Houdini is a very, very serious alternative that, if invested in, can make a gimongous difference in a number of stretches of the pipe. Modo I can't really say I see as a competitor, it barely covers spots if you make movies or games.
The problem is that literally NOTHING out there will cover the stretch of assembly > rigging > animation > caching efficiently and in one go except Maya or Soft. No, not even Houdini. We struggle enough as is, as a subset of disciplines, with software, performance and dedicated efforts with apps that have a long heritage of catering to that stretch. Moving to an app (Houdini) which one simply cannot squeeze performance for a multi-thousand nodes graph out of, and with a pool of animators close to zero, and which requires considerable training efforts is, sadly, not an option. It has brilliance that would save piles of cash in many places (digital assets and all), but it's simply never had a real userbase or any continued effort on the animation side of things. They rarely picked up that ball, and when they did they soon dropped it. I still wish it had been Dassault Systemes back then buying Soft, or that they had listened to the part of the userbase that eight or nine years ago was shouting their throat raw for a proper lights off port to Qt and Boost Bindings. Sadly most of Soft back then was completely blind to how foresightful people like Alan Jones were (or even some of my pleas for all it matters), and even a good chunk of the community mistook it for some pointless Linux closet socialism initiative. Thanks to the impossible to eradicate persistency of gems such as mainwin and COM Soft had to be put to the side in this last major churn inside AD. If they are looking at the whole platform switch, and they would be insanely dumb if they weren't, Soft would simply turn out to be too much work at this point even if given a fair shot. The userbase itself and some most beloved figures of the past made unintentionally sure Soft would be backwards in many regards, and AD is unlikely to be the kind of company that rescues something for the sake of its elegance and dedicated user base. Which is sad, but is what this mostly boils down to. Had Soft two or three years ago been a stronger platform, even with less dressing and elegance painted on top, and had ICE not been so strongly tied to that underlying layer, chances are we'd all be singing a very different tune today. It wasn't, it isn't, and it doesn't have the ridiculous market stretch of MAX, so its future is uncertain. On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 7:19 AM, Jordi Bares <[email protected]> wrote: > Funny enough I keep receiving tweets from Autodesk related to great work > and articles done with… Softimage!!! amazing… > > I wish they sell the software to someone serious about it to rescue from > its current state, it has been all downhill since Autodesk took over. > > Regarding the competitors, the only serious alternative right now is > Houdini and although a step learning curve it is truly worth it. > > I want to see how Modo does but I am even more interested to what happens > to The Foundry as a company as it is partially owned by an investor group > that will surely sell soon to get there profits… > > :-P > > Let's see > >
