One, I don't buy the "selling more suites can only be good for SI"
argument. Ok, better than nothing, but selling suites AND promoting SI
as a reasonable standalone app would be fairer, eye height with the
other packages.
But, behold, maybe AD sees things clearer than we could possibly like...
Because, personal preference and bad marketing aside, in truth, SI is
simply not the shining redeemer. Thought it was (stupid), but had to
learn better...
- It's modelling tools might be good, but there's too much missing
(curve based modelling, data and asset import, rendering) to make it a
reasonable choice for the visualization folks. VRay, the de facto
rendering standard in that (quite big) market, is just available for a
few months now.
- It's not long ago that SI got the rendering options it was in dire
need of. (I tried to use mental ray for a big visualization, and it was
a pretty horrible experience...)
One USP for Softimage now is still Arnold, but the Maya version is
making progress. Cool to have VRay, too, maybe even Maxwell, but all of
them need to mature a bit more.
- ICE might be a TDs wet dream, but what does an animator, modeller,
texturer, etc. get out of it on a daily basis? Depends on your job
situation - freelancers/people in small studios need to approach job
tasks more versatile and will profit from it one way or the other. In
bigger companies, specialization is stronger, and some folks will
probably never need (or be allowed) to touch it.
- SDK is always somewhat lagging behind... it's still not open enough
compared to Maya's, which does NOT help when a choice has to be made for
which app to use for the pipeline backbone.
Still, no official PyQt support. It's good to have a clean UI, but
customizability counts these days.
How come it is still difficult to create on-the-fly UVs in a custom topo
Operator, or there are selection problems with the created geometry, or
Clusters (a pretty central concept) are still not fully exposed?
For 3rd-party devs, it's not only the small market share but also things
like this that make it a lesser choice. Don't tell me it's because SI is
so feature complete that there are so litte commercial plugins around.
Praise Mootz, Mathee, Schönberger for holding up the flag. Without them,
there would be nothing. Where are the americans/canadians in this?
ICE topo still has a bit of a workaround feel to it... Operators also
seem to be somewhat slow, compared to C++ (but I haven't taken the time
to dig deep).
- Particle rendering is still not where it should be, which makes you
shake your head since it is officially sold as a particle system...
- Ran into a bug with bullet rigid bodies recently, which was a pretty
nasty show-stopper almost... or think of that horrible disconnected
shader bug a while ago... Things like this REALLY do not any good.
And this list does not claim to be complete...
So, bottom line, Softimage stand out (far) in terms of
workflow/usability, versatility out-of-the-box, and ICE, but it still
needs some serious dedicated development efforts in many other places,
to justify stepping before the crowd and promote it as the oh-so-cool app.
Still, it is cool... don't ask me why.
0.01
Eugen
