Welcome! Changes to teams can be a good, sometimes great, thing.
I know people use Softimage for all kinds of things but personally I became a Softimage user because it seemed to be the most game-dev focused of the big 3 so I am glad to see people from the game industry join the team. Not because I expect Softimage to change focus or anything, I'm thinking it might bring new ideas and perspectives to old tasks and processes that maybe could be better. Game dev programmers tend to be very passionate about their work and IMHO it can only mean good things for Softimage to be pulling experience from the game industry. Also, if it is anything like most places I've worked, new team members are often happy get their feet wet by fixing long standing "easy" bugs that have been neglected for way too long (MOTOR null pointer crashes anyone?) because the experienced people didn't want to be distracted from the cool new stuff they want/need to do to keep the job interesting. I'd love to visit Singapore :) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chun-Pong Yu Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2012 3:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Intro to the new team (was RE: Softimage development) Luc-Eric's comments are a good segway for me to introduce some members of the new team and what they're working on. We've been lurking on the list so far, and have been amazed by the passion of most in the community for Softimage and will support it as best as we can. Now that Luc-Eric, Guillaume LaForge, Guillaume Laferriere, etc. have moved to the Maya team, we'll be participating more actively especially when there're technical issues reported. We're all based in Singapore btw (so the comments on durians were apt) where the cost of labour isn't that much different from Montreal and certainly much higher (3x?) than in China. And there're more people in the team than there were in Montreal two years ago. Moreover, folks like JF, Francis, David, Manny, Graham, etc. are still around (the first 3 are in fact still developing enhancements and bug fixes for customers). Hence Autodesk is still investing in the Softimage since guess what? Soft still makes money for the company. It's true that the team doesn't know the code as well as Luc-Eric and team but that's not to say that we're newbies to software development, 3D graphics, simulations, rendering, etc. either. Sure, we don't have the 10-15 year histories with Soft that the "old" team had, but we're happy to say that they're still around (even many from the acquisition who eventually moved to other Autodesk teams) and still helping out when there's a need. But that should go down as we become more familiar with the code. So here goes: Hsiao Ming Chia - Core, Ref Models. From NVIDIA, worked on games middleware and runtime engines for 8 yrs. Yury Khmel - Core, ICE, FaceRobot. 12+ years, last 5 as an architect in games development. John Tensuan - Rendering, Data Management. Last in Ubisoft doing rendering and engine systems. Ho Chung Nguyen - ICE, Simulation. Wrote core libraries for math, physics simulation, rendering while at LucasArts. Joany Yang - UI, SDK. Mainly engaged in UI projects using COM, MFC, C++, etc while at another team at Autodesk. Me? I just manage the team so am the "overhead" :-) If you're ever in Singapore, we'd love to meet you. Regards, Chun Pong -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 10:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Softimage development On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 3:26 AM, Mirko Jankovic <[email protected]> wrote: > It is a bit bad that even after so many concerns displayed from > customer about Softimage and AD's plans for it, that not a single > official line of word was put out. > Is it so hard to let people know what is going on and where does it > all lead? Actually, you're getting a lot of official information right here in this thread. None of us moving to the new Maya FX Montreal team, which is led by me, are really doing it to quit Softimage, it's just a natural evolution of thing. As written previously, this was planned and we've been hiring and training a whole lot of new group of great people to work on Softimage. So what does that mean? Well first it means that Autodesk is committed to continuing the development of Softimage - otherwise we wouldn't be spending so much effort building a new team. We worked a lot on this! I interviewed every single one of these guys - and some we rejected. The new guys have backgrounds in game production, real time shader, physics, etc. They're bring new ideas and skills. And it also means that Autodesk is renewing its effort on the Maya FX's toolset, which is not super interesting to you guys obviously, but is that a thing that makes sense. It's hard to leave Softimage, but it's also hard to not get excited with the new projects. We're going to Digital Domain and ILM this week with Duncan. New experiences! If we can just stop hitting the S key to orbit the camera, everything will be fine.
