Sorry for jumping in late into the conversation, I have not read
what ensued before, so pardon me if I miss the whole point of this
thread, but for what it's worth, we are a soft house, and yes we
have done movie work, game cinematics, full CG Feature. Softimage
remains our primary DCC App from tracking to rendering for movie
production. Having said that, it is also true that for VFX work we
do use Maya and Houdini depending on shots.
I think for softimage to replace Maya/Houdini, it still needs some
love specially in the fluids/voxels/volume rendering department.
Soft and Rigid Body dynamics still needs to be done through 3rd
Party Solutions (e.g Momentum, which by the way does great stuff).
With Arnold, it is now even better to have Soft Setup as primary
rendering.
Also, things are changing fast, as they always due in any Tech
field(just a reassertion of Moore's Law on my part). With the advent
of new technologies/solutions like Katana, Alembic, Arnold and the
likes, look Dev and Shading is no more tied to any DCC App. Modeling
is completely taken care by Z Brush, even mudbox and you do not need
to go other apps even for the base mesh. So it all boils down to
Rigging/ Character/Creature rig setups and Animation.
IMHO, Softimage is still qualifies as one of the most fast,
efficient, comprehensive and easy to use package for the
rigging/animation pipeline. With ICE which adds to the strength of
these two(rigging and animation) apects, it gets even better. It is
for sure just a matter of right marketing strategy to push it for
Feature Film Production Pipelines, which I hope the Soft team is
already working on.
In my view, for future, whichever DCC App provides faster, simple
GUI/Front ends for less technologically inclined artists, efficient
and be able to pull off all sorts of particle/fx will lead the
markets.
If you throw open source projects like blender into the mix, it
becomes more interesting, look at Sintel project itself for example.
My 0.02 $
On 4/17/2012 6:30 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Thanks Hilary,
tricky question: does your brilliant Softimage team (I
dont doubt it) get assigned any movie work?
Autodesk (and previously Alias) marketing has made damn
sure that any producer knows the ‘only soft used on movie
VFX is Maya’ – and it’s hurting me badly lately.
If I was more of a business person I would have dropped
Softimage a long time ago. As much as I like working in it,
it is making the business side increasingly difficult.
ICE has certainly been a big push, and I do like where
2013 is going, but the wealth of Maya opportunities VS the
scarcity of Softimage opportunities is hard to ignore.
For every Softimage job I get - and I’ve been some great
places and met wonderful people through them – I miss a
handful of Maya opportunities.
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 10:44 PM
Subject: Re: Softimage development
It's
worth it Peter. I fly the Soft flag here and absolutely
promote our small, but fantastic team. We've delivered a
huge job recently in a crazy time schedule - without
Andi's brilliance and his knowledge of ICE it couldn't
have been done.
H
unfortunately, for many people all over the world,
staying on softimage is a constant uphill struggle...
george knows i’ve been trying to get softimage
adopted, better known and appreciated everywhere I
went for the past 11 years – but looking back one
wonders if it was worth it.
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 9:45 PM
Subject: Re: Softimage development
#3
sound suspiciously congruous to #1
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 2:37
PM, Stefan Andersson <[email protected]>
wrote:
3.) Just go with the flow that
your company is going with. :)
-stefan
The way I see it, everyone has two
choices:
1) Complain that XSI is dying and
resign yourself to that fact. In doing
so,
you'll be sustaining the rumour, and
making it a self-fulfilling prophesy.
2) Start fighting back against the
cynicism (as understandable as it may
or may
not be) and get out there and actively
promote XSI in every way you can. If
it
doesn't work, who cares, at least you
tried.
I'm doing option 2. What about you?
It's only over for XSI the moment the
XSI community go "meh... it's over
isn't
it".
Andy
On 17 April 2012 at 19:39 Grahame
Fuller < [email protected]>
wrote:
> And in fact, none of the
developers mentioned have worked
on SI from the start
> of it. There has always been
a certain amount of churn. It's
normal, and
> pretty much the same
everywhere.
>
> gray
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto: [email protected]]
On Behalf Of Steven Caron
> Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012
02:07 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Softimage
development
>
> thats only a fraction of the
people that have left since the
> acquisition. some left
entirely and some moved to another
projects.
> not to sound gloomy but even
with those talented people leaving
there
> is progress and (i can't be
certain) growth.
>
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:54
AM, Matt Morris < [email protected]>
wrote:
> > Its always good to have
some new blood in the team,
hopefully it leads to
> > new ways of approaching
old problems and is good for the
software. However
> > we do seem to have lost
an awful lot of knowledgable
people since autodesk
> > took over, Luc,
Guillaume, Halfdan, Phil Taylor,
Helge... Its not easy to
> > replace that much
experience.
> >
> >
> > On 17 April 2012 18:45,
Xavier Lapointe < [email protected]>
wrote:
> >>
> >> I'd like to know
them. Are some of them on the
mailinglist?
> >>
> >> Always cool to know
their background.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > www.matinai.com
--
-=T=-
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