Great point, Arvid. I hadn't even thought about how this will effect my bidding process.
Over the years I have refined that process (guesswork) so that I could reliably not lose billable time on a project. My un-billable time was kept to a minimum because I knew the process so well, and it was reliable. In the past (before Softimage) my estimates were often shredded because of some unknown "hitch" in a untried process. Some render bug that has me totally redoing scenes a different way. Or worse... something doesn't work as advertised. I will have to keep this in mind while figuring out what to do, in two years. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Arvid Björn <[email protected]> wrote: > Short-term projects, usually stretching from days up to a month or two, > mostly visual effects work and packshot-type projects. Softimage just > scales so incredibly well between our most advanced and our tiniest > projects. There's literally no job to big or too small for it. It all comes > down to it being easy to use while not compromising on how powerful it is. > Anything that needs a lot of pipeline tools to run isn't as suitable for > the tiny projects, which is why Modo becomes interesting for that, and > Houdini becomes interesting for solving some of the more advanced problems > that we've been able to work out in ICE so far. > > The edge we'd be gaining with Bifrost is very small, since everyone will > have access to the technology, and it's frankly not something we need to do > very often, ie. fluid simulation. The edge we'll be* losing *is the > ability to reliably estimate jobs when forced to use tools that are much > less familiar to us, and often more difficult, or less powerful at doing > what we do the most, which is render wrangling and ICE magic. If XSI didn't > have great modelling, it wouldn't be a super-big problem, but not having > ICE will be. It has transformed a lot of small shops everywhere to > powerhouses of efficiency. Should a company of our size really have to > employ specialized technical directors and riggers just to get through an > average project? It looks like it, and appearently I've been living in a > dream. > > Such a beautiful workflow down the drain. > > > > > > On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Paul Griswold < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Mentioned in another thread. Not everyone works in movies or games. >> What area do you work in and why is Softimage the best choice for what you >> do? >> >> I'm in commercials & occasionally VFX for films. >> >> I am always working on tight deadlines & it's almost always a mix of >> people using After Effects, Modo, Nuke, Fusion, and Softimage. Softimage >> is the Swiss Army Knife of 3D and it allows me to switch gears quickly and >> efficiently. >> >> There is nothing Autodesk offers that can replace it currently and I do >> not have faith that in 2 years they will have anything better. I intend on >> moving away from Autodesk products. >> >> >> -Paul >> >> > -- Best Regards, * Stephen P. Davidson* *(954) 552-7956* [email protected] *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* - Arthur C. Clarke <http://www.3danimationmagic.com>
