I still see no reason to jump ship at all. Unless they Soft devs working
on Maya introduce not only ICE to Maya, but some amazing improvement
that only exists in Maya, maybe. But I'll wager that ICE is not the only
reason people have built pipelines around Softimage. People seem to
think that if you axe the product now, it ceases to function. "We're
going to stop making hammers now, so whatever hammers you bought from us
will no longer work."
But when AD purchased XSI, they purchased a mature toolset that has
stood the test of time and has gone largely untouched since the
acquisition! When someone tells me that AD will 'cease upgrades' for
Softimage, I think to myself 'haven't they been doing that for some time
now?' The core toolset for which we (Magnetic) use Softimage is intact
and reliable as ever. We don't rely on ICE to the degree some of you do,
but we do rely on the following:
- the modeling toolset
- passes/partitions/overrides
- referenced models
- operator stacks
- animation toolset
- API and customizability
- raw performance and stability
- the flippin component tweak tool
- etc...
And if I understand correctly (I wasn't into XSI at the time of the
acquisition), these are feature sets that AD didn't contribute, and have
barely touched. So in my view, they've already been 'not upgrading'
Softimage for years.
More tragically though, the ceasing of development on Softimage would
trigger a slow death of 3rd party development for it, especially if
people get all gloomy and doomy and jump ship. All the 3rd party effort
that has been poured into Softimage tools over the last few years has
been amazing (!), and has done far more to enhance my productivity than
anything AD ever did (apart from, admittedly, improving the underlying
platform for ICE-based solutions). Redshift comes out of nowhere like a
champ, revolutionzing our renders. Eric Mootz, year after year, provides
bridges for people get the power of ICE without needing the underlying
technical know-how (as do many others!). Jeremie Passerin and Miquel
Campos give us rigging tools. Eric and Chris give us a jump on
characters with Species. Ben and Helge deliver the most robust,
feature-friendly alembic implementation available to the public.
rray.de/xsi is rife with contributions that are functional improvements
to the system and provide real solutions to real problems. If Softimage
ceases to be officially developed/supported , these 3rd party
powerhouses will eventually stop as well. And that's when we'll see the
death of Softimage. And that day will suck. So I'm more than happy to
prolong this as much as possible by supporting our 3rd party friends
(and I wish I could buy more of their licenses myself) who have been
doing more to strengthen and improve Softimage than AD has in years,
because I think that's what will keep the product alive as a viable
solution for VFX.
*Tim Crowson
*/Lead CG Artist/
*Magnetic Dreams, Inc.
*2525 Lebanon Pike, Bldg C, Suite 101, Nashville, TN 37214
*Ph* 615.885.6801 | *Fax* 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com
[email protected]
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