Ok part II. Toxik and Matchmover were not part of the DCC nuclear arms race so they developed in relative vacuums and because they ran on multiple platforms a lot of code was written just to do basic things as there were very few libraries available. The only real big expense there was codecs and in the free versions we have had to turn off some codecs. To keep up, Softimage got features by integrating third party technology and those agreements are only for commercial versions of the software. Given they were not the market leader they often paid more for technology.
For Softimage, here are the big things that are third party libraries that are part of the commercial offering: * Mental ray * Syflex * Shave and a hair cut * Physx * Lagoa This is just touching the surface as there are libraries we license for all sorts of things like codecs, importers, linux emulation, etc... . If we wanted to do what we did with Toxik you would have to remove all those features above, no ability to render any video longer than 5 seconds, and no linux. This is a massive code base requiring at least 4-5 developers plus support just to keep it running and maintaining and to give you an idea the lines of code in Soft are about 10 times that of Toxik and 20 times that of Matchmover. Open source is not an option given how much code that is in Maya and 3dsmax is in Softimage. We could not release enough of it to be worth putting a team around. Someone here referred to the linked in numbers of 3dsmax, Maya, and Softimage and it comes down to 25000 for max, 25000 for maya and 1000 for Softimage. Since linked in does not usually capture Asia and Africa this is more of a north American/European view but it gives you a sense of the overall relative sizes that Carl referred to. Just to give you another idea of scale there are over 1 m trial downloads of 3dsmax and Maya per year and hundreds of thousands of students who get to download and use every piece of software we make for free. We track student usage very heavily and they are split with max and maya with soft less than 5%. That is with no marketing and no prompting. Now there are exceptions but the amount of young people that have used a pirated copy of max or maya is huge and that was due to Autodesk investing heavily in early education as far as twenty years ago. So two years of paying support to all these companies and maintaining a team big enough to deal with all the bugs, escalations, and fixes is a big commitment dollar wise and a far better send off than what XSI's brother DS got last year. We respect what XSI brought to this industry and we are working with all of our customers who want to work with us to help with the transition. Many of the larger customers had already begun this transition a couple of years ago and they might take a few more as multi-year projects work their way through the system. Schools have a much more tough transition and the main group who has the biggest group to make is the group of freelancers who either ran their own businesses or supported the larger business with contract work. The big customers are happy we changed the policy for keeping soft licenses alive as that covers older projects but they are full blast into planning their next moves whether that be with Autodesk or The Foundry or Side FX or all of it mashed together. I am glad we have had some constructive threads on what we can do to make Maya better for everyone (Not just softimage users) and we have to show progress fast. We have enough bandwidth to handle unique cases and a lot of private threads are going on to deal with them so Maurice and I are the conduits. I am not a suit. I was in the DCC wars where we fought to have 3dsmax and then Maya switch back and forth vs Softimage and I always respected their spirit given the odds against them and the bum hand they were dealt by being part of Avid. I will not stop working to help out those that want our help. Cv/ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Emilio Hernandez Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass Thank you for taking the time to response Chris. This is all clear to me as I bought a couple of Digital Studio stations at version 2.0 while it was still Microsoft. If it wasn't because they were dependable on the Intergraph video board that eventually got fried after 15 years, and they lacked of HD support, I will still be using them. Those turnkey systems were the ones that kept me out of the Inferno, Smoke, etc. solutions more expensive by far than the DS solution. I agree that Avid did not a lousy but a terrible job with the Softimage asset as they were running like headless chickens towards anywhere but where the useres needed, and that is when Final Cut got in. I understand where Autodesk is going, nothing I can do about it, even though I tried far beyond this list in ways that this is not the arena to talk about it. Still in your response I can't read the answer of: Why Autodesk is not willing to continue ship Softimage 2015, unsupported with an open SDK along Maya/MAX 2020? Maurice said because the inherent costs. You answered because of Autodesk wants to focuse in developing Bifrost or whatever new technology Autodesk is bringing. What is that inherent cost? Thinking of some... 1. Packaging Softimage into the Maya/MAX download, self extract for each new year release. 2. Server space for holding a larger file. 3. Keep the SI online help file In which way Softimage will drive your development resources away from focusing into the new tools if there is no one that moves a single line of code? I not doing so, you started to loose clients already... So what is costing more? At this moment seeing several users of Softimage becoming ex-clients of Autodesk at a faster pace, even faster than I think Autodesk expected. I seriously would reconsider the no Softimage policy after April 2016. Two years of uncertainty of what will be Autodesk decision... It is a long time. By then, I don't think that you will be able to get back what you are loosing now. But anyway, this is thing how they are now. And that is the decision of Autodesk on Softimage for now. To bad to end in an "Only time will tell..." statement. Thank you again.
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