In my humble opinion the secret to getting Soft into studios is the suites, it’s how I got Soft into the building. We needed Maya as that’s what we were all using before we started our new company and we really needed to hit the ground running, and we also needed Mudbox. The nice thing was that the combined price of these two was slightly less than the suite price, which comes with Soft!
So I managed to get Soft in the door at no perceived cost, then over the next year as I familiarised myself with it (and learned ICE also) Vray was released and we had a good renderer too. Then I discovered Exocortex Crate and hopped on board as an early adopter, now we had a reliable way to get all the cached animation from Maya. Then we finally invested in Arnold and things started to get really good, now with a bit of clever scripting from the great Chris Gardner and some nice in house scene management tools we have a button to export Alembic to Soft. We use the initial Alembic export as the asset and package it into an .emdl file, we then do the shading/fur/look dev/whatever to the asset and when it is imported into a shot we can right click on the model node and apply the animation cache from Maya. It is that simple!, also now with open VDB we will be able to bring all the cool volumetric smoke/fire from Houdini or Maya plus fluid sims etc in at rendertime. I have resigned myself to the fact it would be hard for Soft to make a major comeback into the rigging/animation realm as there are just so many people using Maya now. Soft was in development/marketing limbo while Maya got a foothold, the fact Soft came out the other side as by far the better app was sadly of little consequence in the end. I too have been considering the Houdini route, just to future proof us a bit more, but I am keeping a close eye on Fabric Engine too as that just blows me away with possibilities. I am enjoying doing large projects without any major hitches where with Maya as the backbone I was a quivering mess at the end of every job. Right now my relationship with Softimage has never been better! Cheers, Nick From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric Mootz Sent: Monday, 6 January 2014 7:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: rumor, Soft dead within the next year "[..] working with Maya…HOW THE F@CK THIS PROGRAM IS USED IN PRODUCTION?????? [..]" He, he, I can only agree. It is the most buggy and unusable application I have ever had the displeasure to use. How anybody can seriously work with Maya is frankly beyond me. "Hats off" to all those pour souls who have to use it on a daily basis ;) Cheers, Eric PS: for the sake of fairness it must be mentioned that the Maya SDK is really quite good. It is easy to understand, well documented, has tons of examples, etc.
