So where are these jungle drums pounding? In the case of Softimage the development team has undergone a complete replacement and they've only been in charge for one shortened release cycle. Not enough information to extrapolate over the long term. But when you look at it from a business perspective of Autodesk global, it doesn't make much sense to hire a brand new (larger?) development team in another country only to slowly kill a product. I'm not claiming there will be any revolutionary overhauls to the application due to legacy issues, but I wouldn't sell it short either. I think you'll see development continue in areas that will best round out the application to fill in the voids that have been complained about for years that don't disturb the foundation of the application. Some of those developments can still be significant.
As for the bigger picture, I don't see Autodesk maintaining 3 separate applications indefinitely. It's too costly to manage like-features across the applications and maintain 3 separate development teams. While simple to moderate features could be managed across applications, the more complex ones would be a money pit as you'd spend more time and energy to create the result than the benefit that any user would derive. It runs the risk of splintering a customer base as effort to assimilate all the products takes away from progress resulting in unhappy customers. FBX anyone? If you had asked me back in 2008 what the grand plan was, I would say to develop a new application from scratch while using the existing products as cover and provide revenue stream to hold the fort. Long term it makes much more sense to have a single application as all development efforts could be focused, and headcounts to support one application is almost always less than for 3 applications resulting in cost savings. It would allow for faster iteration and development too. For those of us who were around in the mid 1990's, we experienced the headaches of watching Softimage, Alias|Wavefront, Side FX, and Kinetics all revamp their products while continuing to develop their mainstays. It was fun to watch in anticipation, but not so fun to deal with the lack of progress and continual roadblocks in the course of everyday production as workarounds became the norm than the exception. What we're experiencing now looks familiar to me, but not familiar enough to convince me another product is on the drawing boards. However, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if that were the case as its not something you announce until significant prototypes have been completed successfully. What we saw in the mid 1990's is it took roughly 3-4 years to build a new application core from scratch and v1.0 wasn't really usable in production. Each application didn't hit a usable stride until about v3.0 of each product respectively. That's a statement that it takes 6 years of active development to replace a product. Flash forward to today and it will likely take longer due to the emerging secondary markets and complexities needed to address them from an application. Long story short, I don't know if a single broad application to cover all markets makes sense anymore as the complexity to build such a thing would be enormous. It certainly makes sense to have a general 3D application that covers maybe 80% of the daily stuff while other smaller targeted applications are built off as extensions to fill certain niches. If you look in production, that's how most pipelines are built. Each production step uses one or more applications depending on the need. What would streamline it all is if they all talked to each other in a common protocol. I think that's what Autodesk is attempting with FBX and the separate products, but the difference is there is no central platform to build from, it's more or less a series of bridges to different lands. Some will say Maya is the platform, but I don't think that would work simply because all the other applications would have to be retrofitted with that in mind. That's obviously not going to happen. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andi Farhall Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 3:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: the jungle drums have been going off again. Intimating the end of the line for soft. By this I assume the end of supported development from Autodesk, but will that make much difference? Isn't it the case that there has been no real development of any of the three packages in years, excepting perhaps ice? It can't simply be that maya will be the only software that people will end up using, there has to be a next generation surely as things evolve. If not, then an unsuported product is just as much use as a supported but unevolved one, right? I know lots of places that use soft, some of them exclusively so how long can they carry on with an unsupported product? There must be years of life left in soft and if places like MPC really are using ICE for crowd stuff then this has to add to it's life expectancy. I'm not against learning a new package whatsoever, but it has to be an improvement on what i've been using until now, and as somebody who spends all day in either ICE or the render region and render passes i have to say maya seems a backwards step, and if it is a backwards step then maya has room for improvement or even replacement perhaps. They could call it Maxsi perhaps. I would learn that... or will we be left in a stagnatting software pool simply because a few large studios are now backed into a corner? A> ........................................................................... http://www.hackneyeffects.com/ https://vimeo.com/user4174293 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andi-farhall/b/496/b21 http://www.flickr.com/photos/lord_hackney/ http://spylon.tumblr.com/ This email and any attachments to it may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Hackney Effects Ltd. If you are not the intended recipient of this email, you must neither take any action based upon its contents, nor copy or show it to anyone. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error. ------------------------------------------------------------
