Greg, can I post your letter on Facebook?— Sent from Mailbox for iPhone On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:49 AM, Greg Punchatz <g...@janimation.com> 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 ...
