Thanks Paul. I think everyone here respects all the hard work everyone put into ICE and that the whole team did not leave and many of the key people involved in ICE kept working on what eventually became Bifrost. Bifrost will be launched this week so people will get their first real glimpse of the technology. We are clear that we are using the procedural core to power liquids in the form of the rewritten Naiad solver using a generalist UI. We will be more open about the technology like we were in the FX guide article as the year goes on but will have any such discussion with customers under NDA as you know since we seem to keep the same circles these days.
cv/ ________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Paul Doyle [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset" Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at Ubisoft, so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE team and doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and Peter who were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil and Helge who built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's by no means the entire team. Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton of work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at AD or in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success because the whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent throughout the company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in XSI 7.0, it was a colossal team effort that is still the high point of my career. I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many talented people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to say anything but good things about them. What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody is really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a visual programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are the same because they both have a scene graph. There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many people feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the potential to become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the FX end of the pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested post-acquisition. It is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage is being EOL when award winning work is being produced with that toolset - and being told 'just wait till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten the pill. I understand the logic behind that, but you're asking people to have a lot of faith in something they haven't seen yet. Thanks, Paul On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is only for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?
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