Hi,
unfortunately my english is not good enough to express my feelings and
thoughts about all this in a good and polite way and I think some mails
like the open letter from Alastair or the mails from Greg, Peter, Jean,
Sly, Daniel and so on express them much better than I could do.
I'm just an artist, a simple freelancer, so my opinion will not be from
interest for AD I'm sure. But nonetheless here are just some additional
thoughts from my side:
The main thing that surprises me about the decision from AD right now is
that they make this step (stopping SI) even before they can offer any
kind of alternative.
A personal view from the artist point of view:
A lot of my work is based on ICE and at the moment I'm simply not able
to see a real alternative. Will I take a look at Houdini? Sure. Will I
take a look at Modo? Sure. Blender? Sure. ... I will take a look at a
lot of software within the next months, maybe years, to hopefully find
something that will fit again like SI did until now. ICE gives me the
ability to create things I would not be able to do before. I'm not a TD,
I'm not able to write my own tools, I'm just a plain artist and so what
ICE was a pure revolution for me and still is a joy to work with. As
some of you maybe know I did some advertising material for the launch of
XSI 7. Although I didn't use ICE for these images because of the fact
that I didn't know ICE at all at this time I very quickly realised the
enormous power of it. Today I would do it with ICE for sure and it would
be much faster and more flexible and so I would have much more time to
work on the design and content and would also get more sleep during
production.
As an artist you spend a lot of time in finding and learning the tools
which maybe fit best to you or better said to your work. At a certain
point you than hopefully reach a level with the tools where you can care
more about design or creativity than about technical issues. But it's
maybe a very long and hard way to get there and if you are there, if you
can work with a tool without too much thinking about technical issues
(some will be there always and you never stop learning for sure) you are
very happy about this (at least I am). You are happy that you can focus
on the creative side of the work and not only on solving technical problems.
For sure you can learn a lot of things in another software rather fast
since the concepts are similar, but to get at a point where you are
really familar with a tool, where you really have a good feeling about
what you can do and what you better avoid is a long way. Moving a
spotlight around is one thing but finding the reason why your are
getting unexpected results for example is often a complete different story.
Who knows, maybe I will find a new tool which even fits better, maybe
not, but just at the moment I feel like downgraded from a senior to a
junior artist within some days. And what's even more important I'm
afraid that I have to spend my time again on just solving technical
issues instead on creating images.
I simply feel like an artist who get told that there will be no canvas,
brushes, oil colours any more soon and that I have to take a ball pen
and some finger colours instead to do the work I did before. But that's
just my personal point of view and it's for sure not from interest for AD.
A more profesional view from the freelancer point of view and maybe a
thought worth for AD:
In my opinion the reason why SI does so well in particular in the
advertising area is simply because it provides a solid toolset out of
the box but even more important: it's flexible and fast. And that is was
working in the advertising area is about. Flexibility and speed. You
have a lot of different tasks, changes, corrections whatever to solve in
sometimes extremly short timeframes. Often there is simply no time and
also no budget for a big TD team which provides you the basic tools you
need to do the work. It has to be right out of the box. And this is what
AD does not offer with maya right at the moment. It's maybe a good tool
for big pipelines/movie productions or whatever, it's maybe a good
framework for custom tools, I don't know, but I doubt it is a good
solution for doing quick and creative productions where you maybe have
to rethink or rebuild a concept within an evening. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Alone the passes and partions system from SI is pure gold in these kind
of advertising productions. ICE is an option to create stuff where you
normally would need a bigger TD team and the accordingly time for
development. Or you can just use it to fix some smaller issues in the
last moment on top of your operator stack. The overall workflow of SI
simply fits in many areas of these kind of productions. So I'm really
afraid for all these innovative and great shops which deliver
outstanding work in short turnarounds and within a heavy competetion
situation. During the last years and due to for example additional tools
like Arnold or the ones from Eric, Helge and so on the quality of
advertising productions done with SI reaches a very high level in my
opinion. Small shops or small teams are able to create really
outstanding work.
As Daniel from Sehsucht stated out: "How can Autodesk get the timing so
wrong?"
You simply leave them with a big gap and no solution to fill it at the
moment.
So in the end, I will use SI for as long as possible (at least as an
artist) and hope others will do so also. It's one of the best and most
productive tools I've ever used for my work and maybe will still be
within the next years.
Best regards
Tim Borgmann
