Hi Paul I secretly hope you have confcalls or chats with the other 3rd party developers ( you know who you are ), about the recent announcement and changes it will cause – testing the waters if there is some positive initiative that could come out of this. It’s a bleak outlook long term, but perhaps also an opportunity short to mid term?
I imagine many users are going to be moving – but some are going to dig trenches, and stay on (the last stable version of) Softimage for while and beef it up all they can. Crowd funding, people looking to 3rd party initiatives to extend the lifetime of Softimage. Perhaps using a non-evolving Softimage as front-end / host application for evolving technologies – almost like keeping the beloved interface, but little by little replacing the guts with external tech. If anyone I guess Fabric are best placed to think along those terms. Care to comment? From: Paul Doyle Sent: Friday, March 14, 2014 2:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Proposal for TDs and Artist - Expand Softimage ( and other ) tools Just FYI we have a muscle system coming for Fabric in the next couple of months and it will be accessible via the Splice API within Softimage and will be customizable/extensible. On 14 March 2014 09:03, Nicolas Esposito <[email protected]> wrote: Yes, I thought that they might accept specific workflow tools and I think that many artists do that as well ( kind of TD for hiring temporarely ) The main focus would be to do that not as a single element, but the request would be asked ( and founded ) by a group of people who are interested in some specific tools The TD would be happy so will we :-) 2014-03-14 12:07 GMT+01:00 olivier jeannel <[email protected]>: The idea is fantastic. Though, I think asking this directly to Eric Mootz or Leonard Koch is already possible (if I'm not totaly wrong) Le 14/03/2014 11:26, Arman Sernaz a écrit : In order to keep things well organized, a special web site which is dedicated for this purpose may be a good idea. I'm willing to contribute as much as I can to kickstart this project. On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Nika Ragua <[email protected]> wrote: i`m very interested - because i somehow not damanded as i wish to be ))) ahahaha and i love to do this kind of stuff, yet i`m visual programming limited - do not want to mess with code - so ICE, VEX, FE when they do it. aaah, better late than never 2014-03-14 13:51 GMT+04:00 Nicolas Esposito <[email protected]>: Hi guys, This is maybe not the best time to write about this, but maybe something good could be done about this idea. Looking around si-community and here as well I saw a lot of topics regarding "How to" and "Help me with" in order to achieve a goal. This is perfectly fine and on both communities there are lots of talented people willing to give advices, share compounds and make tutorials about it. There are some specific things which are not so simple to develop, and most of the time you can't get the thing you're doing to work, so you end up going nowhere, or switch to another software you know already do what you're looking for ( if there is one ). So, with this in mind my proposal is quite "simple": Setup small found raise groups, using kickstarter, in order to finance a TD or a talented artist to develop a custom tool which allows you to reach your ( ours ) goal. The TD look at the request, setup the minimum amount on money needed to develop that tool, then the fund raise campaign begin. Lets start with an example - A muscle system within Softimage: Most of you saw the Peta commercial and the behind the scene and saw the amazing thing The Mill did using Softimage; also recently Paul Smith did a demo of his muscle system which looks pretty damn cool; Vorlex developed his plugin using ICE, and those are just few examples. - VFX done with ICE: Exocortex already sells amazing plugins, but lets say I need specific VFX in my shot and I need someone who's capable to create what I need. To put it simple would be the answer to "I don't know how to do this, can someone do this for me if I pay?" The found raising could be applied not only to Softimage ( even because I'm not sure how many TDs want to create tools for a Software which is going to be left out in a couple of years ), but extend this idea to other software, for example Fabric Engine, which has huge potentials and lots of people right now are really interested into this framework. So, what are your thoughts about it? Cheers Nicolas -- www.lhvfx.com
