Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
This is exactly what I am thinking for years now: 3D software out of the hands of large corporations. All the legal problems that come with public companies (not being able to talk freely about future developments at any time for example, safe harbor blah) is just to much of a problem for a product that highly depends on the input of it's users and proper communication, let alone looming bankruptcy in financially difficult times, let alone in times of bad management decisions, and combinations thereof. Blender can never go bankrupt! That DATEV example is particularly nice since buyers of the software automatically become owners of the company, not just the product or license. Some thoughts: It would be cool if subscribes could actively contribute to the development through feature requests and/or code contributions, and everybody gets access to daily builds. Through regular code contributions members could get developer status, freeing them from having to pay a member fee. It could be legally challenging to get that business model established on an international level though, not sure how the Genossenschaft translates to the US and other countries. Any ideas how this could work? after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Mr. Doyle are you reading this? Morten Den 5. marts 2014 kl. 10:11 skrev Stefan Kubicek s...@tidbit-images.com: This is exactly what I am thinking for years now: 3D software out of the hands of large corporations. All the legal problems that come with public companies (not being able to talk freely about future developments at any time for example, safe harbor blah) is just to much of a problem for a product that highly depends on the input of it's users and proper communication, let alone looming bankruptcy in financially difficult times, let alone in times of bad management decisions, and combinations thereof. Blender can never go bankrupt! That DATEV example is particularly nice since buyers of the software automatically become owners of the company, not just the product or license. Some thoughts: It would be cool if subscribes could actively contribute to the development through feature requests and/or code contributions, and everybody gets access to daily builds. Through regular code contributions members could get developer status, freeing them from having to pay a member fee. It could be legally challenging to get that business model established on an international level though, not sure how the Genossenschaft translates to the US and other countries. Any ideas how this could work? after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
He Stephan and all. Thanks for your words. But let's try to keep this thread constructive and on topic. Which is about what to do next, and if there is interest in a combined effort to create a scene assembly tool based on fabric (or something else) specifically. There are more than enough threads to vent your feelings about this messed up situation already. 2014-03-05 5:48 GMT+01:00 Alex Arce aa.li...@gmail.com: Wow Stephan, Thanks for sharing. I remember in some of my early days with Softimage CE (starting 21 years ago), Spans+Partners work on some of the early Softimage reels inspiring me to explore more. It makes me happy to be reminded of this so many years later, even at such a depressing moment it Softimage history. Thanks again, Alex On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 11:10 PM, Stephan Hempel elh...@gmail.com wrote: after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I admit that I had to look it up in spite of studying business administration for two years: The English term for Genossenschaft is cooperation. According to a couple of articles I found it seems to be an increasingly popular and successful type of organization, even more so since the financial crisis. According to some statistics it also has the lowest chance of bankruptcy compared to any other form of organisation (at least in Germany, according to this short article: http://www.finanzen.net/nachricht/private-finanzen/Marktwirtschaft-Erfolgsmodell-Genossenschaften-1638921). This is exactly what I am thinking for years now: 3D software out of the hands of large corporations. All the legal problems that come with public companies (not being able to talk freely about future developments at any time for example, safe harbor blah) is just to much of a problem for a product that highly depends on the input of it's users and proper communication, let alone looming bankruptcy in financially difficult times, let alone in times of bad management decisions, and combinations thereof. Blender can never go bankrupt! That DATEV example is particularly nice since buyers of the software automatically become owners of the company, not just the product or license. Some thoughts: It would be cool if subscribes could actively contribute to the development through feature requests and/or code contributions, and everybody gets access to daily builds. Through regular code contributions members could get developer status, freeing them from having to pay a member fee. It could be legally challenging to get that business model established on an international level though, not sure how the Genossenschaft translates to the US and other countries. Any ideas how this could work? after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Hi Felix, well I put this post on purpose in this thread. It's targeted primarily at FabricEngine because I have the impression that regarding their business model they are settled (they have a venture capitalist in their back according to their website) but I suppose not so tight as other companies (The Foundry being a part of Carlyle Group for example). On the other hand I wanted to give Maurice Patel (in all modesty) an idea about some options in the unlikely event that Autodesk would sell the ME division in the future (which imho I think is not so unlikely at all for the stated reasons). But you are right a separate thread would be better. I leave this to the others if someone wants to contribute since I have everything said what I wanted to say. Cheers, Stephan. He Stephan and all. Thanks for your words. But let's try to keep this thread constructive and on topic. Which is about what to do next, and if there is interest in a combined effort to create a scene assembly tool based on fabric (or something else) specifically. There are more than enough threads to vent your feelings about this messed up situation already. 2014-03-05 5:48 GMT+01:00 Alex Arce aa.li...@gmail.com: Wow Stephan, Thanks for sharing. I remember in some of my early days with Softimage CE (starting 21 years ago), Spans+Partners work on some of the early Softimage reels inspiring me to explore more. It makes me happy to be reminded of this so many years later, even at such a depressing moment it Softimage history. Thanks again, Alex On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 11:10 PM, Stephan Hempel elh...@gmail.com wrote: after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Hi Andy, cant agree more with your very elaborate email, thanks for taking the time so sum it up... In regards to your loose suggestion of collaborating on developing future FE based solutions we at Sehsucht in Hamburg are more than interested at this point... Cheers, Daniel On 04/03/2014 22:52, Andy Jones wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported product in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they think their company *might* be interested. I'll start: Psyop Massmarket On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com mailto:felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com mailto:car...@gmail.com: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com mailto:felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Hi Andy,Stefan, re-reading my post, I'm not sure I was totally clear about modeling. I'm not sure if this puts us back in agreement or not, but to clarify, what I meant was just that most pipelines have a reasonable degree of choice in which package they use for modeling. I don't spend much time modeling personally so I'm not qualified to comment on the capabilities of the different packages. From what I do know I fully agree that losing XSI is a hit in this area. For me, it's a hit in every area, just due to how I can make use of ICE pretty much across the board. Not to mention the rest of the tools and the operator stack. I think part of why I glossed over modeling is that I think users who want to will be able to stick with XSI for modelling a little longer in that area than in, say, lighting, where things have to be more consistent across the studio.I just re-read your first post as well and I misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and to which I agree: As far as modeling goes there is a broad range of options to go with (both commercial and non-commercial)I would also say, I think my comments don't really at all capture the needs of game studios. We're all more alike than we are different, and I consider us one user community, but as far as my personal experience, I'm definitely coming at this from a primarily commercials/features point of view. Not sure if your a games guy or not, but I'm just realizing that's a broad category of people who are likely not as antsy as me about getting a new scene assembly tool :)I used to be in games for several years. Most studios I've seen are running some sort of home-grown editor to assemble their game worlds, along the lines of the Cryteks Sandbox, Unity, etc..I doubt they would find a scene assembly tool geared towards shading/rendering useful out of the box, unless it was some emerging games company with awareness of what FE could bring to the game development table and the will to build on it with the goal to transform it into their game editing environment. As for FE used in games, I'm quite surprised seemingly nobody has picked that up yet.I wonder how complicated it would be to get it to run on current consoles and even mobile devices.Now I'm truly going on a tangent, but I would also imagine that a scene assembly tool that exports to Arnold would also serve as a good framework for collecting, prepping, optimizing, and exporting game assets :) You're basically exporting things to a "renderer" after all.Like above, to a certain extent. It might be cool for texture baking/lighting, but the general tendency is to go real-time with as much of the lighting pipeline as possible - It's just so much more flexible and cheaper in the end, and I'm sure we'll see more of that happening in the near future (on faster hardware).Here's a nice example of what's already possible: http://molecularmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/real-time-radiosity/#more-298@Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement in any existing application out there. -- --- Stefan Kubicek--- keyvis digital imagery Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3 A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien Phone:+43/699/12614231 www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at-- This email and its attachments are confidential and for the recipient only--
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Hi Everyone lots of change is going on, never did i imagine that i will see the end of softimage, really sad but am happy that every one is still positive and looking for smart alternatives and really great discussions are going on, I haven't tried Fabric Engine yet i don't know if my poor scripting skills will be any good to develop things myself but sure if there are enough tool shared by the community for it i will and more less technical people will do also. from what i understand that tools developed inside of Fabric Engine will work inside it regardless of the host DCC, that will be a great way to develop tools to help xsi stay alive for a while and also to fill short comings in other softwares like Modo till its more mature. I thinks Fabric Engine should support more and more DCC packages to give the ultimate freedom for every one to chose. it is really a great effort by everyone there at Fabric Engine and i think we should all support it. for me i will keep using soft till it dies completely but i will start giving modo a chance and use it along side till it matures more i have faith in The Foundry they have done only good things with the softwares they acquired. on another note i haven't been active in the softimage community for couple of years now as most of my work is supervision now and running my own small shop that heavily relay on out sourcing and handling freelancers so it is a bit hectic, but i want to thank every one here specially the people that i got the pleasure of meeting, for the effort they did to support this community and make it the best community any software had. Regards Ahmed Barakat On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Stefan Kubicek s...@tidbit-images.com wrote: Hi Andy, Stefan, re-reading my post, I'm not sure I was totally clear about modeling. I'm not sure if this puts us back in agreement or not, but to clarify, what I meant was just that most pipelines have a reasonable degree of choice in which package they use for modeling. I don't spend much time modeling personally so I'm not qualified to comment on the capabilities of the different packages. From what I do know I fully agree that losing XSI is a hit in this area. For me, it's a hit in every area, just due to how I can make use of ICE pretty much across the board. Not to mention the rest of the tools and the operator stack. I think part of why I glossed over modeling is that I think users who want to will be able to stick with XSI for modelling a little longer in that area than in, say, lighting, where things have to be more consistent across the studio. I just re-read your first post as well and I misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and to which I agree: As far as modeling goes there is a broad range of options to go with (both commercial and non-commercial) I would also say, I think my comments don't really at all capture the needs of game studios. We're all more alike than we are different, and I consider us one user community, but as far as my personal experience, I'm definitely coming at this from a primarily commercials/features point of view. Not sure if your a games guy or not, but I'm just realizing that's a broad category of people who are likely not as antsy as me about getting a new scene assembly tool :) I used to be in games for several years. Most studios I've seen are running some sort of home-grown editor to assemble their game worlds, along the lines of the Cryteks Sandbox, Unity, etc..I doubt they would find a scene assembly tool geared towards shading/rendering useful out of the box, unless it was some emerging games company with awareness of what FE could bring to the game development table and the will to build on it with the goal to transform it into their game editing environment. As for FE used in games, I'm quite surprised seemingly nobody has picked that up yet. I wonder how complicated it would be to get it to run on current consoles and even mobile devices. Now I'm truly going on a tangent, but I would also imagine that a scene assembly tool that exports to Arnold would also serve as a good framework for collecting, prepping, optimizing, and exporting game assets :) You're basically exporting things to a renderer after all. Like above, to a certain extent. It might be cool for texture baking/lighting, but the general tendency is to go real-time with as much of the lighting pipeline as possible - It's just so much more flexible and cheaper in the end, and I'm sure we'll see more of that happening in the near future (on faster hardware). Here's a nice example of what's already possible: http://molecularmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/real-time-radiosity/#more-298 @Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I'm writing up a response today - lots to cover :) We are paying attention.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Anyone can explain a bit what are options with Fabric Engine for non tech guys but purely artist type? Start and work? I understood that it is creation platform for people to get it and create their tools but what are chances that in time there will be enough tools and libraries that will enable non tech guys to pickup various tools and start working? Or I misunderstood what is behind Fabric Engine completely :) On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: I'm writing up a response today - lots to cover :) We are paying attention.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
As it have already been stated modern pipelines tend to be more fractured, what we definitely miss is a new and innovative solution for rigging/assembly/animation as there already are plenty of solutions for the rest. Looking forward to Fabric :) Cheers --- Ahmidou Lyazidi Director | TD | CG artist http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos http://www.cappuccino-films.com 2014-03-05 16:30 GMT+01:00 Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com: I'm writing up a response today - lots to cover :) We are paying attention.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I'll take a stab (although I haven't really spent any time using it). Often in production, we face problems that need solving. They can be generic problems that are common across a studio, like fur or grass, or they can be show-specific, like create time-lapse footage of a building being constructed. These examples are fairly small in scope, but studios may have even broader needs, like We'd like a way to visualize our models quickly, without turntables, with an embedded Shotgun page for doing reviews. There are lots of tools at our disposal for solving these things, but the most powerful toolsets all exist with various DCC packages. So any solution you come up with tends to be tightly coupled with one package. For example, a studio might come up with a good procedural forest solution in Houdini, but then every time they want to use it, they have to make sure they have a Houdini artist to run it. If the rest of the show is in Maya, you now have to deal with porting lots of assets over, and the additional crew. Or, more often, the technical artist or rnd person gets asked to simply port the tool over to the other package. Once you port the tool, you now have two separate sets of code to keep up to date, and eventually you have to hire more technical artists and RnD guys to keep up with demand. And the ones you have are unhappy because they're spending time keeping code in sync and porting features back and forth, rather than making cool stuff artists want. Perhaps the most common situation is that we see all of the issues above in advance, and opt to have an artist figure it out themselves, or do it by hand. Not because us technical guys are lazy beer-sipping jerks, but because it's actually cheaper to do it the hard way than to make a tool that will have to get rewritten by the time you use it again. From what they've released so far, Fabric Engine goes a long way towards remedying these kinds of situations, and does so in a very clever way, that's geared for extremely high performance and flexibility. At its core, Fabric Engine gives us an API for graphics built with multi-threading and optimized machine level compiling in mind. With the Splice integrations in various DCC packages, we gain a direct way to integrate tools built in Fabric Engine into all our DCC packages with a single implementation. The tool you make for Maya Splice works in Softimage Splice, and does so far more elegantly than any one-off tool a TD is likely to create. Magic. So, for the artist, it means your studio can build better tools faster, and make better use of them across packages. Gone are the days of seeing what someone has in tool X and wishing you had it in Y. Also, gone are the days of worrying about building a toolset for a package (say, Softimage) and losing your RD investment overnight because a publicly traded corporation thinks you should be using a clunky pile of aging Mel scripts with serious scalability and workflow problems instead. ***If Fabric Engine can improve the return on investment of RnD, you not only make better use of the RnD resources, but in the long term, you are incentivized to increase the RnD budget.*** Now, taking it one step further, we've made use of sites like rray.de, xsibase, creative crash, etc. Imagine if every new script or tool someone wrote could work in all the Spliced packages! The same arguments about RnD budgets at the company level apply to the community efforts as well. Not only do we get better utilization from the efforts people are making, but there's also a stronger incentive for developers to make more tools, because they can reach a wider audience. And on top of that, FE gives you a license for personal use, so there's nothing stopping individuals from contributing tools right now. The situation we're in now is a chicken/egg scenario. In order for all of the above to take off and revolutionize our industry, we need an audience of studios and individuals ready to consume all of these tools people will make. It's still very early days, so it's not in any way too late for this to happen -- if anything it's probably closer to being too soon. What I mean is, this isn't like Softimage, where the industry is turning a blind eye to a great tool. It's exactly the opposite, as some studios (MPC, Hybride) have already site licensed, when the tools are just getting off the ground. Given what's happening right now, there's a very unique opportunity with a captive audience of Softimage users on a 2-year ticking clock. Just by showing an increase of interest and sales, the value of FE is already growing on paper, which can help a young company get where they need to go even faster. That's my pitch. No affiliations with FE whatsoever, but that's how I see it playing out. No guarantees it will happen, but I do believe the potential is there. It's important to note that a move in the direction of FE by no means has to be a move away from other DCCs. Just as
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
My new thread doesn't appear to have made it to the list. There's a copy of it here: http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=36t=4950start=0 I honestly don't have much to add to what Andy wrote - he nailed it. The last two points in my post are: We can't do it alone - if you want to see change happen, you have to get involved. Small companies like Fabric need your support, we need you to kick things around and tell us what you think. We need to know what you need. It's immensely frustrating to be told this is cool, if only it did X and then we do X and the response is now if it did Y then I'd take a look. Get involved - it's free! Let's get creative - we are open to creating a consortium and finding ways to open-source work done there. Obviously there are hooks into Fabric and the concern will be around vendor dependency - however, a lot of that can be addressed in the design of a particular project. We have done deals that give source code access to customers after a certain number of years, and we will work with studios to give that kind of security. We see this as something where we would not be controlling anything, but working on a partnership basis with the studios that want to do this. It has to be driven by studios that want to see some control over their destiny, with companies like Fabric getting involved to support and drive innovation. We are a platform, so for us this is the way to success - providing high-performance, dependable components that can be used to build production-specific tools. If you are interested in becoming a part of this Fabric working group then please email me (p...@fabric-engine.com) - right now I'm just gauging interest with the hope that we can do something amazing together. We started Fabric because we thought there was a better way to do things. I won't lie - we took a few wrong turns with things like web technology. However, the core engine has been consistently developed throughout, by key members of the Softimage team. What we have now is an extremely powerful platform that is hitting maturity - Fabric 2.0 is coming soon and it's got a lot of people excited. For it to become everything it should be, it needs support. I see it as a two-way street though - if we want studios to commit to building on our platform, we have to be open to providing assurances (contractual!). That's all I want to add - we're there and we are excited to do something that breaks the studio/vendor mould. On 5 March 2014 13:00, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: I'll take a stab (although I haven't really spent any time using it). Often in production, we face problems that need solving. They can be generic problems that are common across a studio, like fur or grass, or they can be show-specific, like create time-lapse footage of a building being constructed. These examples are fairly small in scope, but studios may have even broader needs, like We'd like a way to visualize our models quickly, without turntables, with an embedded Shotgun page for doing reviews. There are lots of tools at our disposal for solving these things, but the most powerful toolsets all exist with various DCC packages. So any solution you come up with tends to be tightly coupled with one package. For example, a studio might come up with a good procedural forest solution in Houdini, but then every time they want to use it, they have to make sure they have a Houdini artist to run it. If the rest of the show is in Maya, you now have to deal with porting lots of assets over, and the additional crew. Or, more often, the technical artist or rnd person gets asked to simply port the tool over to the other package. Once you port the tool, you now have two separate sets of code to keep up to date, and eventually you have to hire more technical artists and RnD guys to keep up with demand. And the ones you have are unhappy because they're spending time keeping code in sync and porting features back and forth, rather than making cool stuff artists want. Perhaps the most common situation is that we see all of the issues above in advance, and opt to have an artist figure it out themselves, or do it by hand. Not because us technical guys are lazy beer-sipping jerks, but because it's actually cheaper to do it the hard way than to make a tool that will have to get rewritten by the time you use it again. From what they've released so far, Fabric Engine goes a long way towards remedying these kinds of situations, and does so in a very clever way, that's geared for extremely high performance and flexibility. At its core, Fabric Engine gives us an API for graphics built with multi-threading and optimized machine level compiling in mind. With the Splice integrations in various DCC packages, we gain a direct way to integrate tools built in Fabric Engine into all our DCC packages with a single implementation. The tool you make for Maya Splice works in Softimage
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I have just posted a new message to the list covering some of this - I'll read through this thread again now and respond as best I can. On 5 March 2014 13:00, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: I'll take a stab (although I haven't really spent any time using it). Often in production, we face problems that need solving. They can be generic problems that are common across a studio, like fur or grass, or they can be show-specific, like create time-lapse footage of a building being constructed. These examples are fairly small in scope, but studios may have even broader needs, like We'd like a way to visualize our models quickly, without turntables, with an embedded Shotgun page for doing reviews. There are lots of tools at our disposal for solving these things, but the most powerful toolsets all exist with various DCC packages. So any solution you come up with tends to be tightly coupled with one package. For example, a studio might come up with a good procedural forest solution in Houdini, but then every time they want to use it, they have to make sure they have a Houdini artist to run it. If the rest of the show is in Maya, you now have to deal with porting lots of assets over, and the additional crew. Or, more often, the technical artist or rnd person gets asked to simply port the tool over to the other package. Once you port the tool, you now have two separate sets of code to keep up to date, and eventually you have to hire more technical artists and RnD guys to keep up with demand. And the ones you have are unhappy because they're spending time keeping code in sync and porting features back and forth, rather than making cool stuff artists want. Perhaps the most common situation is that we see all of the issues above in advance, and opt to have an artist figure it out themselves, or do it by hand. Not because us technical guys are lazy beer-sipping jerks, but because it's actually cheaper to do it the hard way than to make a tool that will have to get rewritten by the time you use it again. From what they've released so far, Fabric Engine goes a long way towards remedying these kinds of situations, and does so in a very clever way, that's geared for extremely high performance and flexibility. At its core, Fabric Engine gives us an API for graphics built with multi-threading and optimized machine level compiling in mind. With the Splice integrations in various DCC packages, we gain a direct way to integrate tools built in Fabric Engine into all our DCC packages with a single implementation. The tool you make for Maya Splice works in Softimage Splice, and does so far more elegantly than any one-off tool a TD is likely to create. Magic. So, for the artist, it means your studio can build better tools faster, and make better use of them across packages. Gone are the days of seeing what someone has in tool X and wishing you had it in Y. Also, gone are the days of worrying about building a toolset for a package (say, Softimage) and losing your RD investment overnight because a publicly traded corporation thinks you should be using a clunky pile of aging Mel scripts with serious scalability and workflow problems instead. ***If Fabric Engine can improve the return on investment of RnD, you not only make better use of the RnD resources, but in the long term, you are incentivized to increase the RnD budget.*** Now, taking it one step further, we've made use of sites like rray.de, xsibase, creative crash, etc. Imagine if every new script or tool someone wrote could work in all the Spliced packages! The same arguments about RnD budgets at the company level apply to the community efforts as well. Not only do we get better utilization from the efforts people are making, but there's also a stronger incentive for developers to make more tools, because they can reach a wider audience. And on top of that, FE gives you a license for personal use, so there's nothing stopping individuals from contributing tools right now. The situation we're in now is a chicken/egg scenario. In order for all of the above to take off and revolutionize our industry, we need an audience of studios and individuals ready to consume all of these tools people will make. It's still very early days, so it's not in any way too late for this to happen -- if anything it's probably closer to being too soon. What I mean is, this isn't like Softimage, where the industry is turning a blind eye to a great tool. It's exactly the opposite, as some studios (MPC, Hybride) have already site licensed, when the tools are just getting off the ground. Given what's happening right now, there's a very unique opportunity with a captive audience of Softimage users on a 2-year ticking clock. Just by showing an increase of interest and sales, the value of FE is already growing on paper, which can help a young company get where they need to go even faster. That's my
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
(thread appeared in the end) On 5 March 2014 13:29, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote: My new thread doesn't appear to have made it to the list. There's a copy of it here: http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=36t=4950start=0 I honestly don't have much to add to what Andy wrote - he nailed it. The last two points in my post are: We can't do it alone - if you want to see change happen, you have to get involved. Small companies like Fabric need your support, we need you to kick things around and tell us what you think. We need to know what you need. It's immensely frustrating to be told this is cool, if only it did X and then we do X and the response is now if it did Y then I'd take a look. Get involved - it's free! Let's get creative - we are open to creating a consortium and finding ways to open-source work done there. Obviously there are hooks into Fabric and the concern will be around vendor dependency - however, a lot of that can be addressed in the design of a particular project. We have done deals that give source code access to customers after a certain number of years, and we will work with studios to give that kind of security. We see this as something where we would not be controlling anything, but working on a partnership basis with the studios that want to do this. It has to be driven by studios that want to see some control over their destiny, with companies like Fabric getting involved to support and drive innovation. We are a platform, so for us this is the way to success - providing high-performance, dependable components that can be used to build production-specific tools. If you are interested in becoming a part of this Fabric working group then please email me (p...@fabric-engine.com) - right now I'm just gauging interest with the hope that we can do something amazing together. We started Fabric because we thought there was a better way to do things. I won't lie - we took a few wrong turns with things like web technology. However, the core engine has been consistently developed throughout, by key members of the Softimage team. What we have now is an extremely powerful platform that is hitting maturity - Fabric 2.0 is coming soon and it's got a lot of people excited. For it to become everything it should be, it needs support. I see it as a two-way street though - if we want studios to commit to building on our platform, we have to be open to providing assurances (contractual!). That's all I want to add - we're there and we are excited to do something that breaks the studio/vendor mould. On 5 March 2014 13:00, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: I'll take a stab (although I haven't really spent any time using it). Often in production, we face problems that need solving. They can be generic problems that are common across a studio, like fur or grass, or they can be show-specific, like create time-lapse footage of a building being constructed. These examples are fairly small in scope, but studios may have even broader needs, like We'd like a way to visualize our models quickly, without turntables, with an embedded Shotgun page for doing reviews. There are lots of tools at our disposal for solving these things, but the most powerful toolsets all exist with various DCC packages. So any solution you come up with tends to be tightly coupled with one package. For example, a studio might come up with a good procedural forest solution in Houdini, but then every time they want to use it, they have to make sure they have a Houdini artist to run it. If the rest of the show is in Maya, you now have to deal with porting lots of assets over, and the additional crew. Or, more often, the technical artist or rnd person gets asked to simply port the tool over to the other package. Once you port the tool, you now have two separate sets of code to keep up to date, and eventually you have to hire more technical artists and RnD guys to keep up with demand. And the ones you have are unhappy because they're spending time keeping code in sync and porting features back and forth, rather than making cool stuff artists want. Perhaps the most common situation is that we see all of the issues above in advance, and opt to have an artist figure it out themselves, or do it by hand. Not because us technical guys are lazy beer-sipping jerks, but because it's actually cheaper to do it the hard way than to make a tool that will have to get rewritten by the time you use it again. From what they've released so far, Fabric Engine goes a long way towards remedying these kinds of situations, and does so in a very clever way, that's geared for extremely high performance and flexibility. At its core, Fabric Engine gives us an API for graphics built with multi-threading and optimized machine level compiling in mind. With the Splice integrations in various DCC packages, we gain a direct way to integrate tools built
A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I think a united Softimage community could be kingmaker. I nominate Fabric Engine as King. Here's some facts as I see them: Some of us will continue to use Softimage for the next few years, others of us will unhappily be forced to use Maya. The realities of production, studios, and freelancers will dictate this. Softimage gave us ICE. ICE has made us smart, because ICE is a ladder. ICE is a magical place where the slightest bit of linear algebra is immediately useful. If you can add two vectors together you can make useful things in ICE. And if you learn a little more, it's a little more useful. And in so doing, ICE has elevated many us from people who use 3D applications to people who create our own tools in 3D applications. Our community is not totally unique in this matter, but I think our community is remarkable in its knowledge of the core math of CG. That combined with our formidable production experience, self-sufficiency, and early-adopter fearlessness is unique. It makes us mighty. I think Fabric engine is the way out. That's because Fabric Engine is also a ladder. For the moment, nothing changes. We may continue to use Softimage, or we may be forced to use Maya, depending on each of our circumstance, but the important thing is getting behind Fabric and trying to get as many of our tools as possible into it. There's no giant painful leap that's needed, we can start small without breaking existing workflows. As a bonus, if we open up our tools as much as possible, this will go exponentially faster. Softimage will remain frozen in time and Maya will continue to crumble under the weight of its terrible design, and all the while Fabric Engine will be eating. Here's how I see this playing out. 1. First Fabric Engine replaces what we used to do in ICE. There's a lot of work to do to make this a reality, but this one seems like a no-brainer to me. 2. The next lowest hanging fruit is rigging. Fabric Engine creations eat the deformers used in rigging, and then become the rigs themselves. 3. Once the native rigging in these programs is eaten, Fabric Engine also eats animation as a natural progression. The animators must go where the rigs are, and will be happiest where the rigs play back the fastest. 4. Lighting and rendering is a tough one, but it won't take very much to be better than Maya here. Being competent at scene assembly and having a pass system that isn't obviously terrible is enough. 5. We unceremoniously kick the desiccated husk of Maya into a storm drain. Honestly if we do nothing, I think this might happen anyway. But I think together can make it go much faster. 1. Embrace open source and put as many of our tools as we can out there. 2. Keep making stuff- this is natural for us, as we have, after all, all become toolmakers. No giant painful leap is needed. We liberate ourselves, and empower developers who have passion and care about the right things. This is the only road I see that leads somewhere that I actually want to be. -Jonah
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Since the rumor/news broke (and to a certain extent, before that as well), I've been putting some serious thought into plans for the future, and I want to share a few thoughts, as I think this storm will be best weathered together. Every studio is different, of course, so what works for me right now may not work for everyone. To be clear, these are my own speculations at this time, and NOT any kind of formal plan for my employer. The community discussion will have a big impact on our own internal discussions, though, so I think it is important to be part of the dialog. As we all plow forward, the hope is that we will leave a trail that makes it easier for anyone who eventually finds themselves on the same pathway. -- SCENE ASSEMBLY For us, the biggest hole left by Softimage's demise will be lighting and scene assembly. This, and FX, are the main areas where we currently utilize Softimage, particularly in our NY office, but in LA as well. I'm going to run through some of the options I've looked at, leading up to what I think will be a good solution at the bottom. Process of elimination style. - KATANA I've spent some (non-hands-on) time looking at Katana, and while it is a solid, powerful, scaleable solution to scene assembly, I feel it is actually too open-ended at the surface to address our needs. I'm also not satisfied with how it presents shader networks to the end user. I appreciate the flexibility of a nodal system at the core of an application, but what I actually want is a simplified UI that exposes all of that procedural power in a direct and consistent way. I could see where Katana would work well for larger scale projects, but I have major concerns about how it would fare in small 1-10 man operations for commercials. A key requirement for me in a scene aggregator is also the ability to have an ICE-like procedural layer passing data directly to the renderer without caching to disk. Caching is great for things with a certain data to computational complexity ratio, but in so many cases, you're better off either with a procedural callback, or data in memory. Simple grass systems, feathers, hair, fur, rocks, leaves, fuzz, etc. Largely with the help of ICE, we have graduated to an era where surfaces that need it can have more than just high res textures and displacement. The issues above are likely fixable in Katana, but getting a procedural FX framework is far less likely to happen in the timeframe we'd need. For us, Katana being Linux only, also happens to be an issue (though one we could work around with enough motivation). - MAYA With my last two jobs having been mostly in Maya studios, I don't consider Maya an option for scene assembly. The big beefs I have here are essentially the same as what I mentioned with Katana, plus the frequency of instability, and the lack of compartmentalization in the data model. Not being able to group sets and namespaces being nothing more than a naming convention are also big issues. Obviously, people, including ourselves do some great work lighting in Maya, but I work with some of the smartest and most talented Maya people I know, and it is a simple fact that their days are longer and harder than they should be because of Maya, and that situation hasn't changed at all in the last 5 years, aside from the work that's been done by Chaos Group and Solid Angle and the MtoA community. One would think that Maya would actually be a pretty good choice, which I suppose is how we've ended up in this predicament we're in now, and people thinking they've chosen a winning horse with Maya. But the fact is, there has been little done to improve the situation for far too long, and some of the problems seem to be far too deeply rooted in the software to get fixed. It's not entirely negligence on AD's part, as there are a lot of big studios relying on certain things in Maya NOT changing. - HOUDINI I'm not actually finished assessing Houdini's potential for scene assembly and lighting, but I'm already aware of a couple of big issues there. First, Houdini's pricing model is not structured to be conducive to in-process rendering. This means that any run-time procedurals need to be specially built for each renderer. For example, if you wanted to avoid writing a grass system to disk, you would need to use something special purpose to generate the grass at render time (in the best case scenario leveraging an existing hair procedural) or simply write every blade of grass out to an ifd/ass. With the work SideFX is doing on Houdini engine, maybe there's some hope to get a swiss army knife Houdini procedural into the renderers, but it doesn't seem like that's the usage case they have in mind for Houdini engine. Price is the other big issue with Houdini for scene assembly. I have every intention of making use of Houdini as a core FX package, and the price (while still high) is more tenable in that department. As a studio, we already own a smattering of
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
+1 for Fabric becoming King. On Tuesday, March 04, 2014 1:43:56 PM, Jonah Friedman wrote: I think a united Softimage community could be kingmaker. I nominate Fabric Engine as King. Here's some facts as I see them: Some of us will continue to use Softimage for the next few years, others of us will unhappily be forced to use Maya. The realities of production, studios, and freelancers will dictate this. Softimage gave us ICE. ICE has made us smart, because ICE is a ladder. ICE is a magical place where the slightest bit of linear algebra is immediately useful. If you can add two vectors together you can make useful things in ICE. And if you learn a little more, it's a little more useful. And in so doing, ICE has elevated many us from people who use 3D applications to people who create our own tools in 3D applications. Our community is not totally unique in this matter, but I think our community is remarkable in its knowledge of the core math of CG. That combined with our formidable production experience, self-sufficiency, and early-adopter fearlessness is unique. It makes us mighty. I think Fabric engine is the way out. That's because Fabric Engine is also a ladder. For the moment, nothing changes. We may continue to use Softimage, or we may be forced to use Maya, depending on each of our circumstance, but the important thing is getting behind Fabric and trying to get as many of our tools as possible into it. There's no giant painful leap that's needed, we can start small without breaking existing workflows. As a bonus, if we open up our tools as much as possible, this will go exponentially faster. Softimage will remain frozen in time and Maya will continue to crumble under the weight of its terrible design, and all the while Fabric Engine will be eating. Here's how I see this playing out. 1. First Fabric Engine replaces what we used to do in ICE. There's a lot of work to do to make this a reality, but this one seems like a no-brainer to me. 2. The next lowest hanging fruit is rigging. Fabric Engine creations eat the deformers used in rigging, and then become the rigs themselves. 3. Once the native rigging in these programs is eaten, Fabric Engine also eats animation as a natural progression. The animators must go where the rigs are, and will be happiest where the rigs play back the fastest. 4. Lighting and rendering is a tough one, but it won't take very much to be better than Maya here. Being competent at scene assembly and having a pass system that isn't obviously terrible is enough. 5. We unceremoniously kick the desiccated husk of Maya into a storm drain. Honestly if we do nothing, I think this might happen anyway. But I think together can make it go much faster. 1. Embrace open source and put as many of our tools as we can out there. 2. Keep making stuff- this is natural for us, as we have, after all, all become toolmakers. No giant painful leap is needed. We liberate ourselves, and empower developers who have passion and care about the right things. This is the only road I see that leads somewhere that I actually want to be. -Jonah
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
I would like to nominate Blender in that list for animation/rigging. While I personally dislike its UI and conventions that go with it, I feel it shouldn't be discounted as a serious contender...it has every feature that an animator requires to make great poses. But if only they would make (yet another) UI overhaul I would be very happy to work with it... Yours sincerely, Siew Yi Liang On 3/4/2014 10:49 AM, Andy Jones wrote: Since the rumor/news broke (and to a certain extent, before that as well), I've been putting some serious thought into plans for the future, and I want to share a few thoughts, as I think this storm will be best weathered together. Every studio is different, of course, so what works for me right now may not work for everyone. To be clear, these are my own speculations at this time, and NOT any kind of formal plan for my employer. The community discussion will have a big impact on our own internal discussions, though, so I think it is important to be part of the dialog. As we all plow forward, the hope is that we will leave a trail that makes it easier for anyone who eventually finds themselves on the same pathway. --- SCENE ASSEMBLY For us, the biggest hole left by Softimage's demise will be lighting and scene assembly. This, and FX, are the main areas where we currently utilize Softimage, particularly in our NY office, but in LA as well. I'm going to run through some of the options I've looked at, leading up to what I think will be a good solution at the bottom. Process of elimination style. - KATANA I've spent some (non-hands-on) time looking at Katana, and while it is a solid, powerful, scaleable solution to scene assembly, I feel it is actually too open-ended at the surface to address our needs. I'm also not satisfied with how it presents shader networks to the end user. I appreciate the flexibility of a nodal system at the core of an application, but what I actually want is a simplified UI that exposes all of that procedural power in a direct and consistent way. I could see where Katana would work well for larger scale projects, but I have major concerns about how it would fare in small 1-10 man operations for commercials. A key requirement for me in a scene aggregator is also the ability to have an ICE-like procedural layer passing data directly to the renderer without caching to disk. Caching is great for things with a certain data to computational complexity ratio, but in so many cases, you're better off either with a procedural callback, or data in memory. Simple grass systems, feathers, hair, fur, rocks, leaves, fuzz, etc. Largely with the help of ICE, we have graduated to an era where surfaces that need it can have more than just high res textures and displacement. The issues above are likely fixable in Katana, but getting a procedural FX framework is far less likely to happen in the timeframe we'd need. For us, Katana being Linux only, also happens to be an issue (though one we could work around with enough motivation). - MAYA With my last two jobs having been mostly in Maya studios, I don't consider Maya an option for scene assembly. The big beefs I have here are essentially the same as what I mentioned with Katana, plus the frequency of instability, and the lack of compartmentalization in the data model. Not being able to group sets and namespaces being nothing more than a naming convention are also big issues. Obviously, people, including ourselves do some great work lighting in Maya, but I work with some of the smartest and most talented Maya people I know, and it is a simple fact that their days are longer and harder than they should be because of Maya, and that situation hasn't changed at all in the last 5 years, aside from the work that's been done by Chaos Group and Solid Angle and the MtoA community. One would think that Maya would actually be a pretty good choice, which I suppose is how we've ended up in this predicament we're in now, and people thinking they've chosen a winning horse with Maya. But the fact is, there has been little done to improve the situation for far too long, and some of the problems seem to be far too deeply rooted in the software to get fixed. It's not entirely negligence on AD's part, as there are a lot of big studios relying on certain things in Maya NOT changing. - HOUDINI I'm not actually finished assessing Houdini's potential for scene assembly and lighting, but I'm already aware of a couple of big issues there. First, Houdini's pricing model is not structured to be conducive to in-process rendering. This means that any run-time procedurals need to be specially built for each renderer. For example, if you wanted to avoid writing a grass system to disk, you would need to use something special purpose to generate the grass at render time (in the best case scenario leveraging an existing hair procedural) or simply write every
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
hey andy this is the first step in creating something like the 'stage' demo from fabric engine... https://github.com/caron/FabricArnold i am excited about this and would love to collaborate with others in making this a possibility. i agree and understand all you have outlined below. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Since the rumor/news broke (and to a certain extent, before that as well), I've been putting some serious thought into plans for the future, and I want to share a few thoughts, as I think this storm will be best weathered together. Every studio is different, of course, so what works for me right now may not work for everyone. To be clear, these are my own speculations at this time, and NOT any kind of formal plan for my employer. The community discussion will have a big impact on our own internal discussions, though, so I think it is important to be part of the dialog. As we all plow forward, the hope is that we will leave a trail that makes it easier for anyone who eventually finds themselves on the same pathway. -- SCENE ASSEMBLY For us, the biggest hole left by Softimage's demise will be lighting and scene assembly. This, and FX, are the main areas where we currently utilize Softimage, particularly in our NY office, but in LA as well. I'm going to run through some of the options I've looked at, leading up to what I think will be a good solution at the bottom. Process of elimination style. - KATANA I've spent some (non-hands-on) time looking at Katana, and while it is a solid, powerful, scaleable solution to scene assembly, I feel it is actually too open-ended at the surface to address our needs. I'm also not satisfied with how it presents shader networks to the end user. I appreciate the flexibility of a nodal system at the core of an application, but what I actually want is a simplified UI that exposes all of that procedural power in a direct and consistent way. I could see where Katana would work well for larger scale projects, but I have major concerns about how it would fare in small 1-10 man operations for commercials. A key requirement for me in a scene aggregator is also the ability to have an ICE-like procedural layer passing data directly to the renderer without caching to disk. Caching is great for things with a certain data to computational complexity ratio, but in so many cases, you're better off either with a procedural callback, or data in memory. Simple grass systems, feathers, hair, fur, rocks, leaves, fuzz, etc. Largely with the help of ICE, we have graduated to an era where surfaces that need it can have more than just high res textures and displacement. The issues above are likely fixable in Katana, but getting a procedural FX framework is far less likely to happen in the timeframe we'd need. For us, Katana being Linux only, also happens to be an issue (though one we could work around with enough motivation). - XSI Still the best tool for scene assembly at the moment, in my opinion. It's important to remember that the software isn't going to stop functioning right away. This means that we can make a decision based on 2-3 years of lead-up time, vs making the decision based only on what is available today. - FABRIC ENGINE This takes me to Fabric Engine, which I feel is the right answer going forward. The one negative thing about Fabric Engine is just that it's still really early days. None of the software I would like to use built on Fabric Engine actually exists yet, so there's a development cost that will be required in order to make it happen. However, this can also be a strength, as there's an opportunity to shape the final product in ways that are impossible with some of the more long-established players. Even Softimage had many things that I would have done differently in hindsight. Streamlined offloading, lighter and more portable shaders/shader assignments, per-renderer materials, multiple partition sets, rule-based partition membership, to name a few. The timing for making a new scene assembly tool is also pretty good right now, as USD is on the near horizon, and is aiming to provide a standardized data format for this specific task. I'm also very encouraged by what we saw with the Stage demo earlier. While it is not currently available for testing, the ease with which the Fabric guys put that together speaks to the quality of the framework they're building, and really shows that it should be possible to build a standardized scene assembly tool fairly easily. Last, but certainly not least, any scene assembly tool built on top of Fabric will naturally have native access to all the proceduralism of Fabric Engine. Although with splice, you don't specifically need it to be native, it does mean that there's one less SDK getting in the way of getting raw Fabric Engine power. ALSO, the fact that Splice already
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure. On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3 -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while. Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared. So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. 2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.com: Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure. On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3 -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Yes, that's totally my bad. I should have already given you a shout out about FabricArnold. You, and guys like you, are the reason I think doing scene assembly in Fabric is such a likely reality. It's a huge contribution already. I need to get my feet wet in Fabric Engine myself, but I'm hoping to be able to focus some effort on this stuff as well :) hey andy this is the first step in creating something like the 'stage' demo from fabric engine... https://github.com/caron/FabricArnold i am excited about this and would love to collaborate with others in making this a possibility. i agree and understand all you have outlined below.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Thank you for mentioning us and for the helpful comments. I'll make sure we respond to the things raised in this thread - in particular scene assembly. I just don't feel like pimping software today - I'll be back on top of things tomorrow. On 4 March 2014 15:34, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while. Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared. So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. 2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.com: Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure. On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3 -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
i didn't feel left out, i just wanted to mention it directly :) i hope to talk more about it with you over the course of this year. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, that's totally my bad. I should have already given you a shout out about FabricArnold. You, and guys like you, are the reason I think doing scene assembly in Fabric is such a likely reality. It's a huge contribution already. I need to get my feet wet in Fabric Engine myself, but I'm hoping to be able to focus some effort on this stuff as well :)
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
we are one of those studios... who should i put my superiors in contact with? On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.comwrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project?
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported product in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they think their company *might* be interested. I'll start: Psyop Massmarket On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.comwrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
We're just a small group of individuals (http://www.keller.io/) But we're maintaining our own pipeline and are definitely interested. 2014-03-04 22:52 GMT+01:00 Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported product in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they think their company *might* be interested. I'll start: Psyop Massmarket On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
@Felix: I totally agree on the bundling forces part.I've been on the Fabric Beta since over a year and am pondering over making a standalone application ever since.I have both plans for a hair/fur editing app as well as a general-purpose 3D application (at least the foundation of that) that can be extended and built upon by me and others. Blender comes very close to that ideal but it looks almost like a dead end compared to what FE already has to offer (accessibility of the API, Multithreading, Qt, etc), plus it would take a lot of changes to shape it into what I'd like it to look like, and that will be hard to gety ba the ecisting developers and communits.So far I've been held back by having to earn money in actual production, the (very) little time left gets mostly eaten up by my family.I've been thinking of kickstarting it, but there's a whole slew of steps involved to make that happen successfully. Is anyone familiar with the Blender business model? They do have permanent paid staff, right? Where do they get their funding from?@Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement in any existing application out there.If anyone (individuals and companies alike) is out there who is interested in collaborating on such projects or just wants to share advice and or/ ideas, whether technical or financial - I'm all ears.If this isn't the right moment in time I don't know which one is. Will, need and technology is there. Right now.Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while. Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared. So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. 2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.com: Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure.On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3 -- -- Juhani Karlsson3D Artist/TDTalvi Digital OyPursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs.00150 Helsinki+358 443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi -- --- Stefan Kubicek--- keyvis digital imagery Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3 A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien Phone:+43/699/12614231 www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at-- This email and its attachments are confidential and for the recipient only--
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
For myself, I just want to be heading in a direction of somewhere I actually want to be. When I think of spending the next 5 years maintaining a pile of python to make render layers barely work, I just want to cry. And all of that just to take a massive step backwards. I really just can't. The alternative of open collaboration between studios to build something *good* is not only an alternative to despair, it's actually amazingly exciting. I absolutely can't wait to start using and contributing to a project like this. So many studios suddenly find themselves in this situation now, with real urgency. This is a massive opportunity. Like Stephan just said, if this isn't the right moment, I don't know what is. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Stefan Kubicek s...@tidbit-images.com wrote: @Felix: I totally agree on the bundling forces part. I've been on the Fabric Beta since over a year and am pondering over making a standalone application ever since. I have both plans for a hair/fur editing app as well as a general-purpose 3D application (at least the foundation of that) that can be extended and built upon by me and others. Blender comes very close to that ideal but it looks almost like a dead end compared to what FE already has to offer (accessibility of the API, Multithreading, Qt, etc), plus it would take a lot of changes to shape it into what I'd like it to look like, and that will be hard to gety ba the ecisting developers and communits. So far I've been held back by having to earn money in actual production, the (very) little time left gets mostly eaten up by my family. I've been thinking of kickstarting it, but there's a whole slew of steps involved to make that happen successfully. Is anyone familiar with the Blender business model? They do have permanent paid staff, right? Where do they get their funding from? @Andy J.:Thanks for summing it up so nicely and comprehensively. I need to disagree on the modeling part though. Even in XSI I miss a lot, especially in terms of symmetrical modeling and sculpting. There is huge potential for improvement in any existing application out there. If anyone (individuals and companies alike) is out there who is interested in collaborating on such projects or just wants to share advice and or/ ideas, whether technical or financial - I'm all ears. If this isn't the right moment in time I don't know which one is. Will, need and technology is there. Right now. Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while. Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared. So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. 2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.com: Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure. On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: you can create arnold scenes with the kl language! this is a
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com wrote: For myself, I just want to be heading in a direction of somewhere I actually want to be. When I think of spending the next 5 years maintaining a pile of python to make render layers barely work, I just want to cry. And all of that just to take a massive step backwards. I really just can't. The alternative of open collaboration between studios to build something *good* is not only an alternative to despair, it's actually amazingly exciting. I absolutely can't wait to start using and contributing to a project like this. So many studios suddenly find themselves in this situation now, with real urgency. This is a massive opportunity. Like Stephan just said, if this isn't the right moment, I don't know what is. I hope the studio proprietors agree. All of you guys on-list at studios that can contribute to this, brush up your convince-the-owner skills! In all seriousness, is there someone on-list who can put together a convincing and share-able (i.e. not revealing any proprietary business data) business case? Maybe based on time and money lost by NOT taking this opportunity?
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
There definately is a going to be a void to fill Paul! And right now and a couple years forward it will likely be easy to increase a DCC companys userbase significantly if manages to deliver what is required. Morten Den 4. marts 2014 kl. 21:45 skrev Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com: Thank you for mentioning us and for the helpful comments. I'll make sure we respond to the things raised in this thread - in particular scene assembly. I just don't feel like pimping software today - I'll be back on top of things tomorrow. On 4 March 2014 15:34, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com mailto:felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: Great post Andy! I'm probably biased, because I'm mainly working as a lighter. But after thinking about the future for the last couple of days, I came to the very same conclusion. Lighting and scene assembly is the biggest hole to fill. Houdini will be a great replacement for FX and with stuff like open VDB, alembic, partiio, etc it should become easier to move stuff in and out. Modeling can happen anywhere since a while. Rigging and animation isn't that easy. But animation isn't that technical and animators usually don't take long to switch. Rigging is more difficult. But Maya isn't that bad in rigging. And now there is Fabric. And I think for rigging it is already 90% of where it should be. People like Eric are already building stuff with it. And the advantage here is that rigging is a very modular and job specific process. With a few solvers and deformers you're already up and running, and everything else, you build on top as you need it. And that's the problem with a Fabric scene assembly application. You'd basically need to build a complete and highly complex application from scratch which covers all your needs. Otherwise you won't be able to work with it. And from what I know that's what keeps many people in smaller studios from using fabric in this area. It's just financially impossible to build such an application from scratch. I was really disappointed when I heard that the Fabric guys won't continue Stage for now (although I understand their reasons). And all the other efforts I know of (except for Steven's Arnold connection) are happening inside studios and most likely won't be shared. So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. 2014-03-04 20:39 GMT+01:00 Juhani Karlsson juhani.karls...@talvi.com mailto:juhani.karls...@talvi.com : Now I`m interested about this mailing list too - its full of Kings! Is it going to stay? If not where should we go? Fabric definetly has bright future if you just keep on pushin - and Caron that sounds really good : ) On 4 March 2014 21:35, Paul p...@bustykelp.com mailto:p...@bustykelp.com wrote: I'm going to be going Fabric too for sure. On 4 Mar 2014, at 19:17, Jonah Friedman jon...@gmail.com mailto:jon...@gmail.com wrote: the kl language! this is a step toward my own scene assembly tool. i am imagining something between softimage and katana. That sounds exactly like a place I want to be. 3 -- -- Juhani Karlsson 3D Artist/TD Talvi Digital Oy Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 b 2krs. 00150 Helsinki +358 443443088 tel:%2B358%20443443088 juhani.karls...@talvi.fi www.vimeo.com/talvi http://www.vimeo.com/talvi
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
+1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported product in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they think their company *might* be interested. I'll start: Psyop Massmarket On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron car...@gmail.com: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus felixgere...@googlemail.com wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported product in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Very thoughtful words. Tears almost come to my eyes when such great piece of software is put out to pasture and buried, it is a crime. All the hard work some many people that has been put in to make it the software it is today. One we have been using for such a long time. We now have 2 weeks to make some major decision what direction we will be taking. We will take a look at Houdini and Cinema 4D. I will not consider Maya or 3D Max. On 04/03/2014 11:10 PM, Stephan Hempel wrote: after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up
Re: A way forward - We are kingmakers.
Wow Stephan, Thanks for sharing. I remember in some of my early days with Softimage CE (starting 21 years ago), Spans+Partners work on some of the early Softimage reels inspiring me to explore more. It makes me happy to be reminded of this so many years later, even at such a depressing moment it Softimage history. Thanks again, Alex On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 11:10 PM, Stephan Hempel elh...@gmail.com wrote: after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation. When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. ME only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild ME to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with my second love until I go the Kim Aldis route. Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates jda...@kungfukoi.com wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported
