Sorry I am reading through a lot of the posts. Answers inline
________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Eric Thivierge [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 6:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset" Hey Chris, A few questions: 1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya specifically, who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or responsive to their user base as history has shown. I can give you a specific example. Skin painting. How many years has it been that it has been in its current form, and your user base asking for it's interaction model and tool set cleaned up and extended. Yet here we are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten no attention. It's been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing from AD. Same with the blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the various threads on this list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need a developer that actually listens and turns around results quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not even address it. - As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last few years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize the workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles and not be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the fx that are the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on was FX and modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept the developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology correctly into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing, retopology, base modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and broad/ We are looking at making big progress in animation and lighting/rendering very shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and we are looking at building back up the pace with Maya. 2. What is a generalist UI? - There are hundreds of thousands of users in the 3D market doing everything from film, tv, games, advertising, graphic design, visualization, etc... . A generalist is someone who uses more than two areas of the DCC (modeling, animation, fx, lighting) . A vast majority of these users want to use the out of the box UI and presets and less than 10% of the overall user base scripts (whether visually or not). So a generalist UI is the interface intended for the use case where a user wants to interact with a set of menus, editors, viewport gizmos to achieve a given effect. 3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be released in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is accessible? (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked). It's known that with Maya releases and new features that the first version is never production ready. You could say that for most new features in all software, but when we think about it, if we hypothetically say the node graph is another year off, that first release won't be usable and so that puts us to the next year's release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have had to transitioned off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. So at that point we have more or less zero time to get acquainted with the new system and integrate it into the pipeline and build tools around it. That's all with the wishful thinking everything goes to plan. -You know I can't tell you that but since you have seen the graph with your own eyes you at least know it is there. Anyone under NDA can get all of the information here. 4. Let's not kid ourselves. AD is a company who for the majority of their major new features lately, acquires technology and integrates it. NEX is the most recent to come to mind. In a larger scale sort of way that is exactly what you did with Softimage. Bought it for the devs and are now trying to integrate the technology. How is this supposed to bring confidence to users who need to use Maya? It's just a bunch of plug-ins that were bought and slapped together. There doesn't seem to be a unified workflow thought out of how these all need to play together and thus gives you a very fragmented workflow. Not to mention, what happens when there is a year where you don't acquire a software? Does Maya not get a new feature that release? Isn't your pipeline a collection of applications glued together with a unified workflow or intent? We are clear that Maya needs a UI/workflow overhaul to bring coherency to many of the workflows and there are tools in Softimage like Gator which show the power of such an approach. In this release we had several features that were developed in house like Geodesic Voxel Binding and the whole viewport effort was built on technology entirely developed by Autodesk. So Eric by that logic are you saying that putting effort into Ptex support, UV tiling, Alembic, Open EXR 2.0, python, etc... are not good things? 5. Lastly, who are these other key people who remained at AD that worked on ICE? It may give us reassurance to know what good hands we've been left in. (Not really expecting an answer here because it'd be dangerous for AD to list their employees, but it's more the point that we don't know who these other key people are and thus, have no reason to be confident in them.) -I will ask those employees if they want to have their names listed but I can understand if they don't want to do so. ICE was derived from a very novel programming methodology that had fallen out of favor and which is why Fabric can start up with no harm of IP infringement on ICE. I have many names over the years mentioned as key contributors of ICE and wanted to make sure that the fact that many people who worked at Soft still work at Autodesk and that key people from the ICE team work at Autodesk and on Bifrost was understood as well. Thanks, -------------------------------------------- Eric Thivierge http://www.ethivierge.com On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Chris Vienneau <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face to face and it is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for the thought as it is consistent with what other people have said. cv/
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