Hi Maurice,
Since you brought this up, I thought I would throw in my 2 cents worth
and below is a quote from a friend of my who has been in the 3D industry
for over 25 years.
The reason I am upset about the killing of XSI is XSI was created from
the ground up and not pasted together like Maya as the statement below
states, so it is much superior
piece of software and it is the one that AD should built their future
on. Why would you continue to glue on add to a software that doesn't
have a good foundation..Maya.
It has to do with numbers and $, the install base of Maya is too great
be kill off in the short term.
Softimage/XSI took too long to come to market, schools like Sheridan
College and studios couldn't wait and make the switch to Maya and
Softimage/XSI never did recover from
it.
My 2 cents,
Leoung
The problem with Maya is that the software was combined together from 3 old
UNIX programs (Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer (in California), Thomson
Digital Image (TDI) Explore (in France) and Alias' Power Animator (in Toronto
Canada). The mergers occurred between 1993 and 1995, with Maya appearing in
1998. Most of the Maya development team left the company around 2002-2004
during the downward spiral of Alias to its final death (as we used to know of
Alias). The software really reached its zenith around 2002-2004 when everyone
used to buy it as an "alternative" to 3ds Max. It would be considered a fully
mature program, just like 3ds Max also reached its full maturity around 2005
and after its main developers all sold off their rights to the company
(similar to SketchUp reaching its maturity in 2005 when it was sold off by its
main developer).
On 13/03/2014 1:46 AM, Maurice Patel wrote:
I just want to give a bit of context on innovation at Autodesk because I know
it is not always easy to understand how the organization works and it would not
be fair on the talented and very hardworking engineers (that spend their days
(and sometimes nights) trying to innovate and improve their products) if I did
not try.
While it is fair to feel frustration with the business decisions of Autodesk, I
do believe that the Maya and 3ds Max engineers are as passionate about what
they do as the Softimage engineers. They care deeply about innovation and
making their products better for users. Before I continue I want to stress that
I do not mean to detract from the fact that Softimage was an innovative product
- it was. But I want to share my view on innovation in general, in May/3ds Max
in particular and its challenges in both
In general most attempts at innovation fail because, almost by definition,
innovation means taking high risks with little or no guarantee of return. Does
that mean we should stop trying? No, because occasionally you will succeed at
that success is worth it. One thing that probably cannot be said about Autodesk
is fear of failure.
We have invested significant resources into building new technologies from the
ground up: These include Toxik and Skyline and although these projects did not
pan out exactly as planned we truly believed they were worth the risk. The
whole database aspect of Toxik was a massive innovation attempt. It is easy to
look back in hindsight and laugh at these projects, but they all had
avant-garde ideas underlying them (collaboration and data management in Toxik -
run-time authoring in Skyline); and they were risks that appeared imminently
worth taking because we believed they could change the way visual effects and
games were created for the better. And then again, we also had some great
success with innovation in such areas as virtual production, reality capture
and simulation. And although we bought Naiad, Bifrost is a new and innovative
technology that simply leverages the expertise of the creators of Naiad.
Talented people like Marcus and Duncan always have new ideas on how to do
things better, and they have some great ideas about the future of procedural
effects technology.
Also, there is nothing wrong with buying production-proven technology and
making it into a feature or a product. The Foundry have built a great portfolio
doing just that. But production technology such as XGen while very powerful is
often deeply tied into a specific pipeline and typically not that user-friendly
- requiring significant development work to make usable by a broader audience
of artists. Does that mean we should not invest in doing these kind of things -
just because it doesn't seem cool? That is not really our criteria. The main
question is whether the end result will give our users a better product and
better capabilities.
Plug-in developers (as many here have pointed out) are a very essential part of
any product's development - they can focus on areas that they are expert in and
do things we might not think of doing (or have time to do). If they succeed it
would be cutting of our nose to spite our face not to consider integrating them
where makes sense for the product. But it is not all we do, it is just part of
the story.
As has been discussed Maya and 3ds Max are mature products and we are now
investing resources redesigning key areas of these products. The viewport was
one such example: building a new high performance interactive viewport was
always going to be a multi-year effort. And at first people though it was a
joke - because like most v1s (as some may remember from the first XSI) it did
not do half of what the old tech did - but what it did do it did 100 times
better. Now that it has matured this is more obvious but there were a lot of
skeptics at the time. The industry is going through massive change and we need
to do more faster. But we cannot do that across three applications. We have to
choose the ones that will benefit the greatest number of our users.
None of this alters the fact that Softimage is an innovative product that you
care passionately about and that is not my point. The point is that we are
continuing to take the risks we take because we are trying to do the best we
can to innovate. And will we have failures in the future - probably - but we
will probably have some great successes too.
maurice
Maurice Patel
Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134
What is confusing me is that AD says that they need to continue work on
inventions, they need devs to focus more on that. But lets be honest here, if
you look Maya development in last few releases, they did not invent much
(except Duncan work on nucleus and Viewport 2.0) but they were just buying
technologies, like Naiad, Nex (modeling toolset), now they added Unfold....
Were are those AD inventions at all, Skyline? AFAIK same situation is with
3dsMax, entire Graphite modeling toolset is some 3dsMax plugin (do not know
name) they bought. If they started something like Fabric, well I would
understand that.
