Re: Intro to the new team (was RE: Softimage development)

[Sylvain Lebeau]

Sorry for the french swearing... Sacrament de tabarnak ... Welcome to you guys Chung-Pong!! i have mixed up feelings of course. I really must admit this is major in terms of seeing Softimage finally vanish but i cant do anything except to hope for the best for all of us softimage underdogs. Taking all the devs out to Maya is a sign we cannot put our heads under the sand..... Chung-Pong, you guys seem's to come from a gaming background mostly... Could you tell us about your plans for the futur? .. i mean what was asked to you?.... probably you cannot say anything...  But i really hope you guys are going to bring something new and refreshing so we can still hope for a futur.... You guys have a great challenge under hands. Millions of code lines to delve into..... I wonder how the SP1 will look like. Good luck from the bottom of my heart! Hat's off for the undertaking.. :-) caliss de siboire.... btw: anyone can tell me how to plug textures in the hypershade plz??  I middle click and drag onto the shader then a pop up connection editor come's across.... and nothing i can do in there...... any tips? .... Ohh almebic is already there?? wow nice!!. ...  i' ll still install Helge's version. and how do i do render layers exactly? ..... membership something? Where are the partitions? .... overrides? ... ... chu en tabarnak .... sacrament.. ...Dans l'cul Autodesk de marde avec ma grosse graine. sly -- Sylvain Lebeau // SHED V-P/Visual effects supervisor 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM>   Raffaele Fragapane Thursday, April 19, 2012 7:56 PM We welcome the new overhead overlord and his minions! More seriously, good to hear from, or at least about, you guys. Please do make sure you pick up the torch of mailing list interactions where the old guard left it, even if at the cost of a feature or two per release :) -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! Chun-Pong Yu Thursday, April 19, 2012 6:14 AM 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: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 10:38 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Softimage development 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.