Replying Inline as well. :)
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.
Thanks. As per the NEX devs, is it intended only to keep them on until
integration is done or are you guys thinking that their strategies can
be useful in the future and plan to have them work on other areas? In
the same vain as the core modernization, will there be other things
that may come up that prevent you from working on the various tool sets
much like the core modernization has?
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.
I know you can't tell me, but do you see where there are valid
concerns? We could still be 2 years away right now from being able to
use and integrate that new toolset into our pipeline. The whole initial
plan was to have everyone transitioning off of Softimage within the
next 2 years, then AD backpedaled on that. What would have happened if
you guys stuck to your original plan? There would have been a huge gap
left.
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?
Yes it is, even more reason why I don't need one of those application's
glued together within itself. Pipelines are complex enough let alone
having to fight within one application to have it do what I want and
work productively at a good pace. There is a difference in integrating
Open Source projects than just buying tech, integrating it, and letting
it rot. The OpenSource projects continue to get dev from outside of AD
and evolve.
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.
Not sure why Fabric is getting dragged into this... again. But what
novel programming methodology are you speaking of? Surely not node
based programming.
In the end, all I'm trying to illustrate here is why the vast majority
of Softimage users have little confidence in AD. If you want to move
forward and convince us you really need to be honest about the history
and put a tremendous effort into changing the way things have been done
at AD in the past on all fronts. Not just updating bits and pieces and
hitting bullet points.
Personally, if Maya didn't have the market share and be the only
product on the market that had the amount of decent rigging and
animation tools it currently has, I would be jumping off the AD ship
ASAP. I don't like the way AD works overall. However, since you have
the market cornered in these respects, I have no other option. If the
AD mentality doesn't make a big shift, and another solution comes
along, you're going to find yourselves with a lot of people jumping
ship. I wouldn't take it for granted.
Eric T.
