In my humble opinion, the simple point here is whether or not Autodesk sees softimage as a full-fledged DCC App or not. The aforementioned campaign item shows it does not, but actually it is.
Softimage is a complete 3D Application and not just a specialized particle package. There are numerous examples out there where full projects are completely done on Softimage alone from start to end. I can vouch for it myself. We are soon ending work on a full cg feature film (not released yet) with 3D stereo completely done on softimage, barring a few fluids and particles (Maya and Houdini) on some shots. And I am talking from modelling, texturing, surfacing, layout, rigging, animation, lighting and rendering. All on Softimage for some 900 shots and some change to spare. I myself have written numerous plugins/tools/scripts/feature addition (both in c++ and python) for endowing/extending it for pipeline and otherwise including complete Layout, Modelling, Animation and Lighting plugins/tools etc. I never said no to any feature extension for pipeline asked of me because everything was doable ! Is it not enough to show that Softimage is a full application. It even has a decent compositor in Fx Tree, if need be. Speaking from morality of situation (although business, for most, is everything but morality), Autodesk as a responsible company should give well-informed and undeniably true information about it's products to it's customers. It is a matter of providing true information. Since it is a full app, it should be marketed as such. Any alteration to this and we moving away from truth, providing incomplete information to the user. It may be that for Autodesk, Softimage may not be earning as much revenues as Maya or Max, but it can. Give it the right place it deserves in the campaigns. If you really want to undertake a good research exercise (although not very practical maybe), here's what I suggest, take a few users, a completely random sample, who do not know anything of Maya or Max or Softimage. Ask them to use each one for all kinds of 3D tasks for some time. Then take a vote. I will not be surprised they will value Softimage to be par with Max or Maya, if not more. Alok.
