Apart that most of all of the missing features mentionned (see below)
have been requested for Maya, basically since they were introduced in XSI..
.. the efforts to reproduce *some* aspects of SI have either been faint
reproductions (for the larger part)
or (to be fair) sometimes reaching more or less the same level.
Animation Mixer ; (not bad)
RenderLayers (Passes) ; (iirgh)
NodeEditor (not bad.. while still necessary to go back & forth with
(quite bad) Hypershade & connection editor ),
Nex, (TweakTool) (not bad.. with many selection issues)
Shape System ; (iirgh)
Attribute Transfer (Gator) ; (iirgh)
OperatorStack ; (iirgh)
Proxies (Referencing); (iirgh)
(& many others..)
Perhaps BiFrost will be part of the "least bad" reproductions.. or
perhaps not.. who knows..
..but fact remains that ... it only keeps trying to reproduce..
& most of all.. the most crucial aspects are things that can't really
be bullet-pointed,
to which you can *clearly feel* when you consistently/repeatedly go
"hey! that worked! done!"
(doing it in SI after struggling to solve those very things in other apps)
this while despite Maya having definite advantages on some levels
(object count/poly count),
.. **crunching trough regular everyday tasks is more or less /1.5 to 2x
times faster /**
all due to those nebulous software subtleties.
And *that* is what is *highly unlikely* to change until Maya would
basically be re-invented
(moving away from it's 1995 code base.)
So even *if* a few (at best) of the following points were somehow
implemented,
there would still be the (most important) "je ne sait quoi" missing,
which allows for *rapid production*,
and the VERY HIGH likelihood of having elaborate setups/processes work,
without loads of custom stuff, great resource/time intensive
interventions or splintering headaches.
______________________
Jeremie Passerin
- Gator
- ICE : Especially to create custom deformers
- Proper weights painting tools
- Weights Editor !
- The Operator Stack, reorder, delete operator...
- Being able to change modeling whith Envelope, Shapes already applied
to the mesh
- Blend shape workflow
______________________
Emilio Hernandez
1. A new and coherent interface.
2. The same selection object component behavior.
3. That if you select an item it will stay selected until you
deselected.
4. An M tool
5. The same shape system of Softimage.
6. Stacks
7. Ability to have the same Softimage keyboard shortcuts layout.
8. Hide all the connections in the Channels/Layers Editor
9. Redisgn the graph editor behavior.
10. Ability to lock the propoerties of the object you are editing no
matter what other object you selected.
11. Active mouse over window
12. Render region
13. Pass phylosofphy as the one in Softimage
14. If you make a connection, ability to write expressions there
instead of build an intrincated node laberynth.
15. Object to have only one node, not the object and shape node.
16. Ability to use any object to envelope
17. Implicit objects
18. Operators
Ability to change the same parameters in a multi selection objects
Independency of child parameters from parent objects. LIke for example
if you want to hide the parent and leave the child visible, and not
spread all of this throught the hierarchy.
______________________
Adam Sale;
-Proper branch node tree selection
-Massive update to painting tools for weighting
-Updated shape management system
-Renderpasses that arent flaky
-Tweak tool workflow
-Render regions
-Update to uvs
-Nla op stack
-ICE
_______________________
Eric Turman
*Workgroups (Maya's plugin manager..ugh what a mess)
*GATOR (I've had Maya users nearly go into a seizure of disbelief when
I've shown them GATOR in the past)
*Stacks: Model, Shape, Animate, Secondary shape etc (so useful to be
able to partition operations for freezing etc.)
*non-destructive adaption of modeling work through shapes weights etc.
(when a client wans a change....man this has been a lifesaver in Soft
all these years)
*non-layer approach to dealing with hierarchical inheritance of
visibility etc (hide parent in Maya, the whole branch get hidden...wait,
whut? dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb...yes I know layers...not clean when
temporarily hiding things while working)
*Delta referencing with internal and external aspects (the ability to
spit aspects of internal and external referencing is amazingly powerful)
*Constraint Comp (Maya, why you hide your offset after initial
constraint?!?!)
*Neutral pose (I know that I'm going to get some flak for this one and
that buffer nulls...erm locators...work but Neutral pose when used
correctly is wonderful)
*Proxy Parameters (so nice for the animators not to have to hunt and
peck like on Maya rigs)
*Pass & partition (instead of the ridiculous render layers)
....I know that I'm missing a bunch, but that's a quick fire off the top
of my head. I am not looking forward to using it again. I spent 5 years
trying to embrace it and it was like cuddling with a porcupine back in
the stone ages. But I will have to deal with it once more.
_____________________
Mirko Jankovic
stable non-destructive workflow
On 03/08/14 8:29, Luc-Eric Rousseau 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.
