I think you're still in flame-the-autodesk-guy mode, peter, but I thought
I'd reply to your first post in this thread with some more hopefully
useful background.
sure - but what triggered my other mail was the patronizing "you don’t
really want this" mail you wrote.
It wasn’t informative, it wasn’t based on actual experience with those
tools - you were ditching them based on prejudice, and telling us we would
too.
You can have and voice your opinion just like anyone - but coming from the
administrator of this list, and an AD employee, such an opinionated mail on
a promising new collaboration between competitors, comes across all wrong.
The very idea of doing some work in one specialized software, having the
results running, integrated, in another, the main 3d platform - sounds very
promising. Many hurdles could be avoided by that. Whole departments
(especially so where it comes to FX) are confronted with the lack of, or
very flakey, interoperability between 3d software. They have to build
workflows based on hacky workarounds and import/export issues, trying to
create bridges on-production by developers or 3rd parties with very limited
access to the platforms. Actually I can hardly think of any production I've
been on that hasn’t been confronted with this to some degree.
A collaboration between the vendors of competing 3D software themselves to
create some kind of bridge, sounds like manna from heaven. It's entirely
speculation on my part that it would actually be any use - but dismissing
such an initiative is narrow minded at least.
Turning ICE into an engine, or deeply integrating Softimage into something
like Maya has been discussed for years...
So the solution obviously is to do a clean implementation that is
platform- and app- independent and that's what we were hoping to get with
project skyline but didn't get, in the end.
Sorry for the low blow, but there's been similar ideas for years, with a
substantial failed attempt, with all platforms, source and dev teams under
one roof.
Now two competitors, across different continents, are doing it. Are
announcing when they expect to deliver: this summer for HE in maya, and
before the end of the year for HE in C4D.
And you are belittling their initiative - saying if one had it, one wouldn't
actually want to use it? Am I taking things totally out of context?
I'll quote myself:
if anything it shows that bridges between software can be made and that
there is added value in combining platforms.
as opposed to ditching them.
now imagine one vendor having both the 3d applications and the procedural
environment under its own roof, with access to the development teams and
source code.
making such a bridge should be much easier.
but that would require some forward thinking.
this spring it’s getting obviously clear at which companies the forward
thinking is / is not happening.
I could have just said that first line.
But I cant help but see the writing on the wall. Lately many vendors are
taking initiative across boundaries, something I applaud, while the one
vendor that has it all under one roof, and could show all the others how
it's done, is making one incomprehensible move after another. Going who
knows where. With collateral damage.
I trimmed the whole part where Softimage is 12 million lines of code with
complicated dependencies, as it is besides the point. This is not about one
entire 3D software running as a plugin inside another - nobody is talking
about that. I sure wouldn't care for that.
Now if ICE is too integrated and too dependent on Softimage to make sense as
an engine running elsewhere - fine. That's unfortunate, but it's moot anyway
as AD has put one big cross over it.
And shame on me for believing in Softimage the past decade and a half as the
one with the bright future.
