DS had little to do with XSI.
And Matt is right on most accounts, really.
Alias was older than Soft as a company ('83 vs '86), and Maya is older than
XSI as a product ('98 vs 99-2k).
You can find the timelines of all the companies on wikipedia and in many
other places, and they are actually accurate if you filter out some
personal opinions and judgment calls about the packages that have little to
do with history.
Of the two, for most of the stretch XSI was the less expensive feature for
dollar, but they did take an odd twist between v3 and v4 with a price bump
when Alias went scattershot with 2k complete (they saw a chance of kidney
punching Soft into oblivion AND had near exhausted their market in the high
price range they pitched), and XSI's response with 2k first then 500$
foundation had mixed results.
Conversely, Soft missed out on more than one opportunity to do the same to
Maya in times of crisis. Soft in general has always been plagued by
horrible, narrow and short sighted management with target fixation when it
came to markets and appeal.
Petit saying in 99 we would have never used polygons again in our lifetime
once we saw XSI still gets chuckles at every user meeting with people old
enough to remember, and it was laughed at even back then, but the laughter
was not listened to (and this is just one off a long list of examples, see
a decent API, ASCII file format etc.)
The lot ended up with both softwares barely being profitable anyway, and
I'm still unsure the userbase won anything from that price war.
Stefan also made a couple blunders with his post.
The first version of Soft was nurbs and MRay only, that's true, but then
the first version of maya was also nurbs and their own renderer only, and
that was a F'in tragedy to use. Nobody used Maya unless a) they had access
to an outrageously overpriced rendering engine and baked their own
translator, or paid for even more outrageously prices translators b) they
were a bunch of dolts thinking that because a couple HE guys with access to
such resources used it, it would have been good for them too.
Soft added poly modelling in 1.5, Maya sort of got around to having it
functional in 2.0 (1.5 was SGI only and the first sort-of usable version).
I would also definitely not call the first version of maya usable and open,
but it did have scripting and a clear enough scene model and scene files,
which at the time was all very novel and turned a lot of heads, not to
mention kind of started the modern TD figure and modern pipelines, and
hugely biased decision makers from the bottom up.
Soft was usable and well rounded by v2, if more than a bit unstable, but a
nightmare to pipeline up. Maya was a nightmare to use by v2, but by far the
easiest thing out there to build a pipeline around. No brainer what the big
studios picked, and what the small guys, misled into thinking they should
follow the big studios, ended up going for.
To date, it remains the most expensive and glorified OGL viewer you can
build a functional pipeline around, which is a big part of why it's so well
entrenched, but it's far from an pre-canned, all round solution when
elegance and agility comes into place.
Saying Maya users are dime a dozen though is way off the mark. In the
higher end of the markets you pay for competence, and a solid TD,
developer, or any other figure that needs domain knowledge of the platform
will go for more or less the same money on either, and the more
platform-agnostic figures like animators and modellers don't really suffer
the software distinction much, I've routinely seen, in shops using either,
people coming from the other software being taken on without batting an
eyelid about what software their keyframes were punched in.
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Daniel H <[email protected]> wrote:
> Matt,
>
> I should have added the reference. This is what I was referring to...
> Computer Graphics World, Feb 1998
> http://xsisupport.com/2011/05/27/friday-flashback-20/
>
> - Base price for Maya $10,000.
> - Softimage/DS system $100,000.
>
> Thanks for the clarification and additional info Matt. Someone needs to
> put together a timeline to record SI's hard-to-find history.
>
> Daniel
> VFXM
>
>
--
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!
