after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2 cents on the whole situation.
When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft, because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece Software with this kind of sophistication. I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself. I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability and longevity of such the business model. More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk) I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D industry itself. By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of their business by the way. M&E only contributes 7% to their revenue and is decreasing. Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as consequence sell its stepchild M&E to whomever may have an interest in it (hopefully not a financial investor). Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant market position and apparently no one seems to care. It's a shame their will be no other software with a middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I think I will stay with "my second love" until I go the "Kim Aldis route". Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech. I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya. Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great product over the last 28 years. Cheers, Stephan. +1 Sent from my iPhone On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates <[email protected]> wrote: This. Everything Andy said. On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones <[email protected]> wrote: Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE opportunity if we leverage it properly. I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly, it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting to build a scene assembler as a supported "product" in itself (or who knows -- maybe they will?). It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they think their company *might* be interested. I'll start: Psyop Massmarket On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus <[email protected]> wrote: You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project? 2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron <[email protected]>: it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already difficult market, spending money on software development (not their core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something happen... steven On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus <[email protected]> wrote: So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone. -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen Stephan Hempel mailto:[email protected]
