Good idea
Alastair Hearsum
Head of 3d
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On 11/03/2014 02:49, Greg Punchatz wrote:
Hello Autodesk,
My name is Greg Punchatz , Senior Creative Director at Janimation. I
have a proposal, or call it a counter offer on the proper way to
retire Softimage.
First off, if you don't know who I am, I feel like I have been part of
the Softimage team since the beginning of Sumatra testing. I spent
countless hours creating content on my own time and letting Softimage
use my personal work as the sample scenes that make up a good deal of
the Softimage library. Because of this relationship I have many, many
very dear friends from all eras of Softimage. From the very top to the
bottom of Softimage, I was always welcomed as one of the family.
Our company, Janimation, was instrumental in helping promote XSI from
its earliest days from being its first customer demo at the XSI launch
party. To its final days giving Avid and Autodesk permission to use
our work for promoting Softimage launches. We did this because we
truly believe it is the best software on the planet for what we do....
and that's commercial work. Softimage is lighter on its feet out of
the box for the kind of work the post production world is doing today
in commercials. I don't know a single CG supervisor that knows each
package equally that would rather take a commercial through a single
package other than XSI.
That being said, I believe Autodesk needs to be working on a
completely new 3d software package. I would hope that is the plan. I
also understand that if you are working towards moving us all to one
package, Softimage by market share alone is the logical one to first
retire as it creates the least income.
So if it's time has truly come (even though I believe it is the most
complete out-of-the-box 3-D solution you provide currently) I think
there is a more elegant... let's say, a kinder gentler way for
Softimage to be put into retirement. You can continue to benefit from
our subscription support while we have enough time to move our
existing pipeline to somthing else.
Please consider keepinng the current small development team you
already have for FOUR more years.
With a single focus on these three things: opening up the SDK,
working with 3rd party folk,
and fixing long outstanding low-level requests.
It's nothing but a win-win situation, you still get our money, and we
get to evalute Maya along the way. It's going to take a lot more than
two years for a lot of us to be able to make a tranistion completely.
I'm not sure if Autodesk realizes this, but while the team in
Singapore was not making giant leaps technologically, they were on
their way to leaving Softimage in a much better state. They need a bit
more time than you are giving them.
At the end of the four years, we can at least consider staying in the
Autodesk family because they listened to the users....gave us pleanty
of heads up of its EOL, and did thier darndest to make sure the last
version of softimage is the best version ever...XSI deserves
that....we deserve that ... and quite frankly I deserve that.
Sincerely
Greg Punchatz
Senior Creative Director at Janimation ...
