There is ton and ton to do in Maya as well. Not to mention Max. But instead Softimage is dead.
On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Jordi Bares <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Softimage, like SideEffect, 3DSMax and the rest are small teams of very > clever developers, 8-12 is the normal number of developers for any app... > that is a very small cost compared with the cost of advertising and PR, > believe me. > > That's not quite right. That may be the number of people who interact > with the community, but it certainly isn't the number of people > necessary to develop and keep competitive Softimage, an app that's 12 > millions lines of code. It's just OK to keep it on life support and > make one or two feature a year. True for small apps like 3DCoat, but > not for this one, not at this age. > > At Avid, we had those kinds of numbers ..*just in consulting* > > We had a lot more developers than that at the end at Avid, and that > was after rounds and rounds of layoffs. We were down to one or zero > person per area, not really able to anything but fixes and small > features. > > You can keep that kind of app on life support/maintenance with a staff > of 8-12, and that's totally true. But that's not the real problem. > Look at what happens when you try to do a new project with a handful > of "clever developers", the High Quality Viewport + Crowds in > Softimage 2013. First, it's hit and miss whether it'll be any good; > in this case, miss in the case of the viewport. Secondly, it's soaked > up all the resources so you don't have anything else for the rest of > the user base. > > A small of people can create a develop a new app and continue to > maintain it, they are doing it all the time. A small group of > developer will make a small app, and this app will probably be a lot > more focused. This is not what we ended up with. > > Softimage is a gorgeous app, beautifully designed. But all is not > well. The code base will be due for a large rewrite in a few years, > like the QT port and viewport 2.0 in Maya. There are glass ceillings > in playback performance/scalability that we've never been able to fix > even after years of people looking at that. Mental Ray is about to > fall into oblivion and if that needs to be pulled out of XSI, lots of > stuff is going to go with it. Lots of fundamental things in XSI like > scene file and scripting are based on Windows API that have been > deprecated for a decade. There are new ideas and things coming up > like OpenSubDiv, out-of-core-processing for FX, etc. You can also > fetch one of those multi-volume mails from Matt about everything > that's wrong in the product for his game artists. The animation > toolset hasn't been updated since the shape manager. ICE Kine doesn't > scale enough to replace it/ There is tons of work to do, even after > 14 years. >
