Enthusiastic hello from me!
Dave G
On 4/19/2012 6:14 AM, Chun-Pong Yu wrote:
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.
