That doesn't imbue anyone with much confidence. I am not a 3DS Max user, but if I was, I think I'd be worried, and would take any Autodesk assurances that there was no reason to worry with a very large grain of salt. Can someone please, finally, address this? Thank you On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Thanks Chris! And thanks as well for the update to the licensing terms. That's a big deal. -Tim On 3/7/2014 2:14 PM, Dan Pejril wrote: Good to know you are listening. If you listen closely, you can heart my heart breaking On 3/7/2014 3:01 PM, Chris Vienneau wrote: Hi everyone, I just want to let you know there are people from the maya dev and pm teams coming online to this forum but we are shipping software and answering a lot of calls but the mails you are writing are being passed back and forth as they are coming at a furious pace. Stay tuned for some answers and we plan on doing some private webinars under NDA for soft users to ask questions direct to us. Anyone interested in such a thing please write me a private mail at chris.vienn...@autodesk.com mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list - A new word from Brad Peebler
I'd love to sit in on a webinar. Modo scares me a little bit in that they still seem to have the LW mentality there. -Paul ᐧ On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:04 PM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.com wrote: I'm in for the Webinar. and what is the contact information again to e-mail him directly? On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: More contact from Brad off-list He says the following... *I've been thinking about how this all went down and I'm feeling a bit sad about it. I have a new idea. People should not feel like they have to rush to make a move. They don't! Soft is still awesome and will be for years to come. Rather than offering another promo code what I would like to do is offer an extended trial of MODO for anyone who wants it. They can contact me directly and I'll get them setup with a 60 day license. My offer still stands that anyone who talks to me directly will also find that I am a man of my word (with regard to the code). Wink wink. I can't publicly extend that offer but I will stand by it for anyone on that list.* *I would also be willing to set up an invitation only webinar for the list so we can talk openly under a gentlemens NDA. I'd love to clear up some of the confusion about MODO being built as a modeler only and share some short, mid and long term goals for the product. Finally, I'm getting quite a bit of email this week so if someone doesn't hear from me straight away please feel free to send your email again. I won't be offended to get spammed. :)* If you guys are interested in taking him up in his webinar idea, please voice it! I'm pretty sure he can read these messages on the Google group, but if not I'm happy to convey your corporate response. -Tim
Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list - A new word from Brad Peebler
Oh don't get me started on the history of Modo - it'll totally derail things. I'm an old-time Lightwave beta tester from the early-mid 1990's. Brad Peebler was my contact at NewTek back in those days. There's a whole drama around how Modo came about. ᐧ On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Mmm Paul I think you're getting close to the genetic fallacyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacywith that. Also I'm not sure Modo was ever intended to replace Lightwave. Maybe, just not sure...? I think your point about opening things up the way ICE does is an important distinction to make though. ICE is a platform, not just series of tools to meet specific needs. As such, it shares a room with very few systems (Houdini, Maya internally as I understand...). But the vast majority of 3D applications out there, including Softimage (minus ICE), are built to address specific, known production needs. I don't think it's fair to criticize the choice to design an application this way, simply because such a design choice indicates that the developer is trying to meet artists' known needs. Certainly there's absolutely no denying the power and flexibility of a platform like ICE/Houdini, which essentially opens up a layer between the raw API and the immediate toolset exposed to the user, allowing them to create new tools via node-based programming. But if that's *all *we had, I doubt many of us could get our work done on time. Most of us still need traditional, focused toolsets as well. *As for Modo, people are going to have to take the responsibility of doing their own due diligence in evaluating it*. There's no definite answer to 'can it replace Softimage?' That's silly. It just depends on what your needs are, like everything else. In its current state and because of our pipeline here at Magnetic, I use Modo primarily as a swiss army knife. Just yesterday I was able to load in an illustrator file with complicated curves into Modo, set them to be renderable, then bake that geometry cache into something I could export (rims all around these intricate designs on a stained glass window). Could not have done that nearly as easily otherwise, not by a mile. Took me 30s in Modo. Stuff like that is a stress relief for me! Anyway, I would LOVE to see a truly procedural platform like ICE come to Modo. Who wouldn't? -Tim On 3/6/2014 11:25 AM, Paul Griswold wrote: Well Modo is essentially Lightwave Part 2, since it came from the original programmers of Lightwave and at one point was supposed to replace Lightwave. I feel like they tend to want to build specific tools to fill specific needs instead of opening things up the way ICE does. ᐧ On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: Lightwave mentality Paul ? On 6 March 2014 17:07, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: I'd love to sit in on a webinar. Modo scares me a little bit in that they still seem to have the LW mentality there. -Paul ᐧ On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:04 PM, Chris Johnson chr...@topixfx.comwrote: I'm in for the Webinar. and what is the contact information again to e-mail him directly? On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: More contact from Brad off-list He says the following... *I've been thinking about how this all went down and I'm feeling a bit sad about it. I have a new idea. People should not feel like they have to rush to make a move. They don't! Soft is still awesome and will be for years to come. Rather than offering another promo code what I would like to do is offer an extended trial of MODO for anyone who wants it. They can contact me directly and I'll get them setup with a 60 day license. My offer still stands that anyone who talks to me directly will also find that I am a man of my word (with regard to the code). Wink wink. I can't publicly extend that offer but I will stand by it for anyone on that list.* *I would also be willing to set up an invitation only webinar for the list so we can talk openly under a gentlemens NDA. I'd love to clear up some of the confusion about MODO being built as a modeler only and share some short, mid and long term goals for the product. Finally, I'm getting quite a bit of email this week so if someone doesn't hear from me straight away please feel free to send your email again. I won't be offended to get spammed. :)* If you guys are interested in taking him up in his webinar idea, please voice it! I'm pretty sure he can read these messages on the Google group, but if not I'm happy to convey your corporate response. -Tim --
Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list - A new word from Brad Peebler
Wow! I guess I haven't kept up with Modo at all. It does look pretty appealing. — Sent from Mailbox for iPad On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 4:47 PM, David Rivera activemotionpictu...@yahoo.com wrote: Yes, please I´m into the webinar. I recently saw this: https://vimeo.com/76876920 and I´m picturing myself adding more modo mentality asap :) Thanks. David R. On Thursday, March 6, 2014 2:01 PM, Nic Sievers siev...@gmail.com wrote: Count me in as well On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Sebastien Sterling sebastien.sterl...@gmail.com wrote: Webinar sounds cool would love to hear where things are going On 6 March 2014 18:54, Maurício PC goneba...@gmail.com wrote: I'm also in for the webinar. Brads webinar are always fun and he can convey and express himself really well. Looking forward to it. On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 3:44 PM, Michael Clarke m...@bluecstudios.com wrote: Count me in for the webinar. Very interested to see what could become of the package if it has some customer-focused dedication behind it. I suspect my strategy at this point shared by a number of other users. I'll continue to use SI and take the Maya path for the moment. The real decision will be whether to continue with maintenance or to continue to use SI (an probably Maya) without a viable upgrade path. Either way, i am going to be looking for a package to fill in some gaps and MODO looks like a reasonably priced quality alternative with a future. If in two years it looks like it could one day be a truly complete app comparable to AD's offerings, then the decision to cut ties with AD becomes less difficult. Up until that point — and as some have pointed out already, several years beyond, — SI will remain a functional tool capable of handling most of my needs. MODO can at minimum be something of a stopgap to hedge the risks. It looks like fairly low cost way of providing a buffer to the current dilemma. It's value as a supplemental tool is worth looking into, whether or not it ever becomes a primary production tool. The whole relationship with The Foundry feels good at this point. One more thing. AD had some great people working there, and most of the folks who interacted with customers were extremely dedicated and helpful. What I always sensed from them, however, was a disconnect between the support and development teams, and the decision makers within the company. That's something smaller companies like LUX/Foundry can handle differently. I'm not looking for MODO to become my primary tool. On Mar 6, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Eugen Sares sof...@mail.sprit.org wrote: In for that webinar, too... -- Originalnachricht -- Von: Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com An: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Gesendet: 06.03.2014 19:01:30 Betreff: Re: Luxology Modo 50% off for this mailing list - A new word from Brad Peebler Yes there is. Not much of a secret anymore :-) -Tim On 3/6/2014 11:55 AM, Paul Griswold wrote: Oh don't get me started on the history of Modo - it'll totally derail things. I'm an old-time Lightwave beta tester from the early-mid 1990's. Brad Peebler was my contact at NewTek back in those days. There's a whole drama around how Modo came about. ᐧ On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Tim Crowson tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com wrote: Mmm Paul I think you're getting close to the genetic fallacy with that. Also I'm not sure Modo was ever intended to replace Lightwave. Maybe, just not sure...? I think your point about opening things up the way ICE does is an important distinction to make though. ICE is a platform, not just series of tools to meet specific needs. As such, it shares a room with very few systems (Houdini, Maya internally as I understand...). But the vast majority of 3D applications out there, including Softimage (minus ICE), are built to address specific, known production needs. I don't think it's fair to criticize the choice to design an application this way, simply because such a design choice indicates that the developer is trying to meet artists' known needs. Certainly there's absolutely no denying the power and flexibility of a platform like ICE/Houdini, which essentially opens up a layer between the raw API and the immediate toolset exposed to the user, allowing them to create new tools via node-based programming. But if that'sall we had, I doubt many of us could get our work done on time. Most of us still need traditional, focused toolsets as well. As for Modo, people are going to have to take the responsibility of doing their own due diligence in evaluating it. There's no definite answer to 'can it replace Softimage?' That's silly. It just depends on what your needs are, like everything else. In its current state and because of our pipeline here at Magnetic, I use Modo primarily as a swiss army knife. Just yesterday I was able to load in an illustrator file with complicated curves
Re: let me fan the flames....
Well, as I posted over on CGTalk, I don't think killing Softimage was a real business decision. If ME account for only 7% of ADSK's revenue, and Softimage is one of the smallest components of that revenue, it's insignificant. But, executives need to pound their chests like gorillas and proclaim to the shareholders board that they're trimming the fat, etc., etc. If it was truly a business decision, they could have cut a lot more than just Softimage to make an impact on the bottom line. This was all for show IMHO. Realistically, they could cancel all of their ME products if they're 7% of the revenue. They own enough patents intellectual property that they could essentially hold the industry hostage and never develop another product. Again Joe Alter comes to mind. Why develop anything when you can sit back and force people to pay licensing fees year after year? Hopefully enough noise is made to start stirring up some anti-trust claims. Autodesk is clearly behaving as a monopoly at this point. -Paul ᐧ On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 4:09 PM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: Well we all still think that putting Softimage to rest is a big mistake. Motion Builder also has not major improvements. So we know how all will end. We will continue to support and develop... --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. 2014-03-05 15:02 GMT-06:00 Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com: If they kill any of those the only one I think would be a mistake would be Motion Builder… it has great potential if they decide to actually develop it… it has been in limbo mode like Softimage for years now and killing the Mac version was truly annoying. 3DSMax… well… the architecture is so old and messy (have you tried developing for Max?) I wonder how are they going to sustain it… With regards with the users… they may offer the same great deal we are receiving.. (irony) arhghh Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com On 5 Mar 2014, at 19:45, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: More reasons to stay with softimage El mar 5, 2014 1:42 PM, Gustavo Eggert Boehs gustav...@gmail.com escribió: Yes, but what they might do (are doing imho) is just keeping updates as irrelevant as possible for animation, not to encourage new users to pick it up with that in mind. Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com escreveu: i agree with the first two, just 3dsmax has too much installed user base. i know we are mad and we are making a stink about it... but if they axed max?! autodesk might have to consider extra security... On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 11:06 AM, Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.comwrote: The writing is on the wall. This is my take. 1 - Mudbox is next as Zbrush has truly wiped the market. 2 - Morion Builder next as they implement some tech in maya. 3 - 3DMax goes next. Anyone want to bet? -- Gustavo E Boehs Dpto. de Expressão Gráfica | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina | http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/
Re: let me fan the flames....
I suppose I was looking back and remembering the government going after Microsoft for being a monopoly because it bundled IE with Windows. Netscape existed back then, as did Apple, but it didn't stop them from going after Microsoft. I'd be interested to see what percentage of the entire market Autodesk has compared to Newtek, SideFX, The Foundry, etc. ᐧ On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 5:09 PM, Raffaele Fragapane raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote: People often take the whole antitrust thing a bit too far. Antitrust laws, contrary to popular belief, don't prohibit de-facto monopolies in any way other than those emerging maliciously or aggressively. They are intended to try and avoid them, of course, but there is nothing illegal to a monopoly emerging naturally as long as it doesn't get exploited, once in place, to further itself in an unfair and uncompetitive manner. If you have a monopoly on something because you're the only provider of such thing that's perfectly legal. It's oligopoly through conspiracy (cross company agreements on price fixing in example) that's severely punished, and monopoly through conspiracy or aggressive exploitation of an existing monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic capacity that are prohibited. AD is also not considered a monopoly since Houdini, Modo, C4D, LW, and various other hanger-ons are all available, and AD generally doesn't coerce or litigate much through ME, almost not at all compared to any other tech industry. Lastly, to those saying the acquisition of Softimage should have been stalled or blocked by antitrust, Soft had been gutted by Avid and put on a fire sale and handled very dubiously by a couple entirely too career focused people inside it. AD did absolutely nothing illegal or dodgy buying it. They would have had had they performed an aggressive take over of sorts and concurrently done something like slashing prices or offering trade-ins at a loss against other platforms, effectively making a move to try and sweep the market of competitors, but they did none of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not fond of current or past events, but the whole monopoly and antitrust discussions are honestly best left out of it. There is so much more that is wrong and could be fixed before people contemplate class actions and antitrust appeals that are so incredibly unlikely to go anywhere other than to brush the pocket lining of a handful of lawyers. On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Paul Griswold pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com wrote: Well, as I posted over on CGTalk, I don't think killing Softimage was a real business decision. If ME account for only 7% of ADSK's revenue, and Softimage is one of the smallest components of that revenue, it's insignificant. But, executives need to pound their chests like gorillas and proclaim to the shareholders board that they're trimming the fat, etc., etc. If it was truly a business decision, they could have cut a lot more than just Softimage to make an impact on the bottom line. This was all for show IMHO. Realistically, they could cancel all of their ME products if they're 7% of the revenue. They own enough patents intellectual property that they could essentially hold the industry hostage and never develop another product. Again Joe Alter comes to mind. Why develop anything when you can sit back and force people to pay licensing fees year after year? Hopefully enough noise is made to start stirring up some anti-trust claims. Autodesk is clearly behaving as a monopoly at this point. -Paul ᐧ On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 4:09 PM, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.comwrote: Well we all still think that putting Softimage to rest is a big mistake. Motion Builder also has not major improvements. So we know how all will end. We will continue to support and develop... --- Emilio Hernández VFX 3D animation. 2014-03-05 15:02 GMT-06:00 Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com: If they kill any of those the only one I think would be a mistake would be Motion Builder… it has great potential if they decide to actually develop it… it has been in limbo mode like Softimage for years now and killing the Mac version was truly annoying. 3DSMax… well… the architecture is so old and messy (have you tried developing for Max?) I wonder how are they going to sustain it… With regards with the users… they may offer the same great deal we are receiving.. (irony) arhghh Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com On 5 Mar 2014, at 19:45, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote: More reasons to stay with softimage El mar 5, 2014 1:42 PM, Gustavo Eggert Boehs gustav...@gmail.com escribió: Yes, but what they might do (are doing imho) is just keeping updates as irrelevant as possible for animation, not to encourage new users to pick it up with that in mind. Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014, Steven Caron car...@gmail.com
Re: Retirement.....
They released their profit loss statement last night. I'm pretty sure it showed ADSK as a whole had a 27% drop from the previous year. Personally I don't plan on supporting them financially at all from now on. And I will do my best to discourage anyone I know from buying any ADSK products. I'd love nothing more at this point than to see ADSK being financially forced to start selling off divisions. -Paul ᐧ On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.comwrote: 3pm EST today folks... stay tuned.. On Tuesday, March 04, 2014 7:41:19 AM, Mirko Jankovic wrote: http://www.jigsaw24.com/news/news/11949-autodesk- softimages-retirement-what-you-need-to-know/ taken page down.. who was a bit premature On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Max Evgrafov summ...@gmail.com mailto:summ...@gmail.com wrote: it is impossible to forgive AD 2014-03-04 16:33 GMT+04:00 Max Evgrafov summ...@gmail.com mailto:summ...@gmail.com: managers of AD are scoundrels. they will burn in hell 2014-03-04 16:24 GMT+04:00 John Clausing jclausin...@yahoo.com mailto:jclausin...@yahoo.com: It also says support till April 2016 As for me, as a freelancer, gotta go Maya. But I'm going to learn Modo and Houdini Sent from my iPhone On Mar 4, 2014, at 7:22 AM, Daniel Sweeney dan...@northforge.co.uk mailto:dan...@northforge.co.uk wrote: So they have spoken. Slow transition to another DCC then it is. I will use soft for as long as possible, But time to get the thinking hat on. What is everyone thinking of going too? I am going to look into modo for my own work I think but will probably need to know a bit about maya for freelance work. utter bullshit, but not a shock to be honest. probably the worse thing that could do is alienate there user base. like the blind leading the blind. Daniel Sweeney 3D Creative Director *Mobile:*+44 (0)7743429771 tel:%2B44%20%280%297743429771 *Email:*dan...@northforge.co.uk mailto:dan...@northforge.co.uk *Web:*http://northforge.co.uk http://northforge.co.uk/ On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Stefan Kubicek s...@tidbit-images.com mailto:s...@tidbit-images.com wrote: Not that I know of. And it says at the top: Slated for release in 2015? What? Was it announced - been in lectures all morning? Arse http://www.jigsaw24.com/news/_ _news/11949-autodesk-__softimages-retirement-what-__you-need-to-know/ http://www.jigsaw24.com/news/news/11949-autodesk- softimages-retirement-what-you-need-to-know/ Sofronis Efstathiou Postgraduate Framework Leader and BFX Competition Festival Director Computer Animation Academic Group National Centre for Computer Animation Email: sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk mailto:sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk__mailto:se fstathiou@__bournemouth.ac.uk mailto:sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 1202 965805 tel:%2B44%20%280%29%201202%20965805 Profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/__sofronisefstathiou http://uk.linkedin.com/in/sofronisefstathiou Student Work: http://www.youtube.com/__NCCA3DAnimation http://www.youtube.com/NCCA3DAnimation http://www.youtube.com/__NCCADigitalFX http://www.youtube.com/NCCADigitalFX http://www.youtube.com/__NCCAAnimation http://www.youtube.com/NCCAAnimation [cid:image001.jpg@01CF379F.__4F6AC9C0]http://www.__ bfxfestival.com/competition/ http://www.bfxfestival.com/competition/ [cid:image002.jpg@01CF379F.__4F6AC9C0]http://ncca. __bournemouth.ac.uk/ http://ncca.bournemouth.ac.uk/ [cid:image003.png@01CF379F.__4F6AC9C0] http://www.bfxfestival.com/ [cid:image004.jpg@01CF379F.__4F6AC9C0] Awarded for world-class computer animation teaching with wide scientific and creative applications [http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/ __Images/QueensAwardLogo.jpg http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/ Images/QueensAwardLogo.jpg] BU is a Disability Two Ticks Employer and has
Re: Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement
I sincerely hope this is the beginning of a very fast downward spiral for ADSK as a company. Nothing would thrill me more than to see ADSK go Chapter 11 and be forced to start selling off asset after asset. Thanks for nothing Carl Basshole! -Paul ᐧ
