Sadly, I have to accept that experience isn't coming back any time soon, if ever.
Currently Maya is the one that involves the least problems with animators, and it has OK rigging facilities and is expansible enough to cover what gaps are left. If you want any agility using it you pretty much have to put a ton of dev work into it front-loaded, or cope with a few plugins and pray they don't get discontinued (because unlike Soft every major version they will need to be recompiled). Performance is on the high end of single threading, but abysmal on the multi-threaded side of things. Nodes are actually quite easy to write, and usually not unpleasant, but again a major pain in the arse to thread out properly, which makes Splice an almost necessary companion for it in my eyes. So currently the only option is more or less to move to Maya if you can't afford proprietary (tons of it), and clench your teeth in hope H-Maya won't fondle camel balls, and rely on Fabric for performance and hope they deliver on atomic primitives in place of Autodesk some time soon. That's, obviously enough, a personal take on it. It's not even AL's take on it, don't think what I think or say has any reflection on what my employer does, please :) The scope, quality, quantity and type of work one does can swing that in any direction. Given I work (and therefore am interested in maintaining or evolving expertise) on either feature animation movies or creature work for live action ones large teams of animators and the ability to scale staff promptly are staples, and my choices are restricted, someone else might be in a better situation, someone else in a worse one. Soft was the perfect storm for the work I do. On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 8:20 AM, David Saber <[email protected]> wrote: > OK Raf, so what are the options left? What would you do? > David > > > On 2014-03-31 14:44, Raffaele Fragapane wrote: > >> Maya and Houdini simply don't provide that experience, and their learning >> curve to reach that level of fluidity is measured in years, while with Soft >> we had people who never used it literally flying around within a month. >> > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
