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 ...
