Doesn't seem unreasonable, considering their motivations apparently are not competitively or economically driven. If anything it's just a lot of Money for minimal development.
On 11 March 2014 02:49, Greg Punchatz <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Autodesk, > > My name is Greg Punchatz , Senior Creative Director at Janimation. I have > a proposal, or call it a counter offer on the proper way to retire > Softimage. > > First off, if you don't know who I am, I feel like I have been part of the > Softimage team since the beginning of Sumatra testing. I spent countless > hours creating content on my own time and letting Softimage use my personal > work as the sample scenes that make up a good deal of the Softimage > library. Because of this relationship I have many, many very dear friends > from all eras of Softimage. From the very top to the bottom of Softimage, I > was always welcomed as one of the family. > Our company, Janimation, was instrumental in helping promote XSI from > its earliest days from being its first customer demo at the XSI launch > party. To its final days giving Avid and Autodesk permission to use our > work for promoting Softimage launches. We did this because we truly believe > it is the best software on the planet for what we do.... and that's > commercial work. Softimage is lighter on its feet out of the box for the > kind of work the post production world is doing today in commercials. I > don't know a single CG supervisor that knows each package equally that > would rather take a commercial through a single package other than XSI. > > That being said, I believe Autodesk needs to be working on a completely > new 3d software package. I would hope that is the plan. I also understand > that if you are working towards moving us all to one package, Softimage by > market share alone is the logical one to first retire as it creates the > least income. > > So if it's time has truly come (even though I believe it is the most > complete out-of-the-box 3-D solution you provide currently) I think there > is a more elegant... let's say, a kinder gentler way for Softimage to be > put into retirement. You can continue to benefit from our subscription > support while we have enough time to move our existing pipeline to somthing > else. > > Please consider keepinng the current small development team you already > have for FOUR more years. > > With a single focus on these three things: opening up the SDK, > > working with 3rd party folk, > > and fixing long outstanding low-level requests. > > It's nothing but a win-win situation, you still get our money, and we get > to evalute Maya along the way. It's going to take a lot more than two years > for a lot of us to be able to make a tranistion completely. > > I'm not sure if Autodesk realizes this, but while the team in Singapore > was not making giant leaps technologically, they were on their way to > leaving Softimage in a much better state. They need a bit more time than > you are giving them. > > At the end of the four years, we can at least consider staying in the > Autodesk family because they listened to the users....gave us pleanty of > heads up of its EOL, and did thier darndest to make sure the last version > of softimage is the best version ever...XSI deserves that....we deserve > that ... and quite frankly I deserve that. > > Sincerely > > Greg Punchatz > > Senior Creative Director at Janimation ... >
