Likewise, if you had asked me back in 1997 if Maya would still be around and the dominant player in 2017, I would have said no, and also,"god I hope not" (come to think of it, that may have actually happened). Anyway, it's 2017 and here we are.
What's more realistic these days is the ol' Indiana Jones swap out the gold monkey head for a bag of sand trick. Instead of introducing new products built from scratch, we're seeing incremental updates that shift an existing product over to whatever it was supposed to be. It takes more energy and time to do that, but it's a safer bet in the business space. There's more to new product than the technology - there's also sales concerns. You have to create a brand, educate the consumer, develop sales channels, etc... Even if the product is done right, there's no guarantee it will sell as we've seen with Softimage, Nichimen, Matador, and other quality products. What I would like to see more of is improvement in the individual user experience to be able to run with a creative idea and be able to bring it to fruition uninhibited. It seems like that aspect of user workflow has been lost. While today's software is vastly improved, more scalable, customizable, team oriented, etc...there are so many extra layers just to get started that I found it a big turn off to do personal work anymore. While recently going through some old stuff, I came across my first demo reel which I created using Softimage Creative Environment 2.62 in the early 90s. As I watched it I remembered the effort it took back then and started to think about how much time it would take to do that same project today. While the rendering would absolutely be faster (practically real time), the manually labor intensive operations such as setting key frames really haven't changed. In other words, the project would take about the same amount of time. Frankly, while I've had ideas I've wanted to pursue, the thought of using current tools became a deterrent as they don't feel natural. Today's tools are not inspiring as they require a certain controlled mindset just to be able to function in un-intuitive ways, and that mindset is in conflict with being creative where ideas just need to flow. I would like to see another Daniel Langlois type where inspiration to create drives the improvement of the tools, not engineering bravado. Matt Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2017 14:19:24 +0000 From: Andy Nicholas <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Getting close to a 3 year old EOL annyversary >the risk vs. reward proposition doesn't seem to be attracting enough new >players to the market. True for the moment, but things don't stand still. Do you think people will still be using Maya in 20 years time? (god I hope not!) Technology, hardware, and client's needs all change faster than we realise. So I have a more optimistic outlook, I think it's just a matter of time before someone somewhere comes up with something new that does it in a different way, or maybe just in a better way. ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
