This is true but when I left Alias I had basically finished up most of my work for Maya 1.5.
There were lots of teams in various stages of completion which is why I was working on 1.5 stuff before 1.0 shipped. The windows port was well underway at that point too. What was not clear at that time was whether Maya would be successful in the market but the signs were there and we certainly had the team to pull it off. (Alias+Wavefront+TDI+Disney) When I joined Softimage XSI/Sumatra was very much underway and lots of the architecture was already decided. The team was telling me that the release would be that year but having just been through 5+ years of Maya development I could see that the product still had quite a way to go before 1.0... I joined when the company was owned by Microsoft but my first day in the London office as rather eventful. I didn't have a place to live yet so I commuted 1.5 hours to London as we were staying with my wife's parents. There was a tube strike on so it took me forever to get to the office by bus. When I finally got there everyone was at the pub watching a world cup game so I couldn't find anyone to help me setup my computer. I left early to fight my way home through the tube strike etc. and later that evening my boss phoned from L.A. to tell me we had been sold to Avid! You guys are pretty much spot on about the focus for Maya. In those days everyone was using expensive workstations and we were owned by an expensive workstation maker. If I recall correctly the all singing all dancing version of Maya initially sold for about 50,000 USD so the focus was definitely on making a powerful tool that could be easily customized to meet the customers pipeline. I was a big champion of the embedded language strategy and made sure that the product was based around an embedded language from day one. (even though the language changed several times before settling on Mel) When a customer has invested significant effort building tools on top of your product it is not trivial thing to replace... Ok, enough history lessons... ;-) -- Brent From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Raffaele Fragapane Sent: 19 April 2012 01:42 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Softimage development P.S. I see Brent is referring to himself :p I was saying more that at that time it wouldn't have been possible to move to an xsi team, as there wasn't one :p On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Actually I can think of a couple names that drifted in and out that I recognized across different lists and stuff. I think Brent might be kidding there, as 14 years and two months ago Maya was being released for the first time, and only became remotely usable a few months later with 1.0.1 (Q4 98). At that point it had so many issues and limitations (many of them similar to xsi 1 ironically), that most of us only started taking it seriously with 1.5, which sadly was an IRIX only release (only a few weeks after the buggy 1.0.1 for win). 2.5.2 in 2000 is where it really took off like a rocket. Weta's first images of gollum in the trailer and some leaks, together with Framestore moving across a few months before, and Dneg choosing maya and getting all of pitch black done with it in record time and budget spun the hype mill so hard there was no going back in public perception. Producers were mesemrized by Weta's results and Dnegs budgets, TDs were swayed by having scripting (at all) and an API that didn't suck yards of penis, and decision makers all swung around within less than a year between 99 and 2k. Sumatra was still unseen at that point, the buzz was around the beta of twister that was being demoed alongside Softimage|DS. This was at the microsoft stand, right across the Avid one. You could zap a cellphone dead from static just walking between the two :p On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:30 AM, Xavier Lapointe <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I would love hearing about maya devs who switched to the xsi team ! Not sure that ever happened ... (unless that was sarcasm) -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
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