Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Enoch Ihde 
ah, regarding things like crowdfx  syflex, or the more comprehensive
prebuilt ICE nodes, i think that's all very dependent on what people use
ICE for.
you have a lot of flexibility there.
i've never used the syflex stuff beyond base setups, but i've never really
done must cloth sim stuff recently.
i do rigging and some crowd related things, so i've used some crowdfx, and
cobbled bits of it that i liked together with other things, and lots of
deformation related things for rigs and so forth.

private compounds like the syflex nodes may have a lot of production value
for people that do cloth sims, but crowdfx, for instance, whether it has
production value or not (i have, myself, used it in production), it's a
valuable learning tool for anyone curious about an approach to crowd
simulation, or even how geometry duplication works, etc.

so, if nothing else, it's a great example file, and the value of that is
huge. (there are a many such compound nodes that i don't think i'd want
gotten rid of even if i've never used them, because someday i may learn
something from just deconstructing one).

hth

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Raffaele Fragapane 
The functional programming throwback has officially pushed this
conversation into the twilight zone and right out the other end of it into
some unexplored surreal territory.
Thanks to all involved, it'll stay with me for the rest of my life and make
me giggle every time I'll think of it.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Cesar Saez 
+1
Both mentions to FE tech are a bit surreal.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Andy Jones 
Now that I understand the history of ICE a little better, I can see that I
was wrong to balk at naming the top ICE nodes I need.  Here's my updated
list:

car cdr cons eq atom cons quote

I suppose I won't really need defun, since Maya will let me just add the
same nodes over and over again with a mel script.



On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:56 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:

 The functional programming throwback has officially pushed this
 conversation into the twilight zone and right out the other end of it into
 some unexplored surreal territory.
 Thanks to all involved, it'll stay with me for the rest of my life and
 make me giggle every time I'll think of it.

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Brent McPherson 
Fun fact: Do you know Maya started out using scheme as its scripting language?
--
Brent

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Andy Jones
Sent: 20 March 2014 07:47
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Now that I understand the history of ICE a little better, I can see that I was 
wrong to balk at naming the top ICE nodes I need.  Here's my updated list:

car cdr cons eq atom cons quote

I suppose I won't really need defun, since Maya will let me just add the same 
nodes over and over again with a mel script.


On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:56 PM, Raffaele Fragapane 
raffsxsil...@googlemail.commailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
The functional programming throwback has officially pushed this conversation 
into the twilight zone and right out the other end of it into some unexplored 
surreal territory.
Thanks to all involved, it'll stay with me for the rest of my life and make me 
giggle every time I'll think of it.

attachment: winmail.dat

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Luc-Eric Rousseau 
The original Softimage 3D developers loved LISP so much, they lobbied
Daniel Langlois to write the software in LISP.  The people behing
Mirai probably think they dodge a bullet.  The Softimage|3D expression
language, also in XSI, is based on LISP..

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 3:47 AM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Now that I understand the history of ICE a little better, I can see that I
 was wrong to balk at naming the top ICE nodes I need.  Here's my updated
 list:

 car cdr cons eq atom cons quote

 I suppose I won't really need defun, since Maya will let me just add the
 same nodes over and over again with a mel script.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Luc-Eric Rousseau 
On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:56 AM, Raffaele Fragapane
raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
 The functional programming throwback has officially pushed this conversation
 into the twilight zone and right out the other end of it into some
 unexplored surreal territory.
 Thanks to all involved, it'll stay with me for the rest of my life and make
 me giggle every time I'll think of it.

This functional programming language and ICE diversion sounds like
b.s., but it is not.  You can talk to Andre Foisy, or even Ronald if
he's around, and he can explain it.  Personally these conversation
have a way of reminding me to stick to UI. ;)  Andre is our resident
softimage scientist.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-20 Thread Raffaele Fragapane 
I'm not saying it's B.S., but it is remarkably out place.

Beside the fact implying functional programming was unpopular, or dead, or
forgotten since the 80s or the 60s or whatever is immensely asinine, given
that a staggering amount of engineers and mathematicians out there dealing
with tough as nails problems do so in functional style restricted or
oriented languages every day. Saying that it's functional programming at
the core of ICE and its qualities, or of Fabric for that matter, is
irrelevant, and it felt like an incredibly artificial way to bring FE in
the picture as some sort of rip-off manoeuvre.

Sure, it might have been how a brilliant intuition was presented, but why
the mention of patents (lack thereof) and FE?
Graphs are a classic discrete problem, the classic transposition from the
math problem to relatively modern implementations one has been functional
focused for... I don't know, 40 years? More?

It makes as much sense as saying Bifrost is a FE rip-off because it
revolves around compilation and relies on LLVM, and configures itself as an
external platform feeding transparently into DCC cients.
Is that a comfortable thought to entertain? Does it drive the discussion
anywhere? No, neither, nor it should since finding such shaky ground as
common to drive a point home (functional programming or LLVM+clang) is like
implying Maya ripped off Max before being bought because it was ported to
run on x86 CPUs.

Sorry if this comes out strong, I'm not having a go at you at all Luc only
replying for continuity, but as to why it's a somewhat strong mail:
Honestly? I expect much better from vendors than this.
If there are chips on shoulders I hope they get plastered in a hurry
(because that's what some comments I occasionally read sound), because I
spend, or affect people who pay my wage in spending, money on these
products, I'd really rather know that mature individuals constitute the
force driving them.



On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau luceri...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:56 AM, Raffaele Fragapane
 raffsxsil...@googlemail.com wrote:
  The functional programming throwback has officially pushed this
 conversation
  into the twilight zone and right out the other end of it into some
  unexplored surreal territory.
  Thanks to all involved, it'll stay with me for the rest of my life and
 make
  me giggle every time I'll think of it.

 This functional programming language and ICE diversion sounds like
 b.s., but it is not.  You can talk to Andre Foisy, or even Ronald if
 he's around, and he can explain it.  Personally these conversation
 have a way of reminding me to stick to UI. ;)  Andre is our resident
 softimage scientist.




-- 
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Eric Thivierge 
Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to better 
pastures... :(


On Tuesday, March 18, 2014 7:16:46 PM, Adam Sale wrote:

Chris, lets err on the side of caution and implement them all, as they
will all be needed at one time or another. The cool thing about ICE is
that one never knows what kind of cool tools another user would dream
up. Having all of the nodes gives us all the ability to create that
which doesn't even exist yet.

Innovative approaches to ICE was why I fell in love with it.

I remember Felix Gebhardts forest vs man sim back in 2008, and
remembered thinking that this new paradigm in working gave us the
potential for limitless innovation.

Then Paul Smith went in and remade space invaders... for fun in ICE.
Not what the devs originally had in mind I am guessing.

There are so many neat little ways people have leveraged ICE power in
unexpected ways, this is why people are so upset, and our community is
up in arms. It feels like our maximum creative potential is being
stripped away.

So, if we're forced to biFrost, which I'm hoping like hell is all it's
cracked up to be, then port the nodes and compounds over, and let's
start anew.

Nuff said

Adam


On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Enoch Ihde emi...@gmail.com
mailto:emi...@gmail.com wrote:

@chris:
i use pretty much all of the generic  general nodes, as i think
any user of ice does.
whether or not people use syflex stuff will depend on if they're
doing syflex specific cloth work.
you understand that this question of which of this list of
datatypes do you use? is a bit ridiculous?
i suppose you're trying to prioritize what to implement and when,
but you're basically saying do you use floats, ints, for loops,
arrays, data comparisons, and logic operations, and which ones do
you use the most?
a very odd question, don't you think?


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
wrote:

The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will
not show the Bifrost graph in the first version but if you
click here

(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of
the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when
people say the creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree?
Many on the Bifrost team would argue they were just as much a
part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. I think it is
great that there are two companies following this path and
that will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do
believe there are many people who came together and not just
1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order
operations (compounds) with a super slick visual programming
language and strong ways of querying scene data. Given we have
the source code of ICE we can put in nodes that match 1 for 1
the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of
these node types which do you use the most on a daily basis
and which do not use or find need work:




Arrayhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm

  *

Colorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
  *

Constanthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
  *

Conversionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
  *   Data

Accesshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
  *

Debugginghttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
  *

Executionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
  *   Geometry

Querieshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
  *   Math

Basichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
  *   Math

Comparisonhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
  *   Math

Logichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
  *   Math

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Martin Yara 
What? !

He was one of the few who were talking to us even when being attacked and
cursed. The only good thing that has happened to us in the last couple of
weeks.

Martin


On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 9:58 PM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.comwrote:

 Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to better
 pastures... :(

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Matt Morris 
Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a new
low, didn't think that was possible.


On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

 Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to better
 pastures... :(

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Eric Thivierge 
No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being 
asked...


On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:

Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
new low, didn't think that was possible.


On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
better pastures... :(

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Luc-Eric Rousseau 
Can you move the question to Chris to a new thread for when he gets back
online. Thanks
On Mar 19, 2014 9:15 AM, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

 No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being asked...

 On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:

 Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
 new low, didn't think that was possible.


 On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
 mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

 Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
 better pastures... :(

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Eric Thivierge 
No. We have enough threads already and the question was in context to 
what was being said in this thread. I know it's a task to sift through 
all these emails, but he engaged in this thread so he should be keeping 
up with the thread and the questions asked within it. Honestly, I 
shouldn't have to ask a question twice and in addition to that, Andy 
Jones had a subsequent question as well. Should we ask everyone else 
who had questions for Chris V. to start new threads too?


Thanks,
Eric T.

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:16:52 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote:

Can you move the question to Chris to a new thread for when he gets
back online. Thanks

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Sorry guys. I got a nasty case of tonsillitis and have been laid out for the 
last three days.

CV/

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Eric Thivierge
Sent: ‎Wednesday‎, ‎March‎ ‎19‎, ‎2014 ‎9‎:‎15‎ ‎AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being
asked...

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:
 Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
 new low, didn't think that was possible.


 On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
 mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

 Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
 better pastures... :(



attachment: winmail.dat

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Perry Harovas 
And to Chris' credit, he still replied to me offline with a question I had.


On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Sorry guys. I got a nasty case of tonsillitis and have been laid out for
 the last three days.

 CV/

 Sent from Windows Mail

 From: Eric Thivierge
 Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:15 AM
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

 No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being
 asked...

 On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:
  Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
  new low, didn't think that was possible.
 
 
  On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
  mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:
 
  Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
  better pastures... :(
 
 




-- 





Perry Harovas
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com http://www.theafterimage.com/

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Eric Thivierge 

Sorry to hear that. Hope you feel better soon. Thanks for the note.

Eric T.

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 10:15:15 AM, Chris Vienneau wrote:

Sorry guys. I got a nasty case of tonsillitis and have been laid out for the 
last three days.

CV/

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Eric Thivierge
Sent: ‎Wednesday‎, ‎March‎ ‎19‎, ‎2014 ‎9‎:‎15‎ ‎AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being
asked...

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:

Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
new low, didn't think that was possible.


On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com
mailto:ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:

 Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
 better pastures... :(

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Yeah I wasn't talking data types. Things like syflex and crowds was the main 
gist of the question.

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Enoch Ihde
Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎March‎ ‎18‎, ‎2014 ‎7‎:‎08‎ ‎PM
To: softimage

@chris:
i use pretty much all of the generic  general nodes, as i think any user of 
ice does.
whether or not people use syflex stuff will depend on if they're doing syflex 
specific cloth work.
you understand that this question of which of this list of datatypes do you 
use? is a bit ridiculous?
i suppose you're trying to prioritize what to implement and when, but you're 
basically saying do you use floats, ints, for loops, arrays, data comparisons, 
and logic operations, and which ones do you use the most?
a very odd question, don't you think?


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.commailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:
The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the 
Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here 
(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the 
creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would 
argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. 
I think it is great that there are two companies following this path and that 
will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do believe there are 
many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Arrayhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm

  *   
Colorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
  *   
Constanthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
  *   
Conversionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
  *   Data 
Accesshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
  *   
Debugginghttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
  *   
Executionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
  *   Geometry 
Querieshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
  *   Math 
Basichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
  *   Math 
Comparisonhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
  *   Math 
Logichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
  *   Math 
Matrixhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
  *   Math 
Statisticshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
  *   Math 
Trigonometryhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
  *   Math 
Vectorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
  *   Point 
Cloudhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
  *   
Rotationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
  *   
Simulationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
  *   
Stringhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
  *   
Topologyhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
  *   
Crowdshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
  *   Syflex 
Simulhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
  *   Syflex

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Sorry I am reading through a lot of the posts. Answers inline












From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Eric Thivierge 
[ethivie...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 6:42 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Hey Chris,

A few questions:
1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard Softimage 
users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya specifically, who have 
little to no faith in AD being innovative or responsive to their user base as 
history has shown. I can give you a specific example. Skin painting. How many 
years has it been that it has been in its current form, and your user base 
asking for it's interaction model and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet 
here we are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten no attention. It's 
been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same with the 
blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the various threads on this 
list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use of 3rd Party tools is a 
must! We need a developer that actually listens and turns around results 
quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not even address it.

- As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last few 
years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize the 
workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles and not 
be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the fx that are 
the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on was FX and 
modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept the 
developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology correctly 
into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing, retopology, base 
modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and broad/ We are 
looking at making big progress in animation and lighting/rendering very 
shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and we are looking at building 
back up the pace with Maya.


2. What is a generalist UI?

- There are hundreds of thousands of users in the 3D market doing everything 
from film, tv, games, advertising, graphic design, visualization, etc... . A 
generalist is someone who uses more than two areas of the DCC (modeling, 
animation, fx, lighting) . A vast majority of these users want to use the out 
of the box UI and presets and less than 10% of the overall user base scripts 
(whether visually or not). So a generalist UI is the interface intended for the 
use case where a user wants to interact with a set of menus, editors, viewport 
gizmos to achieve a given effect.

3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be released 
in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is accessible? 
(Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked). It's known that 
with Maya releases and new features that the first version is never production 
ready. You could say that for most new features in all software, but when we 
think about it, if we hypothetically say the node graph is another year off, 
that first release won't be usable and so that puts us to the next year's 
release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have had to transitioned 
off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. So at that point we 
have more or less zero time to get acquainted with the new system and integrate 
it into the pipeline and build tools around it. That's all with the wishful 
thinking everything goes to plan.

-You know I can't tell you that but since you have seen the graph with your own 
eyes you at least know it is there. Anyone under NDA can get all of the 
information here.

4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of their major 
new features lately, acquires technology and integrates it. NEX is the most 
recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of way that is exactly what you 
did with Softimage. Bought it for the devs and are now trying to integrate the 
technology. How is this supposed to bring confidence to users who need to use 
Maya? It's just a bunch of plug-ins that were bought and slapped together. 
There doesn't seem to be a unified workflow thought out of how these all need 
to play together and thus gives you a very fragmented workflow. Not to mention, 
what happens when there is a year where you don't acquire a software? Does Maya 
not get a new feature that release?

Isn't your pipeline a collection of applications glued together with a unified 
workflow or intent? We are clear that Maya needs a UI/workflow overhaul to 
bring coherency to many of the workflows and there are tools in Softimage like 
Gator which show the power of such an approach. In this release we had several 
features that were

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Eric Thivierge 

Replying Inline as well. :)


A few questions:
1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard Softimage 
users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya specifically, who have 
little to no faith in AD being innovative or responsive to their user base as 
history has shown. I can give you a specific example. Skin painting. How many 
years has it been that it has been in its current form, and your user base 
asking for it's interaction model and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet 
here we are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten no attention. It's 
been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same with the 
blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the various threads on this 
list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use of 3rd Party tools is a 
must! We need a developer that actually listens and turns around results 
quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not even address it.

- As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last few 
years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize the 
workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles and not 
be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the fx that are 
the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on was FX and 
modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept the 
developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology correctly 
into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing, retopology, base 
modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and broad/ We are 
looking at making big progress in animation and lighting/rendering very 
shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and we are looking at building 
back up the pace with Maya.


Thanks. As per the NEX devs, is it intended only to keep them on until 
integration is done or are you guys thinking that their strategies can 
be useful in the future and plan to have them work on other areas? In 
the same vain as the core modernization, will there be other things 
that may come up that prevent you from working on the various tool sets 
much like the core modernization has?




3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be released 
in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is accessible? 
(Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked). It's known that 
with Maya releases and new features that the first version is never production 
ready. You could say that for most new features in all software, but when we 
think about it, if we hypothetically say the node graph is another year off, 
that first release won't be usable and so that puts us to the next year's 
release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have had to transitioned 
off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. So at that point we 
have more or less zero time to get acquainted with the new system and integrate 
it into the pipeline and build tools around it. That's all with the wishful 
thinking everything goes to plan.

-You know I can't tell you that but since you have seen the graph with your own 
eyes you at least know it is there. Anyone under NDA can get all of the 
information here.


I know you can't tell me, but do you see where there are valid 
concerns? We could still be 2 years away right now from being able to 
use and integrate that new toolset into our pipeline. The whole initial 
plan was to have everyone transitioning off of Softimage within the 
next 2 years, then AD backpedaled on that. What would have happened if 
you guys stuck to your original plan? There would have been a huge gap 
left.




4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of their major 
new features lately, acquires technology and integrates it. NEX is the most 
recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of way that is exactly what you 
did with Softimage. Bought it for the devs and are now trying to integrate the 
technology. How is this supposed to bring confidence to users who need to use 
Maya? It's just a bunch of plug-ins that were bought and slapped together. 
There doesn't seem to be a unified workflow thought out of how these all need 
to play together and thus gives you a very fragmented workflow. Not to mention, 
what happens when there is a year where you don't acquire a software? Does Maya 
not get a new feature that release?

Isn't your pipeline a collection of applications glued together with a unified 
workflow or intent? We are clear that Maya needs a UI/workflow overhaul to 
bring coherency to many of the workflows and there are tools in Softimage like 
Gator which show the power of such an approach. In this release we had several 
features that were developed in house like Geodesic Voxel Binding and the whole 
viewport effort was built on technology entirely developed by Autodesk. So Eric 
by that logic are you saying

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Paul Doyle 
The statement ICE was derived from a very novel programming
methodology that had fallen out of favor and which is why Fabric can
start up with no harm of IP infringement on ICE is perplexing. It
seems to suggest that Fabric borrows from ICE, which is not a remotely
accurate portrayal of the respective technologies. Given that our team
has deep expertise on both ICE and Fabric, I am well placed to make
this clarification.

Data flow graphs and visual programming predate ICE and imho have
never been out of favour (within the same domain, let alone within
computer science). The commonality between ICE and Fabric starts and
stops there - I think anyone familiar with our execution engine and KL
would agree. It's like suggesting that ICE ripped off Houdini.


On 19 March 2014 12:35, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@hybride.com wrote:
 Replying Inline as well. :)


 A few questions:
 1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard
 Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya
 specifically, who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or
 responsive to their user base as history has shown. I can give you a
 specific example. Skin painting. How many years has it been that it has been
 in its current form, and your user base asking for it's interaction model
 and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet here we are just prior to the 2015
 release and it's gotten no attention. It's been years people have been
 asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same with the blend shape tools. No
 attention. Take a look at the various threads on this list and 3D Pro where
 Maya veterans say that the use of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need a
 developer that actually listens and turns around results quickly. Not taking
 5+ years to not even address it.

 - As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last
 few years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize
 the workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles
 and not be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the
 fx that are the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on
 was FX and modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept
 the developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology
 correctly into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing,
 retopology, base modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and
 broad/ We are looking at making big progress in animation and
 lighting/rendering very shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and
 we are looking at building back up the pace with Maya.


 Thanks. As per the NEX devs, is it intended only to keep them on until
 integration is done or are you guys thinking that their strategies can be
 useful in the future and plan to have them work on other areas? In the same
 vain as the core modernization, will there be other things that may come up
 that prevent you from working on the various tool sets much like the core
 modernization has?



 3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be
 released in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is
 accessible? (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked).
 It's known that with Maya releases and new features that the first version
 is never production ready. You could say that for most new features in all
 software, but when we think about it, if we hypothetically say the node
 graph is another year off, that first release won't be usable and so that
 puts us to the next year's release, 2017. At that time most studios will
 need to have had to transitioned off of Softimage and onto another platform,
 such as Maya. So at that point we have more or less zero time to get
 acquainted with the new system and integrate it into the pipeline and build
 tools around it. That's all with the wishful thinking everything goes to
 plan.

 -You know I can't tell you that but since you have seen the graph with
 your own eyes you at least know it is there. Anyone under NDA can get all of
 the information here.


 I know you can't tell me, but do you see where there are valid concerns? We
 could still be 2 years away right now from being able to use and integrate
 that new toolset into our pipeline. The whole initial plan was to have
 everyone transitioning off of Softimage within the next 2 years, then AD
 backpedaled on that. What would have happened if you guys stuck to your
 original plan? There would have been a huge gap left.



 4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of their
 major new features lately, acquires technology and integrates it. NEX is the
 most recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of way that is exactly
 what you did with Softimage. Bought it for the devs and are now trying to
 integrate the technology. How is this supposed to bring confidence to users
 who need to use Maya? It's just a bunch

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Martin Chatterjee 
Chris,

*(...) ICE was derived from a very novel programming methodology that had
 fallen out of favor and which is why Fabric can start up with no harm of IP
 infringement on ICE. (...)*


Excuse me, say what? I'm so calling 'bullshit' on that statement.

I don't even know where to begin...

a.) Autodesk surely did not invent the concepts of graphical
programming/data flow graphs.
b.) these concepts definitely did not fall out of favor anywhere
c.) your implication that the technology behind Fabric Engine is
essentially a v2.0 of ICE (and therefore your indirect accusation that the
Fabric team simply took the groundwork for their engine with them when they
left Autodesk) is ridiculous to put it mildly.


-M



--
   Martin Chatterjee

[ Freelance Technical Director ]
[   http://www.chatterjee.de   ]
[ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Hi Eric,

I will go back up as our inline inline is getting too hard to follow. What we 
have been doing the last few years is bringing on very focused dev talent like 
the NEX guys or unfold 3D guys and signing them to multi-year contracts so we 
do not get the plugin pasted in and it dies. This gives us 2-3 releases to 
avoid the rot syndrome that we have seen in other packages. 

The concerns over Bifrost are totally valid. I told you that at our meeting. 
Again revamping the UI with QT, the viewport, and the data model has taken many 
years and lots of hard lessons learned in the heart of production. Bifrost will 
get put immediately into the hands of hundreds of thousands of students, 
professionals, pipelines and pirates so we will know if the base engine will 
run on the shittiest hardware we track all the way up to the machines of 
tomorrow we run in the labs of places like HP and Intel. Again the first 
important thing we wanted to get out of Bifrost was scale and performance. As 
we build out the TD UIs (node based and python) and then developer platform 
there will be challenges at each step but with Maya in the most grueling 
pipelines in the world we get the hard feedback very quick.

I understand why everyone here is skeptical about our ability to innovate or 
trust what is being written. We have to show progress on these topics in short 
order and keep it up or you will find other solutions eventually. 

cv/

From: Eric Thivierge [ethivie...@hybride.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12:35 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Cc: Chris Vienneau
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Replying Inline as well. :)

 A few questions:
 1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard 
 Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya specifically, 
 who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or responsive to their 
 user base as history has shown. I can give you a specific example. Skin 
 painting. How many years has it been that it has been in its current form, 
 and your user base asking for it's interaction model and tool set cleaned up 
 and extended. Yet here we are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten 
 no attention. It's been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing 
 from AD. Same with the blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the 
 various threads on this list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use 
 of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need a developer that actually listens and 
 turns around results quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not even address it.

 - As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last few 
 years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize the 
 workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles and 
 not be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the fx 
 that are the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on was 
 FX and modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept the 
 developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology correctly 
 into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing, retopology, 
 base modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and broad/ We are 
 looking at making big progress in animation and lighting/rendering very 
 shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and we are looking at 
 building back up the pace with Maya.

Thanks. As per the NEX devs, is it intended only to keep them on until
integration is done or are you guys thinking that their strategies can
be useful in the future and plan to have them work on other areas? In
the same vain as the core modernization, will there be other things
that may come up that prevent you from working on the various tool sets
much like the core modernization has?


 3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be released 
 in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is accessible? 
 (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked). It's known that 
 with Maya releases and new features that the first version is never 
 production ready. You could say that for most new features in all software, 
 but when we think about it, if we hypothetically say the node graph is 
 another year off, that first release won't be usable and so that puts us to 
 the next year's release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have 
 had to transitioned off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. 
 So at that point we have more or less zero time to get acquainted with the 
 new system and integrate it into the pipeline and build tools around it. 
 That's all with the wishful thinking everything goes to plan.

 -You know I can't tell you that but since you have seen the graph with your 
 own eyes you at least know it is there.

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Hi Martin,



Graphical programming/data flow graphs are not a programming methodology. ICE 
is based on a functional style programming like the type you see in Scheme, 
Clojure from Google, and even Lisp. This methodology was very much out of style 
in the object oriented C++ world of the 90s. Bringing it back in ICE was what I 
was talking about as what was novel (i.e. not the standard practice) and Paul 
can correct me if I am wrong but Fabric uses a functional approach to their 
programming. Bifrost uses the same functional approach with data-flow which is 
the way to get parallelism with big data sets.



So to call bullshit on your bullshit call:  ICE, Fabric, and Bifrost are 
leveraging programming methodologies that started in the 60s and are owned by 
no one. These methodologies did fall out of favor in the big C++ object 
oriented desktop adventure and the move back to the big data / cloud world has 
brought them back which is great as the data in film and games is growing year 
by year and we need to find way to separate the data and functions. Fabric 
started out on their own with a clean slate and nothing I said implied 
differently.



cv/














From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Martin Chatterjee 
[martin.chatterjee.li...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:42 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Chris,

(...) ICE was derived from a very novel programming methodology that had fallen 
out of favor and which is why Fabric can start up with no harm of IP 
infringement on ICE. (...)

Excuse me, say what? I'm so calling 'bullshit' on that statement.

I don't even know where to begin...

a.) Autodesk surely did not invent the concepts of graphical programming/data 
flow graphs.
b.) these concepts definitely did not fall out of favor anywhere
c.) your implication that the technology behind Fabric Engine is essentially a 
v2.0 of ICE (and therefore your indirect accusation that the Fabric team simply 
took the groundwork for their engine with them when they left Autodesk) is 
ridiculous to put it mildly.


-M



--
   Martin Chatterjee

[ Freelance Technical Director ]
[   http://www.chatterjee.dehttp://www.chatterjee.de/   ]
[ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]

attachment: winmail.dat

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Paul Doyle 
Thanks for clearing that up, Chris - appreciated.

On 19 March 2014 14:30, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:
 Hi Martin,



 Graphical programming/data flow graphs are not a programming methodology. ICE 
 is based on a functional style programming like the type you see in Scheme, 
 Clojure from Google, and even Lisp. This methodology was very much out of 
 style in the object oriented C++ world of the 90s. Bringing it back in ICE 
 was what I was talking about as what was novel (i.e. not the standard 
 practice) and Paul can correct me if I am wrong but Fabric uses a functional 
 approach to their programming. Bifrost uses the same functional approach with 
 data-flow which is the way to get parallelism with big data sets.



 So to call bullshit on your bullshit call:  ICE, Fabric, and Bifrost are 
 leveraging programming methodologies that started in the 60s and are owned by 
 no one. These methodologies did fall out of favor in the big C++ object 
 oriented desktop adventure and the move back to the big data / cloud world 
 has brought them back which is great as the data in film and games is growing 
 year by year and we need to find way to separate the data and functions. 
 Fabric started out on their own with a clean slate and nothing I said implied 
 differently.



 cv/













 
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
 [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Martin Chatterjee 
 [martin.chatterjee.li...@googlemail.com]
 Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:42 PM
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
 Toolset

 Chris,

 (...) ICE was derived from a very novel programming methodology that had 
 fallen out of favor and which is why Fabric can start up with no harm of IP 
 infringement on ICE. (...)

 Excuse me, say what? I'm so calling 'bullshit' on that statement.

 I don't even know where to begin...

 a.) Autodesk surely did not invent the concepts of graphical programming/data 
 flow graphs.
 b.) these concepts definitely did not fall out of favor anywhere
 c.) your implication that the technology behind Fabric Engine is essentially 
 a v2.0 of ICE (and therefore your indirect accusation that the Fabric team 
 simply took the groundwork for their engine with them when they left 
 Autodesk) is ridiculous to put it mildly.


 -M



 --
Martin Chatterjee

 [ Freelance Technical Director ]
 [   http://www.chatterjee.dehttp://www.chatterjee.de/   ]
 [ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Jason S 




On 03/19/14 14:00, Chris Vienneau wrote:
I understand why everyone here is skeptical about our ability to innovate or trust what is being written. We have to show progress on these topics in short order and keep it up or you will find other solutions eventually. 
Even -if- (big -if-) that would be so ... we will be able to
see if you were trustworthy in 5-7 years, 
or we will have to find other solutions (yet again.. being somewhat
very possible).

Quite possibly ending-up like the node editor. 
(on top of, and still having to deal-with and manage the hypershade or
-the existing architecture-)

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-19 Thread Martin Chatterjee 
Chris,

*Graphical programming/data flow graphs are not a programming
methodology. **ICE
 is based on a functional style programming like the type you see in Scheme,
 Clojure from Google, and even Lisp. This methodology was very much out of
 style in the object oriented C++ world of the 90s. **Bringing it back in
 ICE was what I was talking about as what was novel (i.e. not the standard
 practice)*

*(...)  *

*ICE, Fabric, and Bifrost are leveraging programming methodologies that
 started in the 60s and are owned by no one.*

*(...)*

*Fabric started out on their own with a clean slate and nothing I said
 implied differently.*


Thanks for clearing this up. What you have been stating above I understand
and I do concur with.

However I am very sure that the overwhelming majority of people reading
this list did not have associations to Scheme, Clojure or Lisp when they
read your previous comment but instead probably read the same things
between the lines which made me reply in the first place...

So I am really glad that you cleared up this misunderstanding, thanks again
for that.

-M





--
   Martin Chatterjee

[ Freelance Technical Director ]
[   http://www.chatterjee.de   ]
[ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-18 Thread Eric Thivierge 
Just giving this a little bump so Chris V. doesn't forget. Hopefully 
Andy's subsequent questions also get some answers...


Thanks,
Eric T.

On 3/16/2014 6:42 PM, Eric Thivierge wrote:

Hey Chris,

A few questions:
1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard 
Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya 
specifically, who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or 
responsive to their user base as history has shown. I can give you a 
specific example. Skin painting. How many years has it been that it 
has been in its current form, and your user base asking for it's 
interaction model and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet here we 
are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten no attention. It's 
been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same 
with the blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the various 
threads on this list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use 
of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need a developer that actually 
listens and turns around results quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not 
even address it.


2. What is a generalist UI?

3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be 
released in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph 
is accessible? (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be 
asked). It's known that with Maya releases and new features that the 
first version is never production ready. You could say that for most 
new features in all software, but when we think about it, if we 
hypothetically say the node graph is another year off, that first 
release won't be usable and so that puts us to the next year's 
release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have had to 
transitioned off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. 
So at that point we have more or less zero time to get acquainted with 
the new system and integrate it into the pipeline and build tools 
around it. That's all with the wishful thinking everything goes to plan.


4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of 
their major new features lately, acquires technology and integrates 
it. NEX is the most recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of 
way that is exactly what you did with Softimage. Bought it for the 
devs and are now trying to integrate the technology. How is this 
supposed to bring confidence to users who need to use Maya? It's just 
a bunch of plug-ins that were bought and slapped together. There 
doesn't seem to be a unified workflow thought out of how these all 
need to play together and thus gives you a very fragmented workflow. 
Not to mention, what happens when there is a year where you don't 
acquire a software? Does Maya not get a new feature that release?


5. Lastly, who are these other key people who remained at AD that 
worked on ICE? It may give us reassurance to know what good hands 
we've been left in. (Not really expecting an answer here because it'd 
be dangerous for AD to list their employees, but it's more the point 
that we don't know who these other key people are and thus, have no 
reason to be confident in them.)


Thanks,


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:


Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face
to face and it is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for
the thought as it is consistent with what other people have said.



cv/

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-18 Thread Enoch Ihde 
@chris:
i use pretty much all of the generic  general nodes, as i think any user
of ice does.
whether or not people use syflex stuff will depend on if they're doing
syflex specific cloth work.
you understand that this question of which of this list of datatypes do
you use? is a bit ridiculous?
i suppose you're trying to prioritize what to implement and when, but
you're basically saying do you use floats, ints, for loops, arrays, data
comparisons, and logic operations, and which ones do you use the most?
a very odd question, don't you think?


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the
 Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here (
 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



 Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the
 creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would
 argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at
 Fabric. I think it is great that there are two companies following this
 path and that will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do
 believe there are many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove
 the whole thing.



 ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations
 (compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways
 of querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in
 nodes that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which
 is usually where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



 We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node
 types which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or
 find need work:



 Array
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm
 

   *   Color
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
 
   *   Constant
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
 
   *   Conversion
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
 
   *   Data Access
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
 
   *   Debugging
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
 
   *   Execution
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
 
   *   Geometry Queries
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
 
   *   Math Basic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
 
   *   Math Comparison
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
 
   *   Math Logic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
 
   *   Math Matrix
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
 
   *   Math Statistics
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
 
   *   Math Trigonometry
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
 
   *   Math Vector
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
 
   *   Point Cloud
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
 
   *   Rotation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
 
   *   Simulation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
 
   *   String
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
 
   *   Topology
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
 
   *   Crowds
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
 
   *   Syflex Simul
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
 
   *   Syflex Force
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
 
   *   Syflex Collision

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-18 Thread Adam Sale 
Chris, lets err on the side of caution and implement them all, as they will
all be needed at one time or another. The cool thing about ICE is that one
never knows what kind of cool tools another user would dream up. Having all
of the nodes gives us all the ability to create that which doesn't even
exist yet.

Innovative approaches to ICE was why I fell in love with it.

I remember Felix Gebhardts forest vs man sim back in 2008, and remembered
thinking that this new paradigm in working gave us the potential for
limitless innovation.

Then Paul Smith went in and remade space invaders... for fun in ICE. Not
what the devs originally had in mind I am guessing.

There are so many neat little ways people have leveraged ICE power in
unexpected ways, this is why people are so upset, and our community is up
in arms. It feels like our maximum creative potential is being stripped
away.

So, if we're forced to biFrost, which I'm hoping like hell is all it's
cracked up to be, then port the nodes and compounds over, and let's start
anew.

Nuff said

Adam


On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Enoch Ihde emi...@gmail.com wrote:

 @chris:
 i use pretty much all of the generic  general nodes, as i think any user
 of ice does.
 whether or not people use syflex stuff will depend on if they're doing
 syflex specific cloth work.
 you understand that this question of which of this list of datatypes do
 you use? is a bit ridiculous?
 i suppose you're trying to prioritize what to implement and when, but
 you're basically saying do you use floats, ints, for loops, arrays, data
 comparisons, and logic operations, and which ones do you use the most?
 a very odd question, don't you think?


 On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the
 Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here (
 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



 Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the
 creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would
 argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at
 Fabric. I think it is great that there are two companies following this
 path and that will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do
 believe there are many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove
 the whole thing.



 ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations
 (compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways
 of querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in
 nodes that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which
 is usually where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



 We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node
 types which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or
 find need work:



 Array
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm
 

   *   Color
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
 
   *   Constant
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
 
   *   Conversion
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
 
   *   Data Access
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
 
   *   Debugging
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
 
   *   Execution
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
 
   *   Geometry Queries
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
 
   *   Math Basic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
 
   *   Math Comparison
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
 
   *   Math Logic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
 
   *   Math Matrix
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
 
   *   Math Statistics
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
 
   *   Math Trigonometry
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
 
   *   Math Vector
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
 
   *   Point Cloud

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-17 Thread Gerbrand Nel 

1(a):Get Data
1(b):Set Data
On 2014/03/15 07:00 PM, Andy Jones wrote:
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:


Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and
compounds you all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Emilio Hernandez 
Nope

And Bradley put it so well that there is nothing else to say.

At this moment a U turn is the best Autodesk can do.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Jordi Bares 
Its easily done, you fire the guy that took the decision and reinstall 
confidence on both parties. Business 101

Jordi Bares
jordiba...@gmail.com

On 15 Mar 2014, at 21:31, Eric Thivierge ethivie...@gmail.com wrote:

 
 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:
 Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of reinventing 
 the round wheel to a square one.  
 
 But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence would 
 plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with it. 
 Business-wise, there is no going back.
 
 
 Eric Thivierge
 http://www.ethivierge.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Emilio Hernandez 
Or the guy that in the meeting raised his hand and said why we don't kill
Softimage...

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Chris Vienneau 
The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the 
Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here 
(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the 
creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would 
argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. 
I think it is great that there are two companies following this path and that 
will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do believe there are 
many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Arrayhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm

  *   
Colorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
  *   
Constanthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
  *   
Conversionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
  *   Data 
Accesshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
  *   
Debugginghttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
  *   
Executionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
  *   Geometry 
Querieshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
  *   Math 
Basichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
  *   Math 
Comparisonhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
  *   Math 
Logichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
  *   Math 
Matrixhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
  *   Math 
Statisticshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
  *   Math 
Trigonometryhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
  *   Math 
Vectorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
  *   Point 
Cloudhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
  *   
Rotationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
  *   
Simulationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
  *   
Stringhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
  *   
Topologyhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
  *   
Crowdshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
  *   Syflex 
Simulhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
  *   Syflex 
Forcehttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
  *   Syflex 
Collisionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B8878926.htm
  *   Syflex 
Constrainthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D551989-2D9C-48F1-A099-8511B514B535.htm



Thx.





cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Nick Martinelli 
[n...@nickmartinelli.net]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 4:59 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

I agree 100% with what everyone is saying.

I would like to add that ICE isn't a point and click system, so it's impossible 
to give a universal list.  There isn't one

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Emilio Hernandez 
Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is
only for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Francisco Criado 
Chris, seriously? yo ad want it all right?
F.


On Sunday, March 16, 2014, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
wrote:

 The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the
 Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here (
 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



 Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the
 creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would
 argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at
 Fabric. I think it is great that there are two companies following this
 path and that will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do
 believe there are many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove
 the whole thing.



 ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations
 (compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways
 of querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in
 nodes that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which
 is usually where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



 We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node
 types which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or
 find need work:



 Array
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm
 

   *   Color
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
 
   *   Constant
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
 
   *   Conversion
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
 
   *   Data Access
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
 
   *   Debugging
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
 
   *   Execution
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
 
   *   Geometry Queries
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
 
   *   Math Basic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
 
   *   Math Comparison
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
 
   *   Math Logic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
 
   *   Math Matrix
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
 
   *   Math Statistics
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
 
   *   Math Trigonometry
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
 
   *   Math Vector
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
 
   *   Point Cloud
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
 
   *   Rotation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
 
   *   Simulation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
 
   *   String
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
 
   *   Topology
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
 
   *   Crowds
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
 
   *   Syflex Simul
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
 
   *   Syflex Force
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
 
   *   Syflex Collision
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B8878926.htm
 
   *   Syflex Constraint
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D551989-2D9C-48F1-A099-8511B514B535.htm
 



 Thx.





 cv/



 
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com javascript:; [
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com javascript:;] on behalf of Nick
 Martinelli [n...@nickmartinelli.net javascript:;]
 Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 4:59 PM
 To:

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Chris Vienneau 
? ad ?


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Francisco Criado 
[malcriad...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:17 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Chris, seriously? yo ad want it all right?
F.


On Sunday, March 16, 2014, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.commailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:
The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the 
Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here 
(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the 
creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would 
argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. 
I think it is great that there are two companies following this path and that 
will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do believe there are 
many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Arrayhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm

  *   
Colorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
  *   
Constanthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
  *   
Conversionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
  *   Data 
Accesshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
  *   
Debugginghttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
  *   
Executionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
  *   Geometry 
Querieshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
  *   Math 
Basichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
  *   Math 
Comparisonhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
  *   Math 
Logichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
  *   Math 
Matrixhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
  *   Math 
Statisticshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
  *   Math 
Trigonometryhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
  *   Math 
Vectorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
  *   Point 
Cloudhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
  *   
Rotationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
  *   
Simulationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
  *   
Stringhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
  *   
Topologyhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
  *   
Crowdshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
  *   Syflex 
Simulhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
  *   Syflex 
Forcehttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
  *   Syflex 
Collisionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B8878926.htm
  *   Syflex 
Constrainthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D551989-2D9C-48F1-A099-8511B514B535.htm



Thx.





cv/

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Paul Doyle 
Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at
Ubisoft, so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE
team and doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and
Peter who were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil
and Helge who built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's
by no means the entire team.

Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton
of work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at
AD or in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success
because the whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent
throughout the company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in
XSI 7.0, it was a colossal team effort that is still the high point of my
career.

I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am
confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many
talented people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to
say anything but good things about them.

What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming
paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is
driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is
problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody
is really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a
visual programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are
the same because they both have a scene graph.

There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many people
feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the potential to
become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the FX end of the
pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested
post-acquisition. It is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage
is being EOL when award winning work is being produced with that toolset -
and being told 'just wait till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten
the pill. I understand the logic behind that, but you're asking people to
have a lot of faith in something they haven't seen yet.

Thanks,

Paul




On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.com wrote:

 Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is
 only for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Thanks Paul. I think everyone here respects all the hard work everyone put into 
ICE and that the whole team did not leave and many of the key people involved 
in ICE kept working on what eventually became Bifrost. Bifrost will be launched 
this week so people will get their first real glimpse of the technology. We are 
clear that we are using the procedural core to power liquids in the form of the 
rewritten Naiad solver using a generalist UI. We will be more open about the 
technology like we were in the FX guide article as the year goes on but will 
have any such discussion with customers under NDA as you know since we seem to 
keep the same circles these days.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Paul Doyle 
[technove...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:51 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at Ubisoft, 
so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE team and 
doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and Peter who 
were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil and Helge who 
built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's by no means the 
entire team.

Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton of 
work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at AD or 
in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success because the 
whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent throughout the 
company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in XSI 7.0, it was a 
colossal team effort that is still the high point of my career.

I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am 
confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many talented 
people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to say anything 
but good things about them.

What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming 
paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is 
driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is 
problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody is 
really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a visual 
programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are the same 
because they both have a scene graph.

There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many people 
feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the potential to 
become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the FX end of the 
pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested post-acquisition. It 
is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage is being EOL when award 
winning work is being produced with that toolset - and being told 'just wait 
till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten the pill. I understand the logic 
behind that, but you're asking people to have a lot of faith in something they 
haven't seen yet.

Thanks,

Paul




On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez 
emi...@e-roja.commailto:emi...@e-roja.com wrote:

Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is only 
for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

attachment: winmail.dat

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Steven Caron 
you don't have to explain ICE to us, i personally have been using some
incarnation of ICE for about 7 years now. grabbing a list of categories
from the docs and asking us which ones we use the most makes me wonder if
you know what are doing... we need all of those lower level nodes to create
the compounds, missing even a handful and it becomes very difficult and
some what impossible to make them.

but going along with your question, the geometry queries are probably some
of the most important nodes. as you already pointed out the underlying data
type 'location' is the backbone of how we store and query scene data which
drive our simulations and effects. they are the inputs to our functions.


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:


 ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations
 (compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways
 of querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in
 nodes that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which
 is usually where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.

 We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node
 types which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or
 find need work:



 Array
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm
 

   *   Color
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
 
   *   Constant
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
 
   *   Conversion
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
 
   *   Data Access
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
 
   *   Debugging
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
 
   *   Execution
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
 
   *   Geometry Queries
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
 
   *   Math Basic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
 
   *   Math Comparison
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
 
   *   Math Logic
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
 
   *   Math Matrix
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
 
   *   Math Statistics
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
 
   *   Math Trigonometry
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
 
   *   Math Vector
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
 
   *   Point Cloud
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
 
   *   Rotation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
 
   *   Simulation
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
 
   *   String
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
 
   *   Topology
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
 
   *   Crowds
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
 
   *   Syflex Simul
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
 
   *   Syflex Force
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
 
   *   Syflex Collision
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B8878926.htm
 
   *   Syflex Constraint
 http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D551989-2D9C-48F1-A099-8511B514B535.htm

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Chris Vienneau 
Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face to face and it 
is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for the thought as it is 
consistent with what other people have said.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Steven Caron 
[car...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 5:00 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset

you don't have to explain ICE to us, i personally have been using some 
incarnation of ICE for about 7 years now. grabbing a list of categories from 
the docs and asking us which ones we use the most makes me wonder if you know 
what are doing... we need all of those lower level nodes to create the 
compounds, missing even a handful and it becomes very difficult and some what 
impossible to make them.

but going along with your question, the geometry queries are probably some of 
the most important nodes. as you already pointed out the underlying data type 
'location' is the backbone of how we store and query scene data which drive our 
simulations and effects. they are the inputs to our functions.


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.commailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.

We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Arrayhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm

  *   
Colorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm
  *   
Constanthttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm
  *   
Conversionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm
  *   Data 
Accesshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm
  *   
Debugginghttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm
  *   
Executionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm
  *   Geometry 
Querieshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm
  *   Math 
Basichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm
  *   Math 
Comparisonhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm
  *   Math 
Logichttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm
  *   Math 
Matrixhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm
  *   Math 
Statisticshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm
  *   Math 
Trigonometryhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm
  *   Math 
Vectorhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm
  *   Point 
Cloudhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm
  *   
Rotationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm
  *   
Simulationhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm
  *   
Stringhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm
  *   
Topologyhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm
  *   
Crowdshttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm
  *   Syflex 
Simulhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm
  *   Syflex 
Forcehttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm
  *   Syflex 
Collisionhttp://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B8878926.htm
  *   Syflex

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Eric Thivierge 
Hey Chris,

A few questions:
1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard
Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya
specifically, who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or
responsive to their user base as history has shown. I can give you a
specific example. Skin painting. How many years has it been that it has
been in its current form, and your user base asking for it's interaction
model and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet here we are just prior to
the 2015 release and it's gotten no attention. It's been years people have
been asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same with the blend shape tools.
No attention. Take a look at the various threads on this list and 3D Pro
where Maya veterans say that the use of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need
a developer that actually listens and turns around results quickly. Not
taking 5+ years to not even address it.

2. What is a generalist UI?

3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be
released in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is
accessible? (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked).
It's known that with Maya releases and new features that the first version
is never production ready. You could say that for most new features in all
software, but when we think about it, if we hypothetically say the node
graph is another year off, that first release won't be usable and so that
puts us to the next year's release, 2017. At that time most studios will
need to have had to transitioned off of Softimage and onto another
platform, such as Maya. So at that point we have more or less zero time to
get acquainted with the new system and integrate it into the pipeline and
build tools around it. That's all with the wishful thinking everything goes
to plan.

4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of their
major new features lately, acquires technology and integrates it. NEX is
the most recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of way that is
exactly what you did with Softimage. Bought it for the devs and are now
trying to integrate the technology. How is this supposed to bring
confidence to users who need to use Maya? It's just a bunch of plug-ins
that were bought and slapped together. There doesn't seem to be a unified
workflow thought out of how these all need to play together and thus gives
you a very fragmented workflow. Not to mention, what happens when there is
a year where you don't acquire a software? Does Maya not get a new feature
that release?

5. Lastly, who are these other key people who remained at AD that worked on
ICE? It may give us reassurance to know what good hands we've been left in.
(Not really expecting an answer here because it'd be dangerous for AD to
list their employees, but it's more the point that we don't know who these
other key people are and thus, have no reason to be confident in them.)

Thanks,


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
 wrote:

 Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face to face
 and it is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for the thought as
 it is consistent with what other people have said.



 cv/

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Andy Jones 
 Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the
 creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would
 argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at
 Fabric. I think it is great that there are two companies following this
 path and that will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do
 believe there are many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove
 the whole thing.


I don't know what the answer to this is, but as a customer I really don't
care that much. I'm far more interested in which development team is
innovating and working on not only giving us back what we're losing with
ICE, but also addressing its limitations. Given that AD just offed ICE
without having a replacement ready, it's going to be a tough sell to
convince me AD has a solid vision for the future of the software they sell.

AD has all the advantages in terms of size and market share, and I'm 100%
confident that there are still some truly exceptional developers working
there -- some of whom no doubt worked directly on ICE. I'm also 100%
confident the Titanic had a lot of great sailors on board when it sank.
Even a tiny lifeboat becomes awfully appealing when the captain of the ship
drives it into an iceberg.  Let alone a Chinook helicopter (which is how I
see Fabric Engine in this analogy. For those who don't think a Chinook
helicopter is good enough, remember the Titanic sank in 1912).

Since you brought them into this, I'd like to ask an open question to your
devs who worked on ICE:  Do they feel like their talents are being put to
good use?  If so, how?

I think comparing a list of answers to questions like that would be a lot
more productive than counting how many of the people who worked on ICE
haven't left AD yet.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Mario Reitbauer 
Uhm.
Actually I know others who say that the key people behind Ice went to a
quite new company which name starts with F and ends with abric Engine.

So someone is wrong here.

About your question.
Actually I think there is not even a single node which should miss in ICE.
Some are redundant and wouldnt need to be there but overall 99% of the
nodes just should be there. And there are even nodes missing (uv to
location on polygon meshes as example).


2014-03-16 21:59 GMT+01:00 Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com:

 Thanks Paul. I think everyone here respects all the hard work everyone put
 into ICE and that the whole team did not leave and many of the key people
 involved in ICE kept working on what eventually became Bifrost. Bifrost
 will be launched this week so people will get their first real glimpse of
 the technology. We are clear that we are using the procedural core to power
 liquids in the form of the rewritten Naiad solver using a generalist UI. We
 will be more open about the technology like we were in the FX guide article
 as the year goes on but will have any such discussion with customers under
 NDA as you know since we seem to keep the same circles these days.



 cv/



 
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
 softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Paul Doyle [
 technove...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:51 PM
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The
 Toolset

 Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at
 Ubisoft, so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE
 team and doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and
 Peter who were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil
 and Helge who built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's
 by no means the entire team.

 Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton
 of work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at
 AD or in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success
 because the whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent
 throughout the company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in
 XSI 7.0, it was a colossal team effort that is still the high point of my
 career.

 I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am
 confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many
 talented people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to
 say anything but good things about them.

 What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual
 programming paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I
 expect that is driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I
 think it is problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to
 ICE. Nobody is really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also
 going to have a visual programming system - but that's like saying Maya and
 Softimage are the same because they both have a scene graph.

 There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many
 people feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the
 potential to become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the
 FX end of the pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested
 post-acquisition. It is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage
 is being EOL when award winning work is being produced with that toolset -
 and being told 'just wait till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten
 the pill. I understand the logic behind that, but you're asking people to
 have a lot of faith in something they haven't seen yet.

 Thanks,

 Paul




 On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez emi...@e-roja.commailto:
 emi...@e-roja.com wrote:

 Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is
 only for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Bk 
Say there was a 50/50 split of the ice team.
I would always go with the team that decided to take matters into their own 
hands with the confidence to start their own company, rather than the team that 
went to work for their competitors- being a company infamous for slow plodding 
development and stifling of development. 
I even knew of this reputation long before I'd bought an Ad product, yet the 
stark reality was far worse than even the reputation suggested.




On 16 Mar 2014, at 23:15, Mario Reitbauer cont...@marioreitbauer.at wrote:

 Uhm.
 Actually I know others who say that the key people behind Ice went to a quite 
 new company which name starts with F and ends with abric Engine.
 
 So someone is wrong here.
 
 About your question.
 Actually I think there is not even a single node which should miss in ICE. 
 Some are redundant and wouldnt need to be there but overall 99% of the nodes 
 just should be there. And there are even nodes missing (uv to location on 
 polygon meshes as example).
 
 
 2014-03-16 21:59 GMT+01:00 Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com:
 Thanks Paul. I think everyone here respects all the hard work everyone put 
 into ICE and that the whole team did not leave and many of the key people 
 involved in ICE kept working on what eventually became Bifrost. Bifrost will 
 be launched this week so people will get their first real glimpse of the 
 technology. We are clear that we are using the procedural core to power 
 liquids in the form of the rewritten Naiad solver using a generalist UI. We 
 will be more open about the technology like we were in the FX guide article 
 as the year goes on but will have any such discussion with customers under 
 NDA as you know since we seem to keep the same circles these days.
 
 
 
 cv/
 
 
 
 
 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
 [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Paul Doyle 
 [technove...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:51 PM
 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
 Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
 Toolset
 
 Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at 
 Ubisoft, so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE team 
 and doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and Peter 
 who were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil and 
 Helge who built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's by no 
 means the entire team.
 
 Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton of 
 work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at AD 
 or in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success because 
 the whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent throughout the 
 company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in XSI 7.0, it was a 
 colossal team effort that is still the high point of my career.
 
 I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am 
 confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many 
 talented people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to 
 say anything but good things about them.
 
 What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming 
 paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is 
 driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is 
 problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody is 
 really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a 
 visual programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are the 
 same because they both have a scene graph.
 
 There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many people 
 feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the potential to 
 become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the FX end of the 
 pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested post-acquisition. 
 It is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage is being EOL when 
 award winning work is being produced with that toolset - and being told 'just 
 wait till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten the pill. I understand 
 the logic behind that, but you're asking people to have a lot of faith in 
 something they haven't seen yet.
 
 Thanks,
 
 Paul
 
 
 
 
 On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez 
 emi...@e-roja.commailto:emi...@e-roja.com wrote:
 
 Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is 
 only for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-16 Thread Luc-Eric Rousseau 
On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Paul Doyle technove...@gmail.com wrote:
 What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming
 paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is
 driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is
 problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody is
 really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a
 visual programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are
 the same because they both have a scene graph.

Here is the link between ICE and Bifrost.

When we worked on ICE at Softimage, there questions about how ICE
could be used in other markets such games or also used in the rest of
Avid as an fx module.  However, the implementation ended up being 100%
tied to XSI's innards and not a separate engine.   But the idea
endured that it would have been the right thing to do, to have a ICE
runtime.

As you know very well, after making some game middleware authoring
tool prototype with XSI, the team then went on to work on project
Skyline, where they created an stand alone evaluation engine that
could have been the successor to ICE, and there had been talked in the
first year of the possibility to plug that BACK into Softimage at a
later date.

Marc Petit was hoping to get a portable ICE engine as a side effect of
Skyline, but that could not happen because the team's focus was
animation (i.e. processing vector, matrices, and doing new things like
state machines) and targeting single-threaded game consoles, and not
particle work on a PC.  There was just a load of other things to do .
But the principles of the graph, with get/set data and polymorphic
nodes, for example, are similar.

So now we're at bifrost and the siggraph 2013 demo of it, which you
can see here at the 8 minute mark http://tinyurl.com/nsswz4n is
running on work that is evolving from these previous efforts.  The
prototype shown was even using the skyline graph, although that won't
be what we ship.

Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Andy Jones 
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
 wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Will Robertson 
nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope




-- 
https://www.facebook.com/littlelift
* Will Robertson*
  917.822.3746
 tinyelevator.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread David Barosin 
Nope sounds about right.

Chris will all due respect.  It's like asking how many letters to you need
to say your favorite words.
ICE is an established visual language for the Softimage folk.  You can
program with it and it reaches far beyond just simulation.




On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Jonah Friedman 
Nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson tinyeleva...@gmail.comwrote:

 nope.


 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope




 --
 https://www.facebook.com/littlelift
 * Will Robertson*
   917.822.3746
  tinyelevator.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread todd peleg 
nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson tinyeleva...@gmail.comwrote:

 nope.


 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope




 --
 https://www.facebook.com/littlelift
 * Will Robertson*
   917.822.3746
  tinyelevator.com

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Angel Negron 
NOPE

From: toddape...@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:21:00 -0400
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The  
Toolset
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson tinyeleva...@gmail.com wrote:


nope.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com 
wrote:





Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all use 
that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?






Nope


-- 



 Will Robertson  917.822.3746


 tinyelevator.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Cesar Saez 
On a more constructive note:
- Visual debugging tools, I really miss to be able to show values between
connections (vectors, matrices).
- Abstract types? it's kinda embarrasing have to use a plusMinusAverage
node to emulate a vector constant in maya.
- Basic math nodes? like trigonometric functions, modulo, exponential...
look at any programming library (python math module could be a good
starting point) and implement those.
- Raycasting nodes and some equivalent to locations (or any mechanism to
interpolate data using baricentric coordinates).
- Sets and/or arrays, be able to drive a stream of data as a whole is
really what makes ICE special for me.

Of course there will be people asking for everything that makes the ICE
helpful and that's fine, but if you have to start somewhere I would take a
look at that list.

Cheers!

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Bradley Gabe 
This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC 
flagships. Bullet-point thinking. 

It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, 
rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the 
application. 

Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the 
daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and maybe 
tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI 
community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, a 
particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing 
continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't 
want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.

In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, 
location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, 
splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit 
for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to resort 
to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of 
the system. 

It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound 
understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear 
algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the things 
I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day of 
experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering that 
feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that never 
arrived?

Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my 
ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had increased 
drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out the math, I 
could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with enough 
practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I could use it as a 
prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to 
sitting down to write out the code.

If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these are 
some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future of 
node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating 
particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, operator 
development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all kinds of 
production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible!

-Bradley


Sent from my iPhone

 On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:
 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all 
 use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
 
 Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Mirko Jankovic 
Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:

 This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
 DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

 It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
 useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
 rest of the application.

 Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
 the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
 (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
 despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
 than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
 providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
 had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
 didn't care.

 In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location,
 location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds,
 workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent,
 splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based
 toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds, without
 having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are
 merely a byproduct of the system.

 It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
 understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
 algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
 things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
 of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
 that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
 never arrived?

 Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
 my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
 increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
 the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
 me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
 could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
 concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.

 If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these
 are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the
 future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes
 for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
 developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
 simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
 workarounds are possible!

 -Bradley


 Sent from my iPhone

 On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Francisco Criado 
Agree with Bradley, +1


2014-03-15 16:55 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com:

 Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
 system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
 features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
 The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
 communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
 workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:

 This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
 DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

 It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
 useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
 rest of the application.

 Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
 the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
 (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
 despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
 than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
 providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
 had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
 didn't care.

 In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
 location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
 workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a
 highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual
 node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
 without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects
 are merely a byproduct of the system.

 It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
 understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
 algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
 things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
 of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
 that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
 never arrived?

 Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
 my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
 increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
 the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
 me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
 could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
 concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.

 If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
 these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us
 the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of
 nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
 developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
 simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
 workarounds are possible!

 -Bradley


 Sent from my iPhone

 On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Ahmidou Lyazidi 
Bradley is s right, I'm quite surprise about this question, it doesn't
mean anything at all.
It's not really about the nodes, it's how the whole system work.

---
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist
http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
http://www.cappuccino-films.com


2014-03-15 20:55 GMT+01:00 Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com:

 Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
 system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
 features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
 The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
 communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
 workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:

 This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
 DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

 It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
 useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
 rest of the application.

 Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
 the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
 (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
 despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
 than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
 providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
 had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
 didn't care.

 In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
 location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
 workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a
 highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual
 node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
 without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects
 are merely a byproduct of the system.

 It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
 understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
 algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
 things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
 of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
 that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
 never arrived?

 Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
 my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
 increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
 the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
 me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
 could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
 concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.

 If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
 these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us
 the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of
 nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
 developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
 simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
 workarounds are possible!

 -Bradley


 Sent from my iPhone

 On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope

RE: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Angel Negron 
Agree with Bradley, +1nailed it

Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 17:07:34 -0300
Subject: Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The  
Toolset
From: malcriad...@gmail.com
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

Agree with Bradley, +1

2014-03-15 16:55 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com:

Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD system 
does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready features 
that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales. 

The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful 
communications one with other...  communication that actually makes workflow.. 
that doesn't mean much I guess.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:


This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC 
flagships. Bullet-point thinking. 
It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, 
rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the 
application. 


Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the 
daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and maybe 
tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI 
community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, a 
particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing 
continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't 
want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.



In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, 
location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, 
splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit 
for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to resort 
to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of 
the system. 


It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound 
understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear 
algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the things 
I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day of 
experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering that 
feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that never 
arrived?


Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my 
ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had increased 
drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out the math, I 
could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with enough 
practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I could use it as a 
prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to 
sitting down to write out the code.


If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these are 
some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future of 
node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating 
particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, operator 
development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all kinds of 
production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible!


-Bradley

Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau chris.vienn...@autodesk.com 
wrote:




Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all use 
that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?





Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread David Gallagher 

You wrote all that on your phone?  :)

On 3/15/2014 1:31 PM, Bradley Gabe wrote:
This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes 
their DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.


It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and 
useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of 
the rest of the application.


Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going 
into the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle 
system (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to 
multiprocesses). And despite the SI community's repeated insistence 
ICE was far more important than that, a particle system is precisely 
how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing continuing evidence that 
Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't want to listen to 
the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.


In real estate, they say the most important things are location, 
location, location. In CG production, the most important things are 
workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with 
a highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, 
visual node based toolkit for discovering and developing production 
workarounds, without having to resort to coding for every little 
thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of the system.


It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more 
profound understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of 
how the linear algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence 
operators to do the things I could only imagine in times past. Every 
day in production is a day of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do 
you have any idea how empowering that feels after years of waiting for 
technical help from developers that never arrived?


Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with 
ICE, my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, 
etc, had increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for 
me to work out the math, I could develop in less than a day, because 
ICE had both provided me with enough practice to greatly enhance my 
thinking, but also because I could use it as a prototype laboratory to 
quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to sitting down to 
write out the code.


If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, 
these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince 
us the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list 
of nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's 
a fully developed, operator development kit, from which particles, 
fluids, simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds are possible!


-Bradley


Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com 
mailto:andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:


Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and
compounds you all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Nick Martinelli 
I agree 100% with what everyone is saying.

I would like to add that ICE isn't a point and click system, so it's
impossible to give a universal list.  There isn't one way to do anything,
just ways that work.  Two artists can have a similar result with
drastically different ICE trees.

Imagine that you ask two people to write an equation that equals 10.  One
might say 7+3 and the other might go with 40/4, both are correct, they just
got there different ways.

That's the beauty of ICE.  It's versatility and efficiency to allow the
artist to work the way they want to without sacrificing quality and
production time.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:16 PM, Bk p...@bustykelp.com wrote:

 Bradley has expressed exactly, what I have been trying to compose over the
 last week. Yet better than I could.

 1 Autodesk either never room the time to understand ICE,
 2  or kept it under wraps in order to not let it steal the thunder from
 Bifrost in the future. Weird decision, as they could have used it as a
 taster to get people excited.
 3 Or of course, there remains the possibility they are just a bit simple
 and confused and deserve our sympathy.

 Ironically, the team that actually Made ICE are onto what could be seen as
 ICE version 2 standalone or in any package. Fabric Engine. (cue binary
 sunset on tatooine music)

 I have no doubt that the successor to ICE is the future. I do actually
 thing that Bifrost is heading there, but if option 3 (above) is not the
 case, I'd be nervous, to say the least. Because I believe Fabric is going
 to get in there first by a long shot.
 And we SI users have learnt the hard way, about how important it is to get
 tools into studios and pipelines first.

 On 15 Mar 2014, at 19:55, Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
 system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
 features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
 The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
 communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
 workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:

 This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
 DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

 It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
 useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
 rest of the application.

 Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
 the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
 (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
 despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
 than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
 providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
 had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
 didn't care.

 In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
 location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
 workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a
 highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual
 node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
 without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects
 are merely a byproduct of the system.

 It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
 understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
 algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
 things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
 of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
 that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
 never arrived?

 Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
 my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
 increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
 the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
 me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
 could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
 concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.

 If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
 these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us
 the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of
 nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
 developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
 simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
 workarounds are possible!

 -Bradley

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Andy Jones 
Bingo.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com wrote:

 This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
 DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

 It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
 useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
 rest of the application.

 Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
 the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
 (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
 despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
 than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
 providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
 had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
 didn't care.

 In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location,
 location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds,
 workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent,
 splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based
 toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds, without
 having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are
 merely a byproduct of the system.

 It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
 understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
 algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
 things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
 of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
 that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
 never arrived?

 Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
 my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
 increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
 the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
 me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
 could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
 concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.

 If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these
 are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the
 future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes
 for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
 developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
 simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
 workarounds are possible!

 -Bradley


 Sent from my iPhone

 On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
 chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

 Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
 all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


 Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread olivier jeannel 

Get data does 40%
Set data does another 40%
with 20% of various nodes in between

Ice is not exactly an assortment of chocolate sweets...

LOL


Le 15/03/2014 21:10, Ahmidou Lyazidi a écrit :
Bradley is s right, I'm quite surprise about this question, it 
doesn't mean anything at all.

It's not really about the nodes, it's how the whole system work.

---
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist
http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
http://www.cappuccino-films.com


2014-03-15 20:55 GMT+01:00 Mirko Jankovic mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com 
mailto:mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com:


Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what
really AD system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of
separate marketing ready features that looks nice on list when you
showing it to sales.
The matter that those separate features have little to non
meaningful communications one with other...  communication that
actually makes workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe witha...@gmail.com
mailto:witha...@gmail.com wrote:

This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk
takes their DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.

It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so
powerful and useful, rather it's how well it plays within the
data structures of the rest of the application.

Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever
going into the daily battle that is production, simply saw it
as a particle system (and maybe tipped their hat to it's
clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI
community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed
by Autodesk, providing continuing evidence that Autodesk
didn't know what they actually had, didn't want to listen to
the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.

In real estate, they say the most important things are
location, location, location. In CG production, the most
important things are workarounds, workarounds, workarounds.
ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, splendidly
integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based
toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
without having to resort to coding for every little thing.
Particle effects are merely a byproduct of the system.

It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much
more profound understanding of CG data structures, an
intuitive sense of how the linear algebra drives transforms,
of how I could influence operators to do the things I could
only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea
how empowering that feels after years of waiting for technical
help from developers that never arrived?

Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds
with ICE, my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation,
deformation, etc, had increased drastically. Tools that used
to require a week for me to work out the math, I could develop
in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with
enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also
because I could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly
hash out more difficult concepts, prior to sitting down to
write out the code.

If you're wondering why people are concerned about life
without XSI, these are some pretty major reasons. You're going
to have to convince us the future of node-based work in
Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating
particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
developed, operator development kit, from which particles,
fluids, simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds,
workarounds, workarounds are possible!

-Bradley


Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones andy.jo...@gmail.com
mailto:andy.jo...@gmail.com wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com wrote:

Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and
compounds you all use that cover 80% of what you do with
the toolset?


Nope

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Meng-Yang Lu 
Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one.

-Lu

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Eric Thivierge 
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:

 Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
 reinventing the round wheel to a square one.


But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence would
plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with it.
Business-wise, there is no going back.


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Jason S 
Hi Eric,  of course coming back on a decision can have some effect of 
board-member/stockholder confidence.

(mostly (or exclusively) looking at daily ups-and downs)

Yet considering how Public Perception can be the main underlying 
driver of -confidence-,
and that in turn being the main driver of basically -everything- in an 
organisation, ..
(the whole purpose of marketing (sometimes taking-up 60% of entire 
budjets) is all around perception)


The effects of persisting on a decision or actions that may widely be 
perceived as not right,

( especailly when it's true (!) )
can absolutely far outweigh or dwarf the effects of reconsideration of 
such actions/decisions.


Shaken confidence can bring any organisation to it's knees,
regardless of it's size in a matter of seconds or days.

ie; only when a small (almost insignificant) textile factory crumbled,
did large manufactuers start spending billions in public campaigns, 
armies of lawyers,

(or a less insignificant % of revenue) on actually real reforms,
in respects to minimum standards in their sweatshop operations.

Resulting in some actions being only superficial,
others temporary t'il things blew over, and others more genuine.

Yet the only thing that motivated such actions was -public awareness-.

..

So what can make large machines turn around when exactly that ends up 
actually happening,

is when certain abstract fuzzy lines have been crossed,
thus affecting perception, therefore -confidence-.

While sometimes those reversals are from actual internal people waking,
more or less coming to grips with their moral compass,
and/or in other cases, merely or mostly just not to look too bad while 
plastering their stuff non-sweatshop-made,

with all sorts of varying degrees in between...

(machines are run by regular everyday people after all)

.. yet the fact remains that, when something is widely perceived as 
wrong or unfair,

especially when you can't really hide, mask or distract attention,
is when the *RIGHT* thing has indeed the best chance of actually happening.



On 03/15/14 17:31, Eric Thivierge wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com 
mailto:ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:


Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one. 



But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence 
would plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with 
it. Business-wise, there is no going back.



Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Ed Manning 

 Yeah.  The question itself, as well-intentioned as it may be, suggests
 such a fundamental misapprehension of ICE and why it's useful that it seems
 to confirm the worst fears of many of us.


It wasn't a pile of golden eggs, it was the goose.  And now it's dead.

Re: Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset

2014-03-15 Thread Jason S 
Hi, while it was merely to prove a point, I'd like to point out that the 
intent was not to equate prematurely retiring software with practicing 
poor working standards. Had there been an edit button, I would have 
accordingly edited it.

thx

On 03/15/14 23:27, Jason S wrote:
Hi Eric,  of course coming back on a decision can have some effect of 
board-member/stockholder confidence.

(mostly (or exclusively) looking at daily ups-and downs)

Yet considering how Public Perception can be the main underlying 
driver of -confidence-,
and that in turn being the main driver of basically -everything- in an 
organisation, ..
(the whole purpose of marketing (sometimes taking-up 60% of entire 
budjets) is all around perception)


The effects of persisting on a decision or actions that may widely be 
perceived as not right,

( especailly when it's true (!) )
can absolutely far outweigh or dwarf the effects of reconsideration of 
such actions/decisions.


Shaken confidence can bring any organisation to it's knees,
regardless of it's size in a matter of seconds or days.

ie; only when a small (almost insignificant) textile factory crumbled,
did large manufactuers start spending billions in public campaigns, 
armies of lawyers,

(or a less insignificant % of revenue) on actually real reforms,
in respects to minimum standards in their sweatshop operations.

Resulting in some actions being only superficial,
others temporary t'il things blew over, and others more genuine.

Yet the only thing that motivated such actions was -public awareness-.

..

So what can make large machines turn around when exactly that ends up 
actually happening,

is when certain abstract fuzzy lines have been crossed,
thus affecting perception, therefore -confidence-.

While sometimes those reversals are from actual internal people waking,
more or less coming to grips with their moral compass,
and/or in other cases, merely or mostly just not to look too bad while 
plastering their stuff non-sweatshop-made,

with all sorts of varying degrees in between...

(machines are run by regular everyday people after all)

.. yet the fact remains that, when something is widely perceived as 
wrong or unfair,

especially when you can't really hide, mask or distract attention,
is when the *RIGHT* thing has indeed the best chance of actually 
happening.




On 03/15/14 17:31, Eric Thivierge wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu ntmon...@gmail.com 
mailto:ntmon...@gmail.com wrote:


Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one. 



But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence 
would plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with 
it. Business-wise, there is no going back.



Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com