date:20140315

All that "we are fully developing Maya so it will be great just you see"is
pure PR crap.
>From couple sides is heard that bifrost which is one big argument on their
side is still too young to be usable. It is not even full grown fluid
simulation and to replace ICE it will take years.. even after, by AD's
plan, SI is long gone they will still be not near the level of ICE.  Not to
mention all other aspects of Maya workflow which are S wrong that won/t
get to table at all for years to come.

If they are so confident in Maya development they should let people see it
for them self and move by own choice.
But having whole road map so closed and under all NDAs is selling a cat in
the bag. You have no idea where is Maya going at all what is planned and
WHEN it will be available.
That is big pile of crap if you have to plan transition.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:56 AM, skuby  wrote:

> The above has a severe typo:  Should read:   With that, I don't think
> Autodesk will want to encourage new users to Softimage, so not selling new
> licenses directly makes sense for them, when they want to be
> selling/promoting Maya and presumably Max licenses.
>
> sorry, my error
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:52 PM, skuby  wrote:
>
>>
>> *Martin furik...@gmail.com *
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *With SI retired you can't buy licenses for SI anymore, it doesn't come
>> with Max or Maya, you can only use the licenses you have right now. You
>> should add "keep selling SI licenses" to your idea. MartinSent from my
>> iPhone""*
>>
>> Thing is, Softimage IS now depreciated, like it or not, no petition will
>> likely change that, that should be clear, -it's not going to move forward
>> like it used to and it will eventually fully die.  With that, I don't think
>> Autodesk will want to encourage new users to Softimage, so not selling new
>> licenses directly makes sense for them to continue selling Softimage
>> directly, when they want to be selling/promoting Maya and presumably Max
>> licenses, -(yes it makes sense to us but not for them and we aren't going
>> to win that one).  But, to keep it updated with FBX/Crosswalk and Mental
>> Ray is a great transition boon for those interested in migrating to either
>> Maya or Max.
>>
>> This will allow people in the middle of a transition to easily return to
>> familiar territory and get work done fast and clean and go back and forth
>> with ease, at their own pace as they re-learn all of their skills as well
>> as totally new features in their new package of choice.
>>
>> Two years, now until 2016, may very well not be enough time for some
>> studios/freelancers if they are buried in much needed work and it may not
>> be so easy to get all of the functionality out of the interfaces they are
>> accustomed to integrated into Max/Maya in such a short time at a level that
>> would be acceptable to all users.  This keeps Soft development in a
>> depreciated state, but gives a little bit more growing room than the 2016
>> deadline which is rightfully ambitious.  And none of this encourages new
>> Softimage users, which is I suspect a quality they are wisely after given
>> their total gameplan.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:17 PM, skuby  wrote:
>>
>>> Ok you are very right on the SDK/Plug-in front, I really didn't think
>>> about it like that.  However, I think that dominated your response and your
>>> accidentally throwing out the baby with the bathwater in effect.  (without
>>> question, no matter what, Softimage is depreciated but I'm trying to get
>>> the best effect out of a transition here)
>>>
>>> Soft, as is, without plug-ins or new features, is STILL usable for
>>> games, movies, commercials and more.  Removing it as a stand-alone product,
>>> and packing it SOLEY as a tie in bonus with Maya, Max or any Suite, ONLY
>>> further promotes the packages AD wants to keep alive while appeasing the
>>> small studios (Japan/Vancouver/etc.) and freelance users of Softimage quite
>>> a bit better than just a 2016 cutoff.  By keeping alive Crosswalk/FBX
>>> functionality for some time longer, -modeling, animation, UV, rigging, etc.
>>> can all still be done as is in Soft and if needed, easily sent over to
>>> Maya, as that features work right now between those two packages quite well
>>> (a little trickier with max as you don't get all the automated 2-way
>>> crosswalk features last I checked but you still have FBX handy and a TD can
>>> easily work with that).  Keeping up to date Mental Ray, allows existing
>>> pipe-lines that go in the other direction, or use Softimage entirely, able
>>> to keep up and extend the transition period beyond 2016.  Now, remember,
>>> all the while anyone primarily using Softimage with these Crosswalk/Mental
>>> Ray add-ons, are also going to have full up to date copies of at least one
>>> of the  2 non-depreciated softwares that AD wants to continue  and actively
>>> promote at this time, which is only going to increase AD's revenue by
>>> ensuring many

Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Matt Lind

I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  What you have to understand 
is Autodesk doesn't want customers running concurrent sessions off a single 
license as in a Maya/Max and a Softimage session running in parallel.  that 
would effectively allow double the users to work while paying only half the 
price.  eg; if a customer has 50 licenses it would allow 50 maya + 50 softimage 
users to run concurrently, but pay for only 50 licenses.  Some studios are 
ethical and wouldn't do something like that, but as someone mentioned just the 
other day, other studios in lesser affluent places might not be so ethical.  
Even if Softimage were included for free, it still consumes some amount of 
resources to ensure it still installs and runs as advertised.
 
I agree in principle Autodesk should continue Softimage until one of their 
other products can replace the functionality.  If anything, that's the ball 
that was dropped in this whole debacle.  Of all companies on the planet, you'd 
think the one with all the accumulated experience of all the products that went 
through this process in the 1990's would know better and be more prepared than 
anyone else.  But what's done is done.

The problem with the theory of disgruntled users leaving and hurting Autodesk 
is that the Softimage user base isn't large enough to really be missed on 
Autodesk's bottom line.  think about it.  Only 8% of Autodesk's revenue comes 
from media and entertainment.  Of that 8%, about 5% of it is from Softimage 
(0.4% total) - and that might be a generous number.  For every $100 Autodesk 
earns in revenue, 40 cents comes from Softimage.  Take out expenses and you're 
looking at much less.  

I don't remember the actual number, but I thought somebody recently reported 
Autodesk earned $392 million last year.  So, let's run that through the 
calculator:

   $392,000,000 USD * 0.004 = $1,568,000 Softimage gross revenue

I don't know what 10 developers in Singapore get paid, so I'll use conservative 
values based on USA rates:
 
   10 * $100,000 = $1,000,000
 
subtract expenses from revenue:
 
   $1,568,000 - $1,000,000 = $568,000

 I don't know what marketing of Softimage costs, but I'm willing to bet 
$568,000 USD doesn't go very far for a product that needs a lot of attention to 
survive.  Even if tripled, that's still lean.  See the problem?

One item of note that probably hasn't been brought up in discussion yet is that 
Softimage has been included in the Max and Maya suites the past few years, so 
some sales of Max and Maya may actually be Softimage sales in a certain light - 
I know of at least one studio where that is the case.  In that scenario 
Softimage is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to accounting.

I mourn the loss of Softimage as much as anybody having dedicated 21+ years of 
my life to it both as professional user and former owner of a Softimage 
certified training center.  Sometimes life sucks.
 
Matt

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread skubyd

I agree completely, which is why I’m hoping that if we all band together and 
ask for this small set of concessions, it will help us all make wiser and 
easier transitions where-ever we may end up.


you can rent or own either Max or Maya or some larger Suite and with any of 
these, you would automatically get the now depreciated Softimage 2015 package 
for legacy/pipeline purposes and uses.


Full development of the now Depreciated Softimage stops, as planned in 2016, 
however we still continue to get some additional years of FBX/Crosswalk support 
as well as regular Mental Ray updates which will go hand in hand with Crosswalk.



That's it, no more we can really hope to ask for considering how this was all 
presented without much of a choice or say, but that little bit right there, 
might be a lot more than it sounds like in terms of what it can do for all 
current Softimage users, as they transition to Maya, Max or elsewhere 
completely -and Autodesk will make some bucks in the process and hopefully keep 
more users in their AD family than they likely will otherwise.


I hope that's all stated clear enough now.  I know everyone, myself included 
will want way more (personally I’d axe Max and Maya and just keep Softimage but 
that's unrealistic), but given the way this all went down, we are lucky if we 
get the above concessions, and if future Maya development goes smoothly (aka. 
the new Maya Ice is good, they replace the dated Hypershade with a system akin 
to the Softimage Render Tree, they add some love to weight painting and rigging 
and animation tools, and they make realistic steps to making Maya a fully 
usable and coherent/streamlined package out of the box, interface wise with 
rich keyboard and mouse interactions like Softimage has) well then by all 
means, you can call me a happy Maya user in time, at my own pace.  But you are 
100% correct that this is all subjective, it’s all PR, it’s not here and right 
now and it’s not the near foreseeable future until proven otherwise, that's why 
I’m asking for the small 2 point concession above to make things better for all 
of us and I hope you will all join me in asking these small things from 
Autodesk as a professional courtesy for the hours/years, the schooling and 
money we all put in to learning these skills and loving this software.


I don’t think it’s too much to ask, but I think we all have to ask.




Sent from Windows Mail





From: Mirko Jankovic
Sent: ‎Saturday‎, ‎March‎ ‎15‎, ‎2014 ‎3‎:‎26‎ ‎PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com





All that "we are fully developing Maya so it will be great just you see"is pure 
PR crap.
From couple sides is heard that bifrost which is one big argument on their side 
is still too young to be usable. It is not even full grown fluid simulation and 
to replace ICE it will take years.. even after, by AD's plan, SI is long gone 
they will still be not near the level of ICE.  Not to mention all other aspects 
of Maya workflow which are S wrong that won/t get to table at all for years 
to come.




If they are so confident in Maya development they should let people see it for 
them self and move by own choice.

But having whole road map so closed and under all NDAs is selling a cat in the 
bag. You have no idea where is Maya going at all what is planned and WHEN it 
will be available. 

That is big pile of crap if you have to plan transition.




On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:56 AM, skuby  wrote:


The above has a severe typo:  Should read:   With that, I don't think Autodesk 
will want to encourage new users to Softimage, so not selling new licenses 
directly makes sense for them, when they want to be selling/promoting Maya and 
presumably Max licenses.
 


sorry, my error






On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:52 PM, skuby  wrote:







Martin furik...@gmail.com




 

 

 










With SI retired you can't buy licenses for SI anymore, it doesn't come with Max 
or Maya, you can only use the licenses you have right now. You should add "keep 
selling SI licenses" to your idea.

Martin
Sent from my iPhone""




Thing is, Softimage IS now depreciated, like it or not, no petition will likely 
change that, that should be clear, -it's not going to move forward like it used 
to and it will eventually fully die.  With that, I don't think Autodesk will 
want to encourage new users to Softimage, so not selling new licenses directly 
makes sense for them to continue selling Softimage directly, when they want to 
be selling/promoting Maya and presumably Max licenses, -(yes it makes sense to 
us but not for them and we aren't going to win that one).  But, to keep it 
updated with FBX/Crosswalk and Mental Ray is a great transition boon for those 
interested in migrating to either Maya or Max.




This will allow people in the middle of a transition to easily return to 
familiar territory and get work done fast and clean and go back and forth with 
ease, at their own pace as they re-learn all of their skills

Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer

2014-03-15 Thread Bk

To add to that, Autodesk had a responsibility to continue Softimage the 
phenomenon, including what the customers had grown used to regarding updates 
and marketing.

By assigning you a tiny budget, which which you could do nothing of 
significance; in my book that puts them wholly to blame.



On 15 Mar 2014, at 03:35, Morten Bartholdy  wrote:

> Well put, John. My sentiments exactly.
>  
> Morten
>  
> 
> Den 15. marts 2014 kl. 01:24 skrev John Clausing : 
> 
> > Maurice, 
> > 
> > "Well if there is someone to blame for that it was me not Autodesk" 
> > 
> > I'm not sure what to say about that..are you falling on your sword to 
> > protect AD? I don't suppose protecting AD is even possible to us on the 
> > list... 
> > 
> > I'm devastated by the loss of a software I've used for 20 years now, but I 
> > can only imagine how difficult it must be for those of you who have now 
> > lost their positions at SoftimageMark S. Comes to mind. 
> > 
> > I wonder, having said that if you (AD) even understand the knock on effects 
> > of your decision, or even care. My well being and that of my family are 
> > being put in jeopardy by the demise of the vehicle that pays my bills. An 
> > expertise honed over decades. And for what? Because Soft is inferior? 
> > Hardly. Were it to make sense, from any perspective, it would be easier to 
> > take, but some off handed comment about "bifrost", and "we care about our 
> > customers" is on it's face just not true. 
> > 
> > That you are the sole heir of a position that makes you listen to us, the 
> > aggrieved, speaks not only to your strength, but to the cowardice of the 
> > management of AD. 
> > 
> > I'm sure you're a good man, many here have said so, but comments like the 
> > one you just made about it "being your fault", do you a dis-service and 
> > ignore the truth. 
> > 
> > With respect, 
> > 
> > John 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Sent from my iPhone 
> > 
> > > On Mar 14, 2014, at 8:05 PM, Maurice Patel  
> > > wrote: 
> > > 
> > > Well if there is someone to blame for that it was me not Autodesk. I ran 
> > > Product Marketing for M&E (recently moved into a new role) and we did 
> > > focus on ways to promote Softimage given our budgets and business 
> > > priorities. It was just not realistic to expect the same level of 
> > > coverage given the sheer volume of business driven by the other products. 
> > > 
> > > Maurice 
> > > 
> > > Maurice Patel 
> > > Autodesk : Tél:  514 954-7134 
> > > 
> > > From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
> > > [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Paul 
> > > Griswold 
> > > Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 1:27 PM 
> > > To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com 
> > > Subject: Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer 
> > > 
> > > I suppose I should have phrased that "There has literally never been a 
> > > single public "champion" of Softimage at a decision-making level." 
> > > 
> > > Was there ever a SIGGRAPH, usergroup meeting, or anything of the sort 
> > > where anyone with any sort of authority at Autodesk called for more 
> > > exposure, more marketing, more anything for Softimage? 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Bradley Gabe 
> > > mailto:witha...@gmail.com>> wrote: 
> > > 
> > > Since the day Autodesk bought Softimage, it's been one cruel joke.  There 
> > > has literally never been a single "champion" of Softimage at a 
> > > decision-making level, right?  It's been the red-headed step-child since 
> > > the moment of the acquisition. 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure this statement is entirely true. The senior VP of M&E at the 
> > > time of the purchase was Marc Petite, originally from Softimage and one 
> > > of the driving forces behind the early development of XSI. When he 
> > > stepped down not long ago, I believe he was replaced by Marc Stevens, the 
> > > former president of Softimage at the time of the acquisition. 
> > > 
> > > 
> > >  
> >

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread skuby

*Matt Lind speye...@hotmail.com  via

listproc.autodesk.com
 *
*3:46 PM (8 minutes ago)*
*to softimage*

*I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  What you have to
understand is Autodesk doesn't want customers running concurrent sessions
off a single license as in a Maya/Max and a Softimage session running in
parallel.  that would effectively allow double the users to work while
paying only half the price.  eg; if a customer has 50 licenses it would
allow 50 maya + 50 softimage users to run concurrently, but pay for only 50
licenses.  Some studios are ethical and wouldn't do something like that,
but as someone mentioned just the other day, other studios in lesser
affluent places might not be so ethical.  Even if Softimage were included
for free, it still consumes some amount of resources to ensure it still
installs and runs as advertised. I agree in principle Autodesk should
continue Softimage until one of their other products can replace the
functionality.  If anything, that's the ball that was dropped in this whole
debacle.  Of all companies on the planet, you'd think the one with all the
accumulated experience of all the products that went through this process
in the 1990's would know better and be more prepared than anyone else.  But
what's done is done.The problem with the theory of disgruntled users
leaving and hurting Autodesk is that the Softimage user base isn't large
enough to really be missed on Autodesk's bottom line.  think about it.
Only 8% of Autodesk's revenue comes from media and entertainment.  Of that
8%, about 5% of it is from Softimage (0.4% total) - and that might be a
generous number.  For every $100 Autodesk earns in revenue, 40 cents comes
from Softimage.  Take out expenses and you're looking at much less.  I
don't remember the actual number, but I thought somebody recently reported
Autodesk earned $392 million last year.  So, let's run that through the
calculator:   $392,000,000 USD * 0.004 = $1,568,000 Softimage gross
revenueI don't know what 10 developers in Singapore get paid, so I'll use
conservative values based on USA rates:10 * $100,000 =
$1,000,000 subtract expenses from revenue:$1,568,000 - $1,000,000 =
$568,000I don't know what marketing of Softimage costs, but I'm willing
to bet $568,000 USD doesn't go very far for a product that needs a lot of
attention to survive.  Even if tripled, that's still lean.  See the
problem?One item of note that probably hasn't been brought up in discussion
yet is that Softimage has been included in the Max and Maya suites the past
few years, so some sales of Max and Maya may actually be Softimage sales in
a certain light - I know of at least one studio where that is the case.  In
that scenario Softimage is getting the short end of the stick when it comes
to accounting.I mourn the loss of Softimage as much as anybody having
dedicated 21+ years of my life to it both as professional user and former
owner of a Softimage certified training center.  Sometimes life
sucks.""*

21+ years of development experience you have and you don't even have the
simplest faith in Autodesk that they can allow Soft and Maya to run on one
single machine at the same time for crosswalk purposes but not allow them
to run separately on two machines at the same time?  ok, sure

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 3:33 PM,  wrote:

>  I agree completely, which is why I'm hoping that if we all band together
> and ask for this small set of concessions, it will help us all make wiser
> and easier transitions where-ever we may end up.
>
>
>1. you can rent or own either Max or Maya or some larger Suite and
>with any of these, you would automatically get the now depreciated
>Softimage 2015 package for legacy/pipeline purposes and uses.
>2. Full development of the now Depreciated Softimage stops, as planned
>in 2016, however we still continue to get some additional years of
>FBX/Crosswalk support as well as regular Mental Ray updates which will go
>hand in hand with Crosswalk.
>
>
> That's it, no more we can really hope to ask for considering how this was
> all presented without much of a choice or say, but that little bit right
> there, might be a lot more than it sounds like in terms of what it can do
> for all current Softimage users, as they transition to Maya, Max or
> elsewhere completely -and Autodesk will make some bucks in the process and
> hopefully keep more users in their AD family than they likely will
> otherwise.
>
> I hope that's all stated clear enough now.  I know everyone, myself
> included will want way more (personally I'd axe Max and Maya and just keep
> Softimage but that's unrealistic), but given the way this all went down, we
> are lucky if we get the above concessions, and if future Maya development
> goes smoothly (aka. the new Maya Ice is good, they replace the dated
> Hypershade wit

Re: Kraken: cross-DCC rigging project (using Fabric)

+1

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Greg Punchatz  wrote:

> I am very excited to see where this project goes...
> I'm hoping for the artist friendly user interface sooner than later...
>
> Question, if you're building a rigging program, won't you need basic
> animation to test these rigs in fabric engine? If so does that mean you
> might have a standalone animation packings in the works? I would love to
> see an animation package with no overhead to slow the characters down..
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:57 PM, Greg Punchatz wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 10:35 PM, Perry Harovas 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Sounds like exactly what is needed to move forward with true DCC
>>> agnostic workflow.
>>> Thank you all for doing this!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Morten Bartholdy 
>>> wrote:
>>>
   This is a great initiative Paul! It will be exciting to see what
 comes from this and similar projects.

 Morten

 Den 14. marts 2014 kl. 17:56 skrev Paul Doyle :

   Hi everyone - I thought I'd let you know about an exciting project
 that we are involved with. I believe it serves a few purposes that are good
 for Fabric and good for you guys as well. It's very early days, but given
 recent events and the questions people keep asking us, I would rather get
 this out there now.

 We have formed a working group with Eric Thivierge (Hybride), Raffaele
 Fragapane (personal project, nothing to do with Animal Logic), Dave
 Gallagher (AnimSchool) and a few other people I don't think we can mention
 yet, but have equally impressive backgrounds. The goal of the group is to
 build a rigging system that takes full advantage of Fabric for performance,
 and also enables rigs to be moved between DCC applications that have been
 integrated with Fabric (Maya and Softimage for sure, possibly Max and
 Houdini later). If things proceed as we all hope then this tool will be
 used within Hybride for production and, more importantly, we will
 open-source the tool (note: it still needs Fabric to run) so that other
 people can contribute and/or fork for their own needs.

 If all goes well then Dave at AnimSchool will work with us to build a
 rig that shows off the capabilities of the approach. We will then work to
 producing the toolset for building these kinds of rigs.

 From Fabric's perspective, this approach will form the foundation of
 everything else we want to do with character animation (crowds, sims etc).
 We will be contributing time to the project to ensure all required Fabric
 components are in place and generally making sure things go smoothly.

 I have asked Eric to explain roughly what he's been doing with Fabric
 at Hybride and how he sees things moving forward. It is very early days,
 but we're committed to making sure this succeeds and proves what can be
 possible with this collaborative model. As things get nailed down we will
 start looking for interested parties to get involved with the effort.
 Something to be crystal clear on is that Fabric is not leading this
 project, and have no veto over design - we'll offer our expertise but it's
 critical that this is driven by the production people involved. It also
 means the model is scalable for us.

 We are looking at a few other areas where this might be possible, so if
 you have the technical chops to build a similar group then please contact
 me. Fabric benefits greatly from this, as we have other people building
 production-level tools and workflows with us - however, we do give free
 licenses to individuals so I think there's a certain amount of goodwill
 shown there.

 Interested to hear your thoughts on this.

 Cheers,

 Paul

>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Perry Harovas
>>> 203-448-7206
>>> Animation and Visual Effects
>>>
>>> http://www.TheAfterImage.com 
>>>
>>> -24 years experience
>>> -Co-Author of "Mastering 
>>> Maya"
>>> -Member of the Visual Effects Society 
>>> (VES)
>>>
>>
>>
>

-- 

Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com 

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering
Maya"
-Member of the Visual Effects Society
(VES)

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Toonafish


Sales revenue was 2.31 Billion in 2013, and gross income 2.07 Billion.

The "funny" thing is that while I read on the list the reason for 
shutting SI down is that they believe they can focus more on innovation 
this way.


But AD spent only 600 million of that money on R&D,  and 2.83 Billion on 
"sales and administration".  They spend way more money on selling the 
idea they are innovative, then they spend on actually trying to 
innovate. And when you consider how little innovation they have been 
able to squeeze out of a budget that is still humongous to smaller, much 
more innovative shops, it's simply embarrassing.


http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/adsk/financials#

You can sell customers, or sheep as they are called in some business 
models, heaps of crap as long as you spend enough dough on convincing 
them it really doesn't stink, it's the sweet smell of innovation.


I suspect the peeps that pull the strings at AD really couldn't care 
less about clients or innovation as long as this attitude brings in 
higher profits. They wouldn't smell innovation even if it sat on their 
face. Softimage with ICE is one of the most innovative DCC packages they 
have on their hands, and even though they seem to understand that you 
need to spend at least some money to sell innovation, they couldn't be 
bothered to lift a single finger to sell SI.


but I'm rambling on..

-Ronald

On 3/15/2014 9:46, Matt Lind wrote:
I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What you have to 
understand is Autodesk doesn't want customers running concurrent 
sessions off a single license as in a Maya/Max and a Softimage session 
running in parallel.  that would effectively allow double the users to 
work while paying only half the price.  eg; if a customer has 50 
licenses it would allow 50 maya + 50 softimage users to run 
concurrently, but pay for only 50 licenses.  Some studios are ethical 
and wouldn't do something like that, but as someone mentioned just the 
other day, other studios in lesser affluent places might not be so 
ethical.  Even if Softimage were included for free, it still consumes 
some amount of resources to ensure it still installs and runs as 
advertised.


I agree in principle Autodesk should continue Softimage until one of 
their other products can replace the functionality.  If anything, 
that's the ball that was dropped in this whole debacle.  Of all 
companies on the planet, you'd think the one with all the accumulated 
experience of all the products that went through this process in the 
1990's would know better and be more prepared than anyone else.  But 
what's done is done.


The problem with the theory of disgruntled users leaving and hurting 
Autodesk is that the Softimage user base isn't large enough to really 
be missed on Autodesk's bottom line.  think about it.  Only 8% of 
Autodesk's revenue comes from media and entertainment.  Of that 8%, 
about 5% of it is from Softimage (0.4% total) - and that might be a 
generous number.  For every $100 Autodesk earns in revenue, 40 cents 
comes from Softimage. Take out expenses and you're looking at much less.


I don't remember the actual number, but I thought somebody recently 
reported Autodesk earned $392 million last year.  So, let's run that 
through the calculator:


   $392,000,000 USD * 0.004 = $1,568,000 Softimage gross revenue

I don't know what 10 developers in Singapore get paid, so I'll use 
conservative values based on USA rates:


   10 * $100,000 = $1,000,000

subtract expenses from revenue:

   $1,568,000 - $1,000,000 = $568,000

I don't know what marketing of Softimage costs, but I'm willing to bet 
$568,000 USD doesn't go very far for a product that needs a lot of 
attention to survive.  Even if tripled, that's still lean.  See the 
problem?


One item of note that probably hasn't been brought up in discussion 
yet is that Softimage has been included in the Max and Maya suites the 
past few years, so some sales of Max and Maya may actually be 
Softimage sales in a certain light - I know of at least one studio 
where that is the case.  In that scenario Softimage is getting the 
short end of the stick when it comes to accounting.


I mourn the loss of Softimage as much as anybody having dedicated 21+ 
years of my life to it both as professional user and former owner of a 
Softimage certified training center. Sometimes life sucks.


Matt




--
Ronald van Vemden
---
3D Graphics & Animation
Cyberfish Laboratories | www.cyberfish.nl
Toonafish | www.toonafish.nl
tel. +31(0)20 5289291
fax  +31(0)20 5289292
email: ron...@toonafish.nl

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Martin

AFAIK that's how the suites worked. You can use all apps in your PC with a 
single license and as soon as you run any of the apps you'll be using the 
license and won't be able to use any other app on any other PC.

I think that is quite reasonable. Make it subscription only, or time limited 
maybe I don't know, but that would save a lot of current Softimage projects 
that may need much more than 2 years to migrate and may need to increase their 
seats meanwhile.

I also don't have faith in Autodesk doing this (or anything at all to help us), 
but IMHO it's a reasonable solution.

Martin
Sent from my iPhone

Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer

2014-03-15 Thread Doeke Wartena

Sorry, but how much money does it cost to show Softimage under products at
the autodesk website...


2014-03-15 9:51 GMT+01:00 Bk :

> To add to that, Autodesk had a responsibility to continue Softimage the
> phenomenon, including what the customers had grown used to regarding
> updates and marketing.
>
> By assigning you a tiny budget, which which you could do nothing of
> significance; in my book that puts them wholly to blame.
>
>
>
> On 15 Mar 2014, at 03:35, Morten Bartholdy  wrote:
>
> > Well put, John. My sentiments exactly.
> >
> > Morten
> >
> >
> > Den 15. marts 2014 kl. 01:24 skrev John Clausing  >:
> >
> > > Maurice,
> > >
> > > "Well if there is someone to blame for that it was me not Autodesk"
> > >
> > > I'm not sure what to say about that..are you falling on your sword
> to protect AD? I don't suppose protecting AD is even possible to us on the
> list...
> > >
> > > I'm devastated by the loss of a software I've used for 20 years now,
> but I can only imagine how difficult it must be for those of you who have
> now lost their positions at SoftimageMark S. Comes to mind.
> > >
> > > I wonder, having said that if you (AD) even understand the knock on
> effects of your decision, or even care. My well being and that of my family
> are being put in jeopardy by the demise of the vehicle that pays my bills.
> An expertise honed over decades. And for what? Because Soft is inferior?
> Hardly. Were it to make sense, from any perspective, it would be easier to
> take, but some off handed comment about "bifrost", and "we care about our
> customers" is on it's face just not true.
> > >
> > > That you are the sole heir of a position that makes you listen to us,
> the aggrieved, speaks not only to your strength, but to the cowardice of
> the management of AD.
> > >
> > > I'm sure you're a good man, many here have said so, but comments like
> the one you just made about it "being your fault", do you a dis-service and
> ignore the truth.
> > >
> > > With respect,
> > >
> > > John
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Sent from my iPhone
> > >
> > > > On Mar 14, 2014, at 8:05 PM, Maurice Patel <
> maurice.pa...@autodesk.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Well if there is someone to blame for that it was me not Autodesk. I
> ran Product Marketing for M&E (recently moved into a new role) and we did
> focus on ways to promote Softimage given our budgets and business
> priorities. It was just not realistic to expect the same level of coverage
> given the sheer volume of business driven by the other products.
> > > >
> > > > Maurice
> > > >
> > > > Maurice Patel
> > > > Autodesk : Tél:  514 954-7134
> > > >
> > > > From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Paul Griswold
> > > > Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 1:27 PM
> > > > To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> > > > Subject: Re: Re[2]: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer
> > > >
> > > > I suppose I should have phrased that "There has literally never been
> a single public "champion" of Softimage at a decision-making level."
> > > >
> > > > Was there ever a SIGGRAPH, usergroup meeting, or anything of the
> sort where anyone with any sort of authority at Autodesk called for more
> exposure, more marketing, more anything for Softimage?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Bradley Gabe  > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Since the day Autodesk bought Softimage, it's been one cruel joke.
>  There has literally never been a single "champion" of Softimage at a
> decision-making level, right?  It's been the red-headed step-child since
> the moment of the acquisition.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'm not sure this statement is entirely true. The senior VP of M&E
> at the time of the purchase was Marc Petite, originally from Softimage and
> one of the driving forces behind the early development of XSI. When he
> stepped down not long ago, I believe he was replaced by Marc Stevens, the
> former president of Softimage at the time of the acquisition.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > 
> > >
>
>

Zoogloo Rigging Tools

2014-03-15 Thread Greg Maguire

Hi guys,

I'm enjoying the discussion regarding Fabric and the cross-DCC rigging
project. I didn't want to hi-jack the thread so started this one. Apologies
if it's redundant.

I've been involved in building several rigging systems. So, much so that I
co-founded Zoogloo with Andy Buecker in 2006 to rig for studios. We worked
on 25 different projects over a three year period including, Spiderman3,
Where The Wild Things Are, Happy Feet, Thundercats and more. Because we
worked on animated features, episodic television, games and visual effects
features and in Maya and in Softimage, we developed an in-house rigging
system that took a different approach to any rigging system at the time and
any that I have seen since.

Having worked at ILM and witnessed the size of the team that had to be
hired to translate between maya and ILM's proprietary tools, we decided to
go further up the chain and develop a higher level rigging tool. We would
not translate between softwares, we would instead issue each package
instructions that would be built natively.

i.e. a node based editor to build connections between blocks of body parts.
A block would have characteristics built in, a 3-bone spine, or a
9-boneIKFK spine or a Disney-foot or an ILM-head. Each block then passed
their data to a python script built for maya or softimage natively. i.e. we
had to write Disney-foot in python for Maya and python for Softimage.

btw. You can tell from my poor explanation above which one of us did the
majority of the coding! (thanks Andy, you rock!)

It addressed the following issues:

1. Developing rigs for Maya, Softimage and any other software (Fabric?)
2. Developing rigs for games, animated features, episodic television and
vfx.
2. Naming convention mapping between all objects, controls for different
studios.
3. SQLite for storing, geom, transforms, weights.

Anyway, to cut what could be an incredibly long story short we Opened
Sourced the tools some time ago but didn't tell anyone. I thought some
of our work might be of use to you guys:

Two years amount of work here, it might speed things up.
https://github.com/abuecker/Zoogloo-Tools

Warmest regards.

-- 

*Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize
Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739
g...@inlifesize.com | www.inlifesize.com

Re: Zoogloo Rigging Tools

2014-03-15 Thread Greg Maguire

Woops, Hit send too quickly. cc'ing in Andy Buecker.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Greg Maguire  wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I'm enjoying the discussion regarding Fabric and the cross-DCC rigging
> project. I didn't want to hi-jack the thread so started this one. Apologies
> if it's redundant.
>
> I've been involved in building several rigging systems. So, much so that I
> co-founded Zoogloo with Andy Buecker in 2006 to rig for studios. We worked
> on 25 different projects over a three year period including, Spiderman3,
> Where The Wild Things Are, Happy Feet, Thundercats and more. Because we
> worked on animated features, episodic television, games and visual effects
> features and in Maya and in Softimage, we developed an in-house rigging
> system that took a different approach to any rigging system at the time and
> any that I have seen since.
>
> Having worked at ILM and witnessed the size of the team that had to be
> hired to translate between maya and ILM's proprietary tools, we decided to
> go further up the chain and develop a higher level rigging tool. We would
> not translate between softwares, we would instead issue each package
> instructions that would be built natively.
>
> i.e. a node based editor to build connections between blocks of body
> parts. A block would have characteristics built in, a 3-bone spine, or a
> 9-boneIKFK spine or a Disney-foot or an ILM-head. Each block then passed
> their data to a python script built for maya or softimage natively. i.e. we
> had to write Disney-foot in python for Maya and python for Softimage.
>
> btw. You can tell from my poor explanation above which one of us did the
> majority of the coding! (thanks Andy, you rock!)
>
> It addressed the following issues:
>
> 1. Developing rigs for Maya, Softimage and any other software (Fabric?)
> 2. Developing rigs for games, animated features, episodic television and
> vfx.
> 2. Naming convention mapping between all objects, controls for different
> studios.
> 3. SQLite for storing, geom, transforms, weights.
>
> Anyway, to cut what could be an incredibly long story short we Opened
> Sourced the tools some time ago but didn't tell anyone. I thought some
> of our work might be of use to you guys:
>
> Two years amount of work here, it might speed things up.
> https://github.com/abuecker/Zoogloo-Tools
>
> Warmest regards.
>
> --
>
> *Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize
> Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739
> g...@inlifesize.com | www.inlifesize.com
>



-- 

*Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize
Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739
g...@inlifesize.com | www.inlifesize.com

Re: Kraken: cross-DCC rigging project (using Fabric)

2014-03-15 Thread Arvid Björn

Incredibly good initiative, this will open up a lot of doors for all
artists and TD's to work where they are most comfortable instead of being
forced to do it where the demand takes them, while also showing that things
don't have to be done like they were always done before. Fabric Engine
really has the power to liberate the people :-)


On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Paul Doyle  wrote:

> Hi everyone - I thought I'd let you know about an exciting project that we
> are involved with. I believe it serves a few purposes that are good for
> Fabric and good for you guys as well. It's very early days, but given
> recent events and the questions people keep asking us, I would rather get
> this out there now.
>
>
>
> We have formed a working group with Eric Thivierge (Hybride), Raffaele
> Fragapane (personal project, nothing to do with Animal Logic), Dave
> Gallagher (AnimSchool) and a few other people I don't think we can mention
> yet, but have equally impressive backgrounds. The goal of the group is to
> build a rigging system that takes full advantage of Fabric for performance,
> and also enables rigs to be moved between DCC applications that have been
> integrated with Fabric (Maya and Softimage for sure, possibly Max and
> Houdini later). If things proceed as we all hope then this tool will be
> used within Hybride for production and, more importantly, we will
> open-source the tool (note: it still needs Fabric to run) so that other
> people can contribute and/or fork for their own needs.
>
>
>
> If all goes well then Dave at AnimSchool will work with us to build a rig
> that shows off the capabilities of the approach. We will then work to
> producing the toolset for building these kinds of rigs.
>
>
>
> From Fabric's perspective, this approach will form the foundation of
> everything else we want to do with character animation (crowds, sims etc).
> We will be contributing time to the project to ensure all required Fabric
> components are in place and generally making sure things go smoothly.
>
>
>
> I have asked Eric to explain roughly what he's been doing with Fabric at
> Hybride and how he sees things moving forward. It is very early days, but
> we're committed to making sure this succeeds and proves what can be
> possible with this collaborative model. As things get nailed down we will
> start looking for interested parties to get involved with the effort.
> Something to be crystal clear on is that Fabric is not leading this
> project, and have no veto over design - we'll offer our expertise but it's
> critical that this is driven by the production people involved. It also
> means the model is scalable for us.
>
>
>
> We are looking at a few other areas where this might be possible, so if
> you have the technical chops to build a similar group then please contact
> me. Fabric benefits greatly from this, as we have other people building
> production-level tools and workflows with us - however, we do give free
> licenses to individuals so I think there's a certain amount of goodwill
> shown there.
>
>
>
> Interested to hear your thoughts on this.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> Paul
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Hey Chris
Thanks for extensive cover. That is first concrete post with specific
points that makes sense.
Still stays question of killing Softimage in it's prime (even if it
stagnating and Maya is on developers rise)
before covering at least thsoe basic workflow things.
All underlying tech is great stuff but have little meaning if it is
disconnected from user on top.
Tech makes fast viewport and faster then ever performance possible and
workflow then cut that all in half or more.
IF in two years is possible to improve what Maya is lacking in terms of
workflow then it does makes sense. But if it takes another 5-6 years then
Softimage is killed prematurely.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Chris Vienneau <
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:

> Hi Mirko,
>
>
>
> We have already shown the maya roadmap to about 60% of the softimage user
> base under NDA. I have had calls with several people on this forum last
> week and I apologize to those that I have not got to already. We will
> launch our new software line up this week and GDC is here with Nvidia GTC
> and NAB all back to back so things are crazy. Anyone that needs more
> information for their transition that has asked for a road map will get one
> in the next couple of months. There are users in a variety of different
> situations that have different things to weigh.
>
>
>
> The largest community of softimage users is in Japan building games and
> most use the modeling and animation tools but very little ICE. This
> community is focusing on the transition to the PS4 and Xbox One console
> cycle and want features like DX11 APIs and .net programming as well as back
> end API for FBX and Middleware. The main work we did with Microsoft and
> Sony for supporting the next gen consoles was done in Maya although the
> transition for a games developer is pretty big when they have to swap out
> engines or back end pipelines. These users upgrade usually once every five
> years around the time a console changes. With the work you will see in Maya
> 2015 this week we are addressing most of the big modeling feature concerns
> in terms of legacy things like crappy Booleans and bevel and we have a
> whole new retopology tool set. We also have done tons of work on supporting
> UV tiling and workflows and ported over the Unfold 3D work into Maya.
>
>
>
> As for the workflows we have an internal project called Project H (or
> Humanize Maya) where we are working with all sorts of users from students
> to pros to studios to come up with proposals to the problems that have come
> up here and in the Maya user base. We invite anyone here and many of you
> have taken up our offer to contribute and it is up to us to show that we
> are delivering over the next two years during the transition period. If we
> don't at the end than you will all have choices and plenty of time to
> evaluate your options.
>
>
>
> As for ICE and Bifrost you will see this week the liquid workflows for
> generalists. We have three user personas we work with: generalists, tds,
> and programmers. If you want a great view of our thoughts on Bifrost than
> read this article from fx guide:
> https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/.
>  The underlying procedural core that powers was written by a core group of
> developers that worked on ICE except this time they built it separate from
> Maya so that we could potentially re-use it in other areas. So we will show
> the benefits of a modern procedural core running on all CPUs but we will
> not expose the node graphing network underneath in the first version. As
> you will read in the article and see in the videos the graph which is very
> much like ICE is there but we want to focus on enabling a key workflow like
> liquids first for the big user base and then expose it to tds through a
> node graph interface and then programmers through an API. We have been
> working on this core for a long time so we are confident that it is ready
> for prime time with the hundred of thousands of Maya users out there today.
> Again those of you that want to take part in how we expose this procedural
> core through a node interface are welcome to join the beta.
>
>
>
> As for modernizing Maya's core there are several components that make up
> the core of an application. This is by no means exhaustive but for this
> conversation let's imagine the primary components are UI, Viewport, Data
> model, and Evaluation. Higher level things like API and scripting are also
> in the equation. For Maya we ported the entire UI to QT over the last
> couple of years and you will see us start to take advantage of that in the
> 2015 release. The viewport 2.0 project will be completed in the 2015
> release so we will make it the default viewport. This supports all the
> modern DX11 techniques like gpu tessellation, opensubdiv and will natively
> display UV tiling, Ptex,  Alembic streaming, and most elements of the
> hypershade and good chunks of me

Re: Zoogloo Rigging Tools

2014-03-15 Thread Eric Turman

Thank you Greg and Andy,

Back in 2007, my friend Michael Werckle was saying very good things about
the ZooGloo system. I have not downloaded it yet, but if half of what I've
heard holds up, I'm certain that it will benefit the community greatly.
Also, as I am looking to adapt my rig components and modular, non-linear
auto-rig system --that Greg Punchatz referred to recently in another
thread-- to the Fabric engine, it is helpful to do a sanity-check against
other workflows. Thank you so much for your and Andy's generosity and of
open sourcing this.

-=Eric Turman



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:58 AM, Greg Maguire  wrote:

> Woops, Hit send too quickly. cc'ing in Andy Buecker.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Greg Maguire wrote:
>
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I'm enjoying the discussion regarding Fabric and the cross-DCC rigging
>> project. I didn't want to hi-jack the thread so started this one. Apologies
>> if it's redundant.
>>
>> I've been involved in building several rigging systems. So, much so that
>> I co-founded Zoogloo with Andy Buecker in 2006 to rig for studios. We
>> worked on 25 different projects over a three year period including,
>> Spiderman3, Where The Wild Things Are, Happy Feet, Thundercats and more.
>> Because we worked on animated features, episodic television, games and
>> visual effects features and in Maya and in Softimage, we developed an
>> in-house rigging system that took a different approach to any rigging
>> system at the time and any that I have seen since.
>>
>> Having worked at ILM and witnessed the size of the team that had to be
>> hired to translate between maya and ILM's proprietary tools, we decided to
>> go further up the chain and develop a higher level rigging tool. We would
>> not translate between softwares, we would instead issue each package
>> instructions that would be built natively.
>>
>> i.e. a node based editor to build connections between blocks of body
>> parts. A block would have characteristics built in, a 3-bone spine, or a
>> 9-boneIKFK spine or a Disney-foot or an ILM-head. Each block then passed
>> their data to a python script built for maya or softimage natively. i.e. we
>> had to write Disney-foot in python for Maya and python for Softimage.
>>
>> btw. You can tell from my poor explanation above which one of us did the
>> majority of the coding! (thanks Andy, you rock!)
>>
>> It addressed the following issues:
>>
>>  1. Developing rigs for Maya, Softimage and any other software (Fabric?)
>> 2. Developing rigs for games, animated features, episodic television and
>> vfx.
>> 2. Naming convention mapping between all objects, controls for different
>> studios.
>> 3. SQLite for storing, geom, transforms, weights.
>>
>> Anyway, to cut what could be an incredibly long story short we Opened
>> Sourced the tools some time ago but didn't tell anyone. I thought some
>> of our work might be of use to you guys:
>>
>> Two years amount of work here, it might speed things up.
>> https://github.com/abuecker/Zoogloo-Tools
>>
>> Warmest regards.
>>
>> --
>>
>> *Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize
>> Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739
>> g...@inlifesize.com | www.inlifesize.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> *Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize
> Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739
> g...@inlifesize.com | www.inlifesize.com
>



-- 




-=T=-

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Rob Chapman

"We invite anyone here and many of you have taken up our offer to
contribute and it is up to us to show that we are delivering over the next
two years during the transition period. If we don't at the end than you
will all have choices and plenty of time to evaluate your options."

what kind of choices? If you do not deliver to our criteriathen Softimage
is not EOL or..  it is very unclear as to what our choices are exactly?

in 2016 will we be able to load ICE trees and compounds into Maya?

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Hi guys,



Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in sales 
and administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the people 
that support the developers to the building and computers. Autodesk spends more 
on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products and tells about 
what he doesn't like all the time. Again you can check him making stuff here: 
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king . We have a huge research 
group that drives its own agenda (http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our 
doing lots of labs/research projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research 
into multi-touch, reality capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we 
have been involved in projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer 
research 
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software
 ). Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran 
softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a technology 
driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E has said this 
to this community but I like working for Autodesk and believe that this is a 
good company.



For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid flip 
method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method that was a 
siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair and cloth simulation of 
Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the innovation in this industry comes from 
the top studios and the work that comes out of production. The snow in Frozen 
was amazing but a lot of work. 
(http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) 
If you take the 
innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the last five years 
the origins are all on production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb, Ptex, 
UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open EXR, etc there are smart people 
in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson (Pixar), Lincoln 
Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt Disney animation), 
and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open source to the benefit of 
the community. Then there are tons of contributors like Autodesk and the 
Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug fixing so this all works 
together. Even the applications that are young and fast moving like Mari (weta) 
 and Arnold (Sony) are from production and still take their main direction from 
production just like Maya. All of the applications from Soft with Jurassic to 
Maya with Dinosaurs got their footing with production work. The fact that Toy 
Story was all built on in house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing 
movies like Despicable Me and Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools 
is amazing. Go back and look at the tools you think are innovating and see how 
many of their "innovations" are based off Siggraph papers or are inspired by 
tools written in production. I for one have no problem giving credit where 
credit is due and most anything in Maya that is good has come from being built 
in partnership with customers.



This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that foster 
and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base platform is 
community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux libraries for all 
the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work in organizations like 
open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA (setting the new ACES 
standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the base upon which the industry 
sits. We get to package up technology like Xgen and bring it to the larger 
market and all vendors get to put in Alembic to share data and open color I/O 
to set color within a facility.



This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were once 
only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has allowed stories to 
be told in countries that have never before had a voice. There is no one tool 
to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft vs Houdini vs Modo vs Zbrush vs fabric 
does not foster innovation. Raf said it well when he described the Lego as all 
of those tools plus internal tools plus really smart people plus an amazing 
story made what we all enjoyed so much.



First and foremost everyone who works at Autodesk in the M&E division including 
the people who used to work at Soft (there are way more than have left) love 
the film and games industry and the chance to be a part of it. The decision 
with Soft was a hard one but we back it so we can focus on helping the 
ecosystem make better movies and games. Innovation comes from the synergies of 
all these products, platforms, hardware and your talent and putting that on any 
one tool or company does not capture what is still a vibrant passionate 
community. The business model right now su

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all use 
that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?



thx.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Rob Chapman 
[tekano@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 8:43 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.

"We invite anyone here and many of you have taken up our offer to contribute 
and it is up to us to show that we are delivering over the next two years 
during the transition period. If we don't at the end than you will all have 
choices and plenty of time to evaluate your options."

what kind of choices? If you do not deliver to our criteriathen Softimage is 
not EOL or..  it is very unclear as to what our choices are exactly?

in 2016 will we be able to load ICE trees and compounds into Maya?



<>

Re: Proposal for TDs and Artist - Expand Softimage ( and other ) tools

2014-03-15 Thread Arman Sernaz

My studio is planning to keep using Softimage and doing researchs with
Fabric Engine as long as I'm not convinced that I can do better with the
rest.


On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:38 PM, Nicolas Esposito <3dv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> For me the main problem is still that AD would never sell Softimage to
> anyone, because they know they fucked it up, and they know for sure if
> SideFX or The Foundry will buy Soft, they will literally kick out Maya and
> Max in a couple of years.
>
> Regarding the subscription renewal I completely agree with you, I'd rather
> invest that money for custom tools, instead of giving my money to AD, so
> that developers would gladly build those tools and get paid...and thats why
> I think that the "share for free" would be a kick in the nuts for those who
> developed the custom tools that they use in Softimage.
>
> Greg, how much time and development you guys spent on developing the
> "Janimation HeadTech" demo/character? looks like Facerobot, but I suppose
> that is heavily modified together with ICE in order to achieve the
> deformation technology.
>
> Thoat is something I would pay to have, together with the muscle systema
> that the guys at Fabric engine are developing, or what Paul Smith did, or
> an upgrade to the plugins from Exocortex or LK.
>
> I really would like to show my appreciation to those guys, and together
> with others I think that we could give them the possibility to get their
> money for the time they spent developing what they did, and for more future
> tools if they want to.
>
> I thought about kickstarter, but could be something different as
> well.in general something to keep track of those who contribuite to the
> donation, then share the tools with them.
> It would be highly unfair from my point of view to share those tools with
> everyone who uses Softimage, because at this point it'll just be free stuff
> paid by 20-30-40 people.
>
> Maybe, when Softimage will eventually die, some of the studios who
> developed the tools will share them for free, but who knows
>
>
> 2014-03-14 16:13 GMT+01:00 Greg Punchatz :
>
> I like the idea, I was thinking along the same lines but much BIGGER.
>> Let's kick the shit of Autodesk at their own game...3d development.
>>
>> I think we should set up this has a PUBLIC challenge, us agasinst
>> Autodesk Maya dev team, in a development death match. Thinking this would
>> go much further in showing Autodesk what an incredible mistake it made by
>> killing Softimage. Release after release... we will kick their fucking ass.
>>
>> Here is what I don't really think Autodesk really understands
>> Softimage and particularly Ice allows you to develop features that are
>> production ready to the public a much faster rate than you can in any of
>> other full Dcc applications they own.
>>
>> I never understood why there wasn't a huge effort to create new tools
>> with ice and after it had matured a bit. I was really hoping for an ice
>> version of face robot, as it was not so linear... the idea of face robot is
>> great.. but picking session is brilliant, but things can get terribly
>> linear after that point on with no real way to fix what's under the hood.
>>  So this really is my challenge--- to the user base and developers. We
>> set up a kickstarter campaign or something to raise money to help out
>> develop Maya...
>>
>> Show it for what it is, an aging dinosaur that's about to become
>> fossilized.
>>
>> First off is a kick starter the right way to go? How do we get the money
>> from a single kickstarter into the hands of multiple developers ? Ideally I
>> would like to see something that benefits all Softimage users to contribute
>> to the user build... it could be a single workgroup that we all share. I
>> know that there a lot of plug-ins already that are very useful, but
>> sometimes getting organized workgroup of all the latest and greatest core
>> tools is difficult .
>>
>> I have 1 million ideas of what needs to be done, but I have no idea what
>> it's capable with the current SDK . I'm sure everybody else has their list
>> as well.
>>
>> We need BIG shiny features... as well as taking care of anything we can
>> that will keep Softimage viable for years to come.
>>
>> Is it possible that any of the big studios would consider releasing some
>> of their tools to the Softimage community? I've heard and seen some of
>> these tools in action , if we could get something going quick enough we
>> would already have a far more impressive release and what is most likely
>> coming from Maya. These tools for your competitive advantage, but not as
>> much Softimage is. My suggestion is wherever it makes sense for us to share
>> our scripts and plug-ins that have already been developed into the
>> community for the greater good of Softimage. Softimage is definitely my
>> competitive advantage, and as a community we can make it even more so.
>>
>> To the TDs and developers out there, would it be possible for us to
>> implement U

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

"but there is still a bright future ahead" all OK but this particular
sentence invokes some really bad memories and taste for  Softimage people...

"The future is brightclick"


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Chris Vienneau  wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
>
>
> Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in
> sales and administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the
> people that support the developers to the building and computers. Autodesk
> spends more on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products
> and tells about what he doesn't like all the time. Again you can check him
> making stuff here: http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king .
> We have a huge research group that drives its own agenda (
> http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of labs/research
> projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch,
> reality capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been
> involved in projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer
> research (
> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software).
>  Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran
> softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a
> technology driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E
> has said this to this community but I like working for Autodesk and believe
> that this is a good company.
>
>
>
> For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid
> flip method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method
> that was a siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair and cloth
> simulation of Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the innovation in this
> industry comes from the top studios and the work that comes out of
> production. The snow in Frozen was amazing but a lot of work. (
> http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) If<
> http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications)%20If> you take
> the innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the last five
> years the origins are all on production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb,
> Ptex, UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open EXR, etc there are
> smart people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson
> (Pixar), Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt
> Disney animation), and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open
> source to the benefit of the community. Then there are tons of contributors
> like Autodesk and the Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug
> fixing so this all works together. Even the applications that are young and
> fast moving like Mari (weta)  and Arnold (Sony) are from production and
> still take their main direction from production just like Maya. All of the
> applications from Soft with Jurassic to Maya with Dinosaurs got their
> footing with production work. The fact that Toy Story was all built on in
> house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing movies like Despicable
> Me and Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools is amazing. Go back
> and look at the tools you think are innovating and see how many of their
> "innovations" are based off Siggraph papers or are inspired by tools
> written in production. I for one have no problem giving credit where credit
> is due and most anything in Maya that is good has come from being built in
> partnership with customers.
>
>
>
> This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that
> foster and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base
> platform is community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux
> libraries for all the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work
> in organizations like open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA
> (setting the new ACES standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the
> base upon which the industry sits. We get to package up technology like
> Xgen and bring it to the larger market and all vendors get to put in
> Alembic to share data and open color I/O to set color within a facility.
>
>
>
> This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were
> once only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has allowed
> stories to be told in countries that have never before had a voice. There
> is no one tool to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft vs Houdini vs Modo
> vs Zbrush vs fabric does not foster innovation. Raf said it well when he
> described the Lego as all of those tools plus internal tools plus really
> smart people plus an amazing story made what we all enjoyed so much.
>
>
>
> First and foremost everyone who works at Autodesk in the M&E division
> including the people who used to work at Soft (there are way more than have
> left) love the film and games industry and the chance to be a part of it.
> The decision with Soft was a

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

First you beat us up and now you try to convince us that is was for our
own good and that you are actually really nice people... ?

Cancer research. really? You are pulling this card here and now? I'm
speechless.

Chris

On 15/03/14 14:37, Chris Vienneau wrote:

Hi guys,

Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in sales and
administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the people that support the
developers to the building and computers. Autodesk spends more on R&D than Adobe or
Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products and tells about what he doesn't like all the
time. Again you can check him making stuff here:
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king . We have a huge research group that
drives its own agenda (http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of
labs/research projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch, reality
capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been involved in projects like
molecular maya working with MIT on cancer research
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software ).
Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran softimage and runs
the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a technology driven company. I know it
sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E has said this to this community but I like
working for Autodesk and believe that this is a good company.

For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid flip method from Dr.
Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method that was a siggraph paper , continued
improvements on the hair and cloth simulation of Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the
innovation in this industry comes from the top studios and the work that comes out of
production. The snow in Frozen was amazing but a lot of work.
(http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications)
If you take the innovation
that has really driven the industry forward in the last five years the origins are all on
production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb, Ptex, UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open
EXR, etc there are smart people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson
(Pixar), Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt Disney animation),
and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open source to the benefit of the community.
Then there are tons of contributors like Autodesk and the Foundry who do things like porting,
standards and bug fixing so this all works together. Even the applications that are young and
fast moving like Mari (weta) and Arnold (Sony) are from production and still take their main
direction from production just like Maya. All of the applications from Soft with Jurassic to
Maya with Dinosaurs got their footing with production work. The fact that Toy Story was all
built on in house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing movies like Despicable Me and
Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools is amazing. Go back and look at the tools you
think are innovating and see how many of their "innovations" are based off Siggraph
papers or are inspired by tools written in production. I for one have no problem giving credit
where credit is due and most anything in Maya that is good has come from being built in
partnership with customers.

This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that foster
and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base platform is
community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux libraries for all
the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work in organizations like
open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA (setting the new ACES
standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the base upon which the industry
sits. We get to package up technology like Xgen and bring it to the larger
market and all vendors get to put in Alembic to share data and open color I/O
to set color within a facility.

This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were once
only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has allowed stories to
be told in countries that have never before had a voice. There is no one tool
to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft vs Houdini vs Modo vs Zbrush vs fabric
does not foster innovation. Raf said it well when he described the Lego as all
of those tools plus internal tools plus really smart people plus an amazing
story made what we all enjoyed so much.

First and foremost everyone who works at Autodesk in the M&E division including
the people who used to work at Soft (there are way more than have left) love the
film and games industry and the chance to be a part of it. The decision with Soft
was a hard one but we back it so we can focus on helping the ecosystem make b

Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

2014-03-15 Thread Jonah Friedman

>
> but to kill Softimage I would think that Maya would have to prove to be an
> ice replacement within 2 years. How else do you justify it.


While what you're saying makes perfect sense, the
Bifrost-based-ice-replacement does not exist and given Autodesk's track
record, I think it's very likely to never exist. As for having it in two
years, I think that might actually be literally impossible. And BTW, I'm
leaving out the ecosystem that exists around ICE in soft (weight maps,
groups, clusters, render tree integration, etc) that can make it so
amazingly useful. Like Perry said, having this stuff involves changing the
internals of Maya, and having that in two years seems even more impossible.
Ultimately I don't see how people who transition to Maya can reasonably
expect to have something like ICE ever again.




On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 4:00 PM, phil harbath
wrote:

>   perhaps I am terrible ignorant to think this and I have no knowledge of
> what the upcoming 2015 version of Maya will contain,  but to kill Softimage
> I would think that Maya would have to prove to be an ice replacement within
> 2 years.  How else do you justify it.  In my opinion Autodesk considers
> Maya superior in everyway except ICE, so that would be the last step needed
> to make Softimage totally redundant (again in the eyes of Autodesk).
>
>  *From:* Jonah Friedman 
> *Sent:* Friday, March 14, 2014 3:57 PM
> *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> *Subject:* Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?
>
>   To make matters worse for the Bifrost-replacing-ice idea-
>
> Bifrost, at the moment, is fluid simulation. Hell, Bifrost hasn't even
> been proven to be good at fluid simulation yet, although I have no doubt it
> eventually can be. But as for Bifrost-the-ICE-replacement, it's not even at
> the level of vaporware. It hasn't been officially promised, just vaguely
> hinted at. Once Bifrost actually succeeds at its current purpose- fluid
> simulation- then we can talk about what it might take to rebuild ICE based
> on it.
>
> I'm imagining one possible future a couple years down the line everyone is
> happy that Maya finally solved their fluid simulation problem which is
> apparently holding Maya back, and team Bifrost turns their attention to
> replacing ICE. At this point, they're several years away from making
> something as good as ICE and we can start having this conversation in
> earnest. This is a best case scenario.
>
> There's another possible future where where it turns out people are using
> Houdini and/or Realflow for their fluid simulation needs, and nobody cares
> very much about having one directly in Maya, even if it's awesome, and
> Bifrost is deemed yet another misguided direction Maya was taken in by AD.
> And in this future, no matter how good the technical underpinnings of
> bifrost are, and ICE is a distant memory and Bifrost is just more
> abandonware in Maya.
>
> So yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath for an ice replacement from Autodesk.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Daniel Sweeney 
> wrote:
>
>> I will be surprised if bit frost is anything compared to ice. But who
>> knows. I will be honest I have never used Maya, and never have ventured
>> into that territory from things I have heard. With all the thing I'm
>> reading after the EOL was announce I just think out the box it far too
>> technical/hardwork for my personal work flow.
>>
>> Let's be rational, ice is 5 some years old and was 2-3 years in the
>> making before that. So that's 7-8 years. I would be interested to find out
>> how long this bit frost has been in the making.now considering they
>> only bought niad not too long ago and I read its based somehow on that, I
>> would be sceptical how well it could work or how mature it is. I just think
>> all of this is based on pure market share and pleasing the share holders.
>>
>> But like I said I don't know. But I know I will be looking for another
>> route away from autocash for sure.
>>
>> I hope most people follow another path to show these bully tactics are
>> bull shit and the customer is always right.
>>
>> Daniel
>>  On 14 Mar 2014 18:43, "Nuno Conceicao" 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Gee, I guess how many features wont be supported in Bifrost, or how long
>>> it will take them to have it at the level ICE currently is...
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 6:37 PM, Ahmidou Lyazidi 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 # mean mode on
 They should introduce first the concept of weight map object in Maya as
 currently it's all blackboxed in the different nodes,
 and all with different SDK access...
 # mean mode off

  ---
 Ahmidou Lyazidi
 Director | TD | CG artist
 http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
 http://www.cappuccino-films.com


 2014-03-14 19:29 GMT+01:00 Nuno Conceicao :


  Something just came up on my head while doing blendshapes and using
> ICE to help along.
>
> Can you guys imagine how would ICE

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Sorry, don' t want to be rude here, but what i am seeing in this thread and
others, is Softimage users helping develop Maya for the Company that ruin
Softimage. They kill the software and then come to us to ask what parts of
your ripped software would you like to have on the software we want to
market?
Don't you have r&d? don't you have a mayan user database? ask them, not us.
If you come to us is that you are approving soft is better software and now
you need to begin to strip it.
Don't come to me with a phrase like "we want to hear what tools want the
softimage artist needs to migrate to maya".
The Softimage artist needs Softimage, period, the best 3d tool you had as a
product and decided to remove from market.
Again, sorry if it sounds rude.

F.

On Saturday, March 15, 2014, Chris Vienneau 
wrote:

> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>
>
>
> thx.
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com  [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com ] on behalf of Rob
> Chapman [tekano@gmail.com ]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 8:43 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com 
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
> "We invite anyone here and many of you have taken up our offer to
> contribute and it is up to us to show that we are delivering over the next
> two years during the transition period. If we don't at the end than you
> will all have choices and plenty of time to evaluate your options."
>
> what kind of choices? If you do not deliver to our criteriathen Softimage
> is not EOL or..  it is very unclear as to what our choices are exactly?
>
> in 2016 will we be able to load ICE trees and compounds into Maya?
>
>
>
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Yes take the name Softimage out and name it Maya reloaded if you want.
Personally I don't want a Softimage Maya fembot.

It turns out that now they are listening after they realized that most of
us will stay in a zombie software or are evaluating other company's options
but none of the Autodesk "solutions".

Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

Autodesk cut us the legs and they are offering us a wheelchair...

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

The topic was innovation and research. So no I was not trying to pull a cancer 
card but yes I was very proud to have helped out on that project. We are not 
trying to down play the fact that this decision sucks for many people on this 
list. 

cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Christoph Muetze 
[c...@glarestudios.de]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 10:24 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite

First you beat us up and now you try to convince us that is was for our
own good and that you are actually really nice people... ?

Cancer research. really? You are pulling this card here and now? I'm
speechless.

Chris

On 15/03/14 14:37, Chris Vienneau wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
>
>
> Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in 
> sales and administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the 
> people that support the developers to the building and computers. Autodesk 
> spends more on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products 
> and tells about what he doesn't like all the time. Again you can check him 
> making stuff here: http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king . We 
> have a huge research group that drives its own agenda 
> (http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of labs/research 
> projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch, reality 
> capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been involved in 
> projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer research 
> (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software
>  ). Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran 
> softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a 
> technology driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E 
> has said this to this community but I like working for Autodesk and believe 
> that this is a good company.
>
>
>
> For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid flip 
> method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method that was a 
> siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair and cloth simulation of 
> Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the innovation in this industry comes from 
> the top studios and the work that comes out of production. The snow in Frozen 
> was amazing but a lot of work. 
> (http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) 
> If you take the 
> innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the last five years 
> the origins are all on production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb, Ptex, 
> UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open EXR, etc there are smart 
> people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson (Pixar), 
> Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt Disney 
> animation), and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open source to the 
> benefit of the community. Then there are tons of contributors like Autodesk 
> and the Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug fixing so this 
> all works together. Even the applications that are young and fast moving like 
> Mari (weta)  and Arnold (Sony) are from production and still take their main 
> direction from production just like Maya. All of the applications from Soft 
> with Jurassic to Maya with Dinosaurs got their footing with production work. 
> The fact that Toy Story was all built on in house hardware and 20 years later 
> you have amazing movies like Despicable Me and Lego movie made with mostly 
> off the shelf tools is amazing. Go back and look at the tools you think are 
> innovating and see how many of their "innovations" are based off Siggraph 
> papers or are inspired by tools written in production. I for one have no 
> problem giving credit where credit is due and most anything in Maya that is 
> good has come from being built in partnership with customers.
>
>
>
> This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that 
> foster and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base 
> platform is community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux 
> libraries for all the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work in 
> organizations like open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA 
> (setting the new ACES standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the base 
> upon which the industry sits. We get to package up technology like Xgen and 
> bring it to the larger market and all vendors get to put in Alembic to share 
> data and open color I/O to set color within a facility.
>
>
>
> This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were once 
> only possible by a few sh

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Tim Marinov

Hahahaha.. this is all I can say to you!Good luck with the
inovation!Autodesk,  it sounds that the future is bright for you as well.
On 15 Mar 2014 13:37, "Chris Vienneau"  wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
>
>
> Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in
> sales and administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the
> people that support the developers to the building and computers. Autodesk
> spends more on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products
> and tells about what he doesn't like all the time. Again you can check him
> making stuff here: http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king .
> We have a huge research group that drives its own agenda (
> http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of labs/research
> projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch,
> reality capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been
> involved in projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer
> research (
> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software).
>  Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran
> softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a
> technology driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E
> has said this to this community but I like working for Autodesk and believe
> that this is a good company.
>
>
>
> For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid
> flip method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method
> that was a siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair and cloth
> simulation of Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the innovation in this
> industry comes from the top studios and the work that comes out of
> production. The snow in Frozen was amazing but a lot of work. (
> http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) If<
> http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications)%20If> you take
> the innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the last five
> years the origins are all on production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb,
> Ptex, UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open EXR, etc there are
> smart people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson
> (Pixar), Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt
> Disney animation), and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open
> source to the benefit of the community. Then there are tons of contributors
> like Autodesk and the Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug
> fixing so this all works together. Even the applications that are young and
> fast moving like Mari (weta)  and Arnold (Sony) are from production and
> still take their main direction from production just like Maya. All of the
> applications from Soft with Jurassic to Maya with Dinosaurs got their
> footing with production work. The fact that Toy Story was all built on in
> house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing movies like Despicable
> Me and Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools is amazing. Go back
> and look at the tools you think are innovating and see how many of their
> "innovations" are based off Siggraph papers or are inspired by tools
> written in production. I for one have no problem giving credit where credit
> is due and most anything in Maya that is good has come from being built in
> partnership with customers.
>
>
>
> This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that
> foster and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base
> platform is community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux
> libraries for all the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work
> in organizations like open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA
> (setting the new ACES standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the
> base upon which the industry sits. We get to package up technology like
> Xgen and bring it to the larger market and all vendors get to put in
> Alembic to share data and open color I/O to set color within a facility.
>
>
>
> This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were
> once only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has allowed
> stories to be told in countries that have never before had a voice. There
> is no one tool to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft vs Houdini vs Modo
> vs Zbrush vs fabric does not foster innovation. Raf said it well when he
> described the Lego as all of those tools plus internal tools plus really
> smart people plus an amazing story made what we all enjoyed so much.
>
>
>
> First and foremost everyone who works at Autodesk in the M&E division
> including the people who used to work at Soft (there are way more than have
> left) love the film and games industry and the chance to be a part of it.
> The decision with Soft was a hard one but we back it so we can focus on
> helping

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are
offering us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the
weelchair is better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair
customized...   pfff.

Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you
can ride your wheelchair all the way back.

Open Letter to Carl Bass

Dear Mr. Bass

My name is Perry Harovas.

You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.

I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.

I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave in
Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
software (over Lightwave) into
feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.

I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually co-authored
the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".

I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I
couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
would allow me to create anything I could dream of.

Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
largest obstacles
with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code tools
into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.

A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG children's
shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we
plunged head on into doing it.

Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
our characters were coming
into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
all the animation we did gone?

Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that the
animation curves were still there,
but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
will).
Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.

We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
similar issues. They refused to let us help.
We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
list of other things
so long that I can't remember it now.

Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
consistent, and endangered our whole company.

We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing to
NEVER use Maya again.
We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a new
application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what
we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.

Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which
eventually became ICE.
This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing
things that I could not believe.
I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon
dog, in literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.

Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and then
beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever used.

Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.

I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people.
Imagine what a team of people could do?
Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from
just the last few years:

-'The Lego Movie'
-The Mill's '98% Human' ad
-The Embassy's 'Science Project' commercial
-'Iron Man'
-'Pacific Rim'
-'Now You See Me'
-Subaru 'Car Parts' ad

These are just off the top of my head.

This software, the one your company just retired (also known as EOL, or End
Of Life) is Softimage.
You remember Softimage, don't you? You bought it from Avid in 2008. I
wouldn't blame you for not remembering,
it never showed up on your home page, it was barely promoted, and it was
something that you had to hunt for in Siggraph demos.

Softimage, the software that gave rise to dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park' (in
a previous, less powerful, incarnation of the software).
Softimage, the software that gave the world 'Terminator 2'', 'Death Becomes
Her', 'Babe, 'Casper', 'Jumanji', 'Mars Attacks' and just too many others
to list.
Softimage, the software that invented Inverse Kinematics.
Softimage, the

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are working 
with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about what we are 
doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
[emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.


As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are offering 
us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the weelchair is 
better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair customized...   
pfff.

Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you can 
ride your wheelchair all the way back.
<>

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer in
Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough to
replace Softimage.

But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not
speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that
final result.
El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau" 
escribió:

> Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are
> working with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about
> what we are doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [
> emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
>
> As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are
> offering us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the
> weelchair is better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair
> customized...   pfff.
>
> Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you
> can ride your wheelchair all the way back.
>

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Greg Punchatz

Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas wrote:

> Dear Mr. Bass
>
> My name is Perry Harovas.
>
> You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
> 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
> peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.
>
> I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.
>
> I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave
> in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
> I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
> software (over Lightwave) into
> feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.
>
> I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
> I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
> months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
> I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually
> co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".
>
> I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I
> couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
> in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
> would allow me to create anything I could dream of.
>
> Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
> larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
> largest obstacles
> with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code
> tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.
>
> A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG children's
> shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
> We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
> characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
> An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we
> plunged head on into doing it.
>
> Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
> our characters were coming
> into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
> all the animation we did gone?
>
> Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that
> the animation curves were still there,
> but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
> will).
> Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
> animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.
>
> We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
> issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
> We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
> similar issues. They refused to let us help.
> We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
> list of other things
> so long that I can't remember it now.
>
> Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
> consistent, and endangered our whole company.
>
> We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing
> to NEVER use Maya again.
> We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a
> new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
> and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what
> we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
> Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
> power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.
>
> Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which
> eventually became ICE.
> This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing
> things that I could not believe.
> I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon
> dog, in literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.
>
> Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and
> then beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever
> used.
>
> Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.
>
> I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people.
> Imagine what a team of people could do?
> Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from
> just the last few years:
>
> -'The Lego Movie'
> -The Mill's '98% Human' ad
> -The Embassy's 'Science Project' commercial
> -'Iron Man'
> -'Pacific Rim'
> -'Now You See Me'
> -Subaru 'Car Parts' ad
>
> These are just off the top of my head.
>
> This software, the one your company just retired (also known as EOL, or
> End Of Life) is Softimage.
> You remember Softimage, don't you? You bought it from Avid in 2008. I
> wouldn't blame you for not remembering,
> it never showed up on your home page, it was barely promoted, and it was
> something that you had to hunt for in Siggraph demos.
>
> Softimage, the software that gave rise to

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

By the way just being curious...

During the time you made the decision of killing Softimage. Did you
evaluate that maybe the one that you should have killed instead was Maya to
dedicate your innovative effort to Softimage?

Or that never happened?

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Martin

Improving Maya to make it better than any DCC available is a good thing, and I 
sincerely hope you success.
The problem is that you killed Softimage just too soon. Now as how it is, Maya 
isn't better than SI and I seriously doubt that it will be in 2 years, or 3 or 
4. Even without having ICE in the comparison.

Martin
Sent from my iPhone

> On 2014/03/16, at 0:17, Chris Vienneau  wrote:
> 
> Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are 
> working with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about 
> what we are doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?
> 
> 
> 
> cv/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
> [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
> [emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free 
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
> 
> 
> As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are offering 
> us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the weelchair is 
> better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair customized...   
> pfff.
> 
> Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you can 
> ride your wheelchair all the way back.
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

Problem is it is not just it sucks ok get over it and move on, it is a life
changer for a lot of seasoned Softimage veterans out there that are
effectively reduced back to Maya junior, 2 and more decades of experience
stripped away.
That is something that no invention can replace.
Using software is not just fancy new tool inside it but years of experience
and creative thinking and problem solving and after that much time you
think like a software and becomes to understand it.
Now you are in whole new river trying t o find your way. No fancy tool can
help there but another 10-20 years of experience.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Emilio Hernandez  wrote:

> Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...
>

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Doeke Wartena

Perry that is an awesome open letter.
Your background makes it really strong.


2014-03-15 16:32 GMT+01:00 Greg Punchatz :

> Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas wrote:
>
>> Dear Mr. Bass
>>
>> My name is Perry Harovas.
>>
>> You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
>> 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
>> peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.
>>
>> I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.
>>
>> I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave
>> in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
>> I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
>> software (over Lightwave) into
>> feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.
>>
>> I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
>> I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
>> months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
>> I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually
>> co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".
>>
>> I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet.
>> I couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
>> in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
>> would allow me to create anything I could dream of.
>>
>> Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
>> larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
>> largest obstacles
>> with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code
>> tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.
>>
>> A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG
>> children's shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
>> We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
>> characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
>> An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But
>> we plunged head on into doing it.
>>
>> Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
>> our characters were coming
>> into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
>> all the animation we did gone?
>>
>> Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that
>> the animation curves were still there,
>> but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
>> will).
>> Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
>> animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.
>>
>> We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
>> issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
>> We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
>> similar issues. They refused to let us help.
>> We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
>> list of other things
>> so long that I can't remember it now.
>>
>> Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
>> consistent, and endangered our whole company.
>>
>> We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing
>> to NEVER use Maya again.
>> We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a
>> new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
>> and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than
>> what we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
>> Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
>> power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.
>>
>> Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which
>> eventually became ICE.
>> This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing
>> things that I could not believe.
>> I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon
>> dog, in literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.
>>
>> Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and
>> then beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever
>> used.
>>
>> Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.
>>
>> I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people.
>> Imagine what a team of people could do?
>> Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from
>> just the last few years:
>>
>> -'The Lego Movie'
>> -The Mill's '98% Human' ad
>> -The Embassy's 'Science Project' commercial
>> -'Iron Man'
>> -'Pacific Rim'
>> -'Now You See Me'
>> -Subaru 'Car Parts' ad
>>
>> These are just off the top of my head.
>>
>> This software, the one your company just retired (also known as EOL, or
>> End Of Life) is Softimage.
>> You remember Softimage, don't you? You bought it from

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

Agree with you Mirko.


2014-03-15 12:38 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic :

> Problem is it is not just it sucks ok get over it and move on, it is a
> life changer for a lot of seasoned Softimage veterans out there that are
> effectively reduced back to Maya junior, 2 and more decades of experience
> stripped away.
> That is something that no invention can replace.
> Using software is not just fancy new tool inside it but years of
> experience and creative thinking and problem solving and after that much
> time you think like a software and becomes to understand it.
> Now you are in whole new river trying t o find your way. No fancy tool can
> help there but another 10-20 years of experience.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Emilio Hernandez wrote:
>
>> Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...
>>
>
>

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

We agree. That is why you need to see the plan on how we change how you get the 
end result. Otherwise this is probably a really lame thread to follow for the 
group as we talk over each other and it much less entertaining than the Chris 
is a lying piece of crap diatribe. Let's get on the same page and if you want 
to say after that Autodesk has its head up its ass then fine but if we agree 
that Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, and Softimage can all produce amazing results 
albeit a different way then we are close. There is real value in the way 
Softimage does certain things we want to put in Maya.



cv/








From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
[emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:28 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.


Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer in 
Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough to 
replace Softimage.

But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not 
speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that final 
result.

El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau" 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> escribió:
Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are working 
with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about what we are 
doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?



cv/




From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com]
 on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.


As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are offering 
us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the weelchair is 
better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair customized...   
pfff.

Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you can 
ride your wheelchair all the way back.
<>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread John Clausing

Chris,

I admire you for having the courage to come on this list and tell us your side.

But let's be clear, you don't get to be frustrated, angry, or abusive. You need 
to win us over, you have let us down, pure and simple. You have to convince us 
that there is a good reason to use your product, period.

With respect, you need to SELL us on maya as a replacement for soft. You need 
to tell us what we do when we don't have ICE. You need to put up with our 
frustration at losing our tools because it is not and won't be "just use Maya, 
they do the same thing". They don't, and you have put us in a situation with 
our clients that is untenable at least in the short term, so sell us and in the 
meantime, deal with the consequences of YOUR actions in as patient a way as you 
can.

I look forward to hearing from you, how I replace my tool in concrete ways.

John

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 15, 2014, at 11:46 AM, Chris Vienneau  
> wrote:
> 
> We agree. That is why you need to see the plan on how we change how you get 
> the end result. Otherwise this is probably a really lame thread to follow for 
> the group as we talk over each other and it much less entertaining than the 
> Chris is a lying piece of crap diatribe. Let's get on the same page and if 
> you want to say after that Autodesk has its head up its ass then fine but if 
> we agree that Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, and Softimage can all produce amazing 
> results albeit a different way then we are close. There is real value in the 
> way Softimage does certain things we want to put in Maya.
> 
> 
> 
> cv/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
> [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
> [emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:28 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free 
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
> 
> 
> Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer in 
> Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough to 
> replace Softimage.
> 
> But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not 
> speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that final 
> result.
> 
> El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau" 
> mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> escribió:
> Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are 
> working with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about 
> what we are doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?
> 
> 
> 
> cv/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: 
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
>  
> [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com]
>  on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free 
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
> 
> 
> As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are offering 
> us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the weelchair is 
> better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair customized...   
> pfff.
> 
> Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you can 
> ride your wheelchair all the way back.
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Chris, nobody here on this list is saying you are that, its not you, is
Autodesk, the company we complain. And again, suppose someone comes and
guts your workflow in pieces and then says "look we want the best for you,
so why don´t you tell me what you need", well we need that exactly way of
working you just have taken away. Still don´t understand why is so
difficult.
If you want to have ice on Maya, first you should have to port a lot of
"tools", (workflow i prefer to name it) that Softimage has, and i´m no
programmer but think i have enough capacity to see Maya is not implemented
for 3d in the way Softimage has.

F.



2014-03-15 12:46 GMT-03:00 Chris Vienneau :

> We agree. That is why you need to see the plan on how we change how you
> get the end result. Otherwise this is probably a really lame thread to
> follow for the group as we talk over each other and it much less
> entertaining than the Chris is a lying piece of crap diatribe. Let's get on
> the same page and if you want to say after that Autodesk has its head up
> its ass then fine but if we agree that Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, and Softimage
> can all produce amazing results albeit a different way then we are close.
> There is real value in the way Softimage does certain things we want to put
> in Maya.
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [
> emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:28 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
>
> Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer
> in Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough
> to replace Softimage.
>
> But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not
> speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that
> final result.
>
> El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau"  > escribió:
> Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are
> working with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about
> what we are doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [
> emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
>
> As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are
> offering us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the
> weelchair is better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair
> customized...   pfff.
>
> Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you
> can ride your wheelchair all the way back.
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

2014-03-15 Thread Alen


Nicely said, Mirko

A

On 15.3.2014. 16:38, Mirko Jankovic wrote:
Problem is it is not just it sucks ok get over it and move on, it is a 
life changer for a lot of seasoned Softimage veterans out there that 
are effectively reduced back to Maya junior, 2 and more decades of 
experience stripped away.

That is something that no invention can replace.
Using software is not just fancy new tool inside it but years of 
experience and creative thinking and problem solving and after that 
much time you think like a software and becomes to understand it.
Now you are in whole new river trying t o find your way. No fancy tool 
can help there but another 10-20 years of experience.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Emilio Hernandez > wrote:


Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

Agreed. I am running the transition training program and we need more ideas on 
how to help seasoned Soft users get trained up on Maya whether that be online 
or live training. Any thoughts are welcome.



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Francisco Criado 
[malcriad...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:43 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite

Agree with you Mirko.


2014-03-15 12:38 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic 
mailto:mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com>>:
Problem is it is not just it sucks ok get over it and move on, it is a life 
changer for a lot of seasoned Softimage veterans out there that are effectively 
reduced back to Maya junior, 2 and more decades of experience stripped away.
That is something that no invention can replace.
Using software is not just fancy new tool inside it but years of experience and 
creative thinking and problem solving and after that much time you think like a 
software and becomes to understand it.
Now you are in whole new river trying t o find your way. No fancy tool can help 
there but another 10-20 years of experience.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Emilio Hernandez 
mailto:emi...@e-roja.com>> wrote:

Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...


<>

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

Hi Greg,

I don't have it, but I was going to look.
I wanted to put it here first, since you are all the peers that I mention
in the letter.
If you have his email address, can you please send it to me?

perryharo...@gmail.com

Thank you!



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Greg Punchatz  wrote:

> Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas wrote:
>
>> Dear Mr. Bass
>>
>> My name is Perry Harovas.
>>
>> You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
>> 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
>> peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.
>>
>> I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.
>>
>> I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave
>> in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
>> I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
>> software (over Lightwave) into
>> feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.
>>
>> I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
>> I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
>> months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
>> I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually
>> co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".
>>
>> I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet.
>> I couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
>> in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
>> would allow me to create anything I could dream of.
>>
>> Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
>> larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
>> largest obstacles
>> with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code
>> tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.
>>
>> A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG
>> children's shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
>> We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
>> characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
>> An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But
>> we plunged head on into doing it.
>>
>> Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
>> our characters were coming
>> into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
>> all the animation we did gone?
>>
>> Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that
>> the animation curves were still there,
>> but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
>> will).
>> Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
>> animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.
>>
>> We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
>> issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
>> We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
>> similar issues. They refused to let us help.
>> We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
>> list of other things
>> so long that I can't remember it now.
>>
>> Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
>> consistent, and endangered our whole company.
>>
>> We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing
>> to NEVER use Maya again.
>> We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a
>> new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
>> and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than
>> what we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
>> Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
>> power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.
>>
>> Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which
>> eventually became ICE.
>> This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing
>> things that I could not believe.
>> I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon
>> dog, in literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.
>>
>> Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and
>> then beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever
>> used.
>>
>> Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.
>>
>> I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people.
>> Imagine what a team of people could do?
>> Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from
>> just the last few years:
>>
>> -'The Lego Movie'
>> -The Mill's '98% Human' ad
>> -The Embassy's 'Science Project' commercial
>> -'Iron Man'
>> -'Pacific Rim'
>> -'Now You See Me'
>> -Subaru 'Car Parts' ad
>>
>> These are just off the top of

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

I will add to Francisco.

All I have seen is that you are adding tools for Maya. Not really improving
the workflow.  Starting with the UI.

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Leendert A. Hartog

Well, the true nature of an "open" letter is that it needs to be 
published, not sent!


Greetz
Leendert

--

Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist
AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

2014-03-15 Thread John Clausing

Gosh, I hope you're sincere.

Please let us know where we can find such "transition vids".

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:02 PM, Chris Vienneau  
> wrote:
> 
> Agreed. I am running the transition training program and we need more ideas 
> on how to help seasoned Soft users get trained up on Maya whether that be 
> online or live training. Any thoughts are welcome.
> 
> 
> 
> cv/
> 
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
> [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Francisco Criado 
> [malcriad...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:43 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free 
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite
> 
> Agree with you Mirko.
> 
> 
> 2014-03-15 12:38 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic 
> mailto:mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com>>:
> Problem is it is not just it sucks ok get over it and move on, it is a life 
> changer for a lot of seasoned Softimage veterans out there that are 
> effectively reduced back to Maya junior, 2 and more decades of experience 
> stripped away.
> That is something that no invention can replace.
> Using software is not just fancy new tool inside it but years of experience 
> and creative thinking and problem solving and after that much time you think 
> like a software and becomes to understand it.
> Now you are in whole new river trying t o find your way. No fancy tool can 
> help there but another 10-20 years of experience.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Emilio Hernandez 
> mailto:emi...@e-roja.com>> wrote:
> 
> Well innovating Maya is not such a difficult task...
> 
> 
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Greg Punchatz

Chris,

 I am all ears, we are very interested in talking (as you know you were
supposed to call or visit me a while back ; )

 Emilio, please don't be rude... while I think Chris's company and perhaps
his are views and perception are misinformed and or misguided,   they are
not evil people. Name calling will get us no where... in fact it just puts
the nail in the coffin faster..

Pointing out facts are fine. Pointing ongoing issues with AD and its
culture and results is awesome. Pointing out that Maya is in fact broken in
so many ways is just what we need tooMayans are used to working around
these issues they don't even realize they are an issue. Pointing out how
broken the communication is with the beta teams is awesome.

Pointing out things like the Xgen demo vs what the guys at Whiskey Tree can
do with ICE is more than fair. Just because it's from Disney does not mean
that its good... Xgen at Sig was just one of the worst product demos I have
ever seen The hair part was nifty, but when they used it for placing
tree's I just about busted a gut laughing at the inadequacies of the
implementation or core tech. Pointing out that AD hid the Whiskey Tree demo
because they knew it made the new micky mouse tech in Maya look useless is
important to do because it shows that AD does in fact  stifle innovation if
it is not aligned with the "Big Plan".

I just want to continue the discussion on how best to retire softimage or
better yet put soft into semi retirement for just a tad longer so we
can see if ADs plans (whatever they are) pan out. Keep it on standby in
case the plans you currently have go the way of Toxic...

I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one day
that is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just a fact.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Chris Vienneau <
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:

> We agree. That is why you need to see the plan on how we change how you
> get the end result. Otherwise this is probably a really lame thread to
> follow for the group as we talk over each other and it much less
> entertaining than the Chris is a lying piece of crap diatribe. Let's get on
> the same page and if you want to say after that Autodesk has its head up
> its ass then fine but if we agree that Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, and Softimage
> can all produce amazing results albeit a different way then we are close.
> There is real value in the way Softimage does certain things we want to put
> in Maya.
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [
> emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:28 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
>
> Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer
> in Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough
> to replace Softimage.
>
> But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not
> speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that
> final result.
>
> El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau"  > escribió:
> Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are
> working with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about
> what we are doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [
> emi...@e-roja.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >
> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
> w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>
>
> As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are
> offering us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the
> weelchair is better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair
> customized...   pfff.
>
> Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you
> can ride your wheelchair all the way back.
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Rob Wuijster


Hi Chris,

What AD doesn't seem/want to understand is that it took away the tool we 
make money with, to provide for ourself and our families.

And 'suck it up and change to Maya/Max' is basically the answer we got.

The question here is, can we retrain ourself? It will differ from person 
to person, and range of tools used on a daily basis. But in the end, sure.
But at what costs? We have spent a lot of money year after year on 
licenses, on training, on tools. Lots of hours spent learning the tool 
and honing your skills. Often after work hours. It will take a long time 
to get comfortable to that same level, and that means less income.


This retraining will probably be somewhat less evasive for smaller 
teams, but the bigger companies face a whole different ballgame here.
Pipelines have to be restructured, tools have to be rewritten, staff has 
to be retrained.


But, with the forced transition to Maya or Max, we cannot expect our 
clients to understand the price or timetable suddenly goes up because we 
cannot do the job as we normally could. Especially with tools like ICE, 
which have become an vital tool for all production for most of us.
Or have the same timetables and hire in extra staff, because the tools 
we have to use aren't as fast or good as we're used to.


As you said that the end results are the same, but the route taken is 
different. We SI users still know and feel that Maya or Max aren't the 
proper road taken for that result. We strongly feel that both Maya or 
Max cannot do what SI can do in our situation. There's ton's of movies 
and commercials out there that prove that. On budgets that would be 
impossible to do in another app/pipeline.


You've read the letters from some very well known and respected names in 
the business. The damage AD is doing here is not just to the SI 
community, but far beyond that and it's not really sinking in at AD HQ 
I'm afraid.


You and Maurice are probably very nice people when met in person, but 
don't expect any understanding from us after years of 'The future for 
Softimage is bright' despite all the emails that say otherwise.


If Maya 2015 turns out to be the overruling app for us all, I will 
congratulate you guys.

But until than Hell is still a hot place, and pigs cannot fly..


Rob

\/-\/\/

On 15-3-2014 16:46, Chris Vienneau wrote:

We agree. That is why you need to see the plan on how we change how you get the 
end result. Otherwise this is probably a really lame thread to follow for the 
group as we talk over each other and it much less entertaining than the Chris 
is a lying piece of crap diatribe. Let's get on the same page and if you want 
to say after that Autodesk has its head up its ass then fine but if we agree 
that Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, and Softimage can all produce amazing results 
albeit a different way then we are close. There is real value in the way 
Softimage does certain things we want to put in Maya.



cv/








From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
[emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:28 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.


Chris first bring back Softimage and then show us what you have to offer in 
Maya that will allow us to evaluate if what you are doing is good enough to 
replace Softimage.

But at this moment. Maya is still a long way behind Softimage.  I am not 
speaking of the ending result.  I am talking about how you get to that final 
result.

El mar 15, 2014 4:18 PM, "Chris Vienneau" 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> escribió:
Emilio there are people on this list and within the community that are working 
with us right now and taking us up on our offer to hear more about what we are 
doing? What do you have to lose to hear our plan?



cv/




From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] 
on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.


As I said in another post. Autodesk cut us our legs and now they are offering 
us a wheelchair. And they are trying to convince us that the weelchair is 
better than our legs by asking us how we want the wheelchair customized...   
pfff.

Dont mean to be rude but... You can go back where you came from.  And you can 
ride your wheelchair all the way back.


-
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2014.0.4336 / Virus Database: 3722/7199 - Release Date: 03/15/1

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Perryharovas

Of course you are correct, Leendert.

I published it on my Facebook page as the only public thing on there and would 
love anyone on this list to please add it or send it to anyone you think might 
help get the word out. You are encouraged to tweet about it, submit it to 
websites for them to publish, to news organizations, anything. All the help we 
can get, and give to each other, is very much needed and appreciated. 

Thank you!

Sent from my iPhone
Please excuse typos and
brief replies. 
Thank you!

> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:19 PM, "Leendert A. Hartog"  wrote:
> 
> Well, the true nature of an "open" letter is that it needs to be published, 
> not sent!
> 
> Greetz
> Leendert
> 
> -- 
> 
> Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist
> AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com
> 
>

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

Chris again. Thank you for helping in the transition and you are trying to
do your job.  But you are still not listening to us. You just want to drag
us. I have been working in Maya for three years from now for some
particular projects that I needed to deliver in Maya.

Maya again is no option for us.  If you had not kill Softimage there will
be no transition at all. Still even that you killed Softimage, Maya today
is not an option for us.

We don't have the resources nor the time to work in Maya, even if we have
the same level of skill to use Maya as we have in Softimage.

Simple by digging into the connections of the nodes in Maya in the node
editor, is a mayhem!  The channel/layer editor is another mayhem.  The way
you work with objects and the selections in Maya are terrible. Rigging is a
nightmare. Managing the blendshapes is really annoying.

Doing math and expressions in Maya sucks. Your utility nodes have no
coherence at all.  The inputs and outputs are presented in one way at the
node editor and in another way in your connection editor.

Just to address a few.

Maya slows my workflow by twice the time at least to achieve the final
result.

I am working in a rig that if I had done it in Softimage I would have it
finished by now. But Maya's workflow takes me triple the time.

Believe me that if I had built the rig as fast in Maya as I do it in
Softimage. Not because I do not know Maya. But because that is the way Maya
works, we will be not having tgis transition conversation.

Expect not a transition but a flee from Autodesk to other solutions.

RE: Open Letter to Carl Bass

carl.b...@autodesk.com



And cc



chris.brads...@autodesk.com



as he is the new head of M&E that replaced Marc Petit.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Perry Harovas 
[perryharo...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 12:06 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

Hi Greg,

I don't have it, but I was going to look.
I wanted to put it here first, since you are all the peers that I mention in 
the letter.
If you have his email address, can you please send it to me?

perryharo...@gmail.com

Thank you!



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Greg Punchatz 
mailto:g...@janimation.com>> wrote:
Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas 
mailto:perryharo...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear Mr. Bass

My name is Perry Harovas.

You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.

I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.

I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave in 
Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that 
software (over Lightwave) into
feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.

I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only months 
earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually co-authored the 
first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".

I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I 
couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that would 
allow me to create anything I could dream of.

Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on 
larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the largest 
obstacles
with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code tools 
into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.

A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG children's 
shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the 
characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we 
plunged head on into doing it.

Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that our 
characters were coming
into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had all 
the animation we did gone?

Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that the 
animation curves were still there,
but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you will).
Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the 
animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.

We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this issue. We 
spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having similar 
issues. They refused to let us help.
We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a list of 
other things
so long that I can't remember it now.

Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being 
consistent, and endangered our whole company.

We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing to 
NEVER use Maya again.
We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a new 
application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what we 
could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The power in 
one application seemed to be nearly limitless.

Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which eventually 
became ICE.
This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing things 
that I could not believe.
I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon dog, in 
literally 20 minutes of "fiddling around" with ICE.

Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and then 
beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever used.

Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole.

I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people. Im

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Leendert A. Hartog


What's the exact address of your Facebook page?
That would seem a good place to link to...

Greetz
Leendert

--

Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist
AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Toonafish

Sorry, my mistake. You're right, 1.12 Billion in 2013 according to 
marketwatch.


And that's a nice picture you paint of a bright future for all of us 
with AD family. But I'm sure you and the other good people at AD can 
understand why some of us will have a hard time believing in promises 
made by the friendly people of AD. The same friendly people decided to 
retire an amazing tool like Softimage, even though they promised us they 
would not do so, and are currently trying to replace it with a pie in 
the sky.


I believe it when I see it.

-Ronald


On 3/15/2014 14:37, Chris Vienneau wrote:


Hi guys,

Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion 
in sales and administrative. The administrative covers everything from 
all the people that support the developers to the building and 
computers. Autodesk spends more on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO 
Carl Bass uses the products and tells about what he doesn't like all 
the time. Again you can check him making stuff here: 
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king . We have a huge 
research group that drives its own agenda 
(http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of labs/research 
projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch, 
reality capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been 
involved in projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer 
research 
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software ). 
Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran 
softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a 
technology driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk 
in M&E has said this to this community but I like working for Autodesk 
and believe that this is a good company.


For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up 
fluid flip method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning 
method that was a siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair 
and cloth simulation of Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the 
innovation in this industry comes from the top studios and the work 
that comes out of production. The snow in Frozen was amazing but a lot 
of work. (http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) If 
 you 
take the innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the 
last five years the origins are all on production. With tech like 
Alembic, openvdb, Ptex, UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open 
EXR, etc there are smart people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain 
(ex-weta), Bill Polson (Pixar), Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob 
Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt Disney animation), and Hilmar Koch 
(ILM) that make great code and open source to the benefit of the 
community. Then there are tons of contributors like Autodesk and 
the Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug fixing so 
this all works together. Even the applications that are young and fast 
moving like Mari (weta) and Arnold (Sony) are from production and 
still take their main direction from production just like Maya. All of 
the applications from Soft with Jurassic to Maya with Dinosaurs got 
their footing with production work. The fact that Toy Story was all 
built on in house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing movies 
like Despicable Me and Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools 
is amazing. Go back and look at the tools you think are innovating and 
see how many of their "innovations" are based off Siggraph papers or 
are inspired by tools written in production. I for one have no problem 
giving credit where credit is due and most anything in Maya that is 
good has come from being built in partnership with customers.


This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX 
that foster and promote innovation and we love that more and more of 
the base platform is community based. We have led the VES effort to 
standard Linux libraries for all the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, 
Autodesk) and get to work in organizations like open GL building out 
the next gen drivers and MPAA (setting the new ACES standard for 
replacing Cineon) all building up the base upon which the industry 
sits. We get to package up technology like Xgen and bring it to the 
larger market and all vendors get to put in Alembic to share data and 
open color I/O to set color within a facility.


This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were 
once only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has 
allowed stories to be told in countries that have never before had a 
voice. There is no one tool to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft 
vs Houdini vs Modo vs Zbrush vs fabric does not foster innovation. Raf 
said it well when he described the Lego as all of those tools plus 
internal tools plus really smart people plus an amazing story made 
what we

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.


On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:


I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one 
day that is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda 
just a fact.



I'm so with you on this..

We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups 
seats to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but 
also to have a deep look at Maya.


Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer 
what i need on a day to day basis.


It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also 
that the tools that are available take more time away from me than their 
Softimage counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super 
tight deadlines (where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver) 
every click counts.


If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop Softimage. 
But this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will happen in the 
next 2 years with someone using Maya.


Chris

"Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Andy Jones

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau  wrote:

> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>

Nope

RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Angus Davidson

Hi Chris

Part of the problem is the users have been begging to be heard for years now. 
Even if it was under NDA. Unfortunately the very few times that happened it was 
only for a very small amount of people at specific events (that 99% of your 
user base couldn't go to)  I have asked to be put under NDA  so I could find 
out what went on many times only to be told its limited to only the attendees. 
Whats happening now is very much reactionary to try and keep people within the 
AD fold. Its very plain that currently the majority of people who have voiced 
their opinion have come down to this. Use SI for as long as possible while 
finding a non AD alternative/s to switch to in the future. Which I am fairly 
sure was very far from AD's original thinking.

The 2013 and 2014 subscription releases were massive proof that AD was 
incredibly out of touch with everyone except a few studios in the far east. The 
major release for 2014 (ie the Camera sequencer ) wasn't even done with 
subscription money. It was paid for via your consultancy arm. This went a long 
way to explain why it was pretty much useless to everyone else. So people were 
already pissed off because their subscription money was giving a tiny ROI 
compared to Maya.

Because of this when it was announced it generated a lot of anger. People are 
still very angry, and while I don't necessarily agree with people telling you 
personally  to bugger off I can understand why they say that. Because of the 
way this was done it directly affects peoples livelihood. There will be 
companies that will close and a lot of freelancers that will loose jobs because 
they will not be allowed to use a tool of their choice.  With the best of 
intentions Maya is no where near as optimal as SI for the solo artist / small 
studio. You have had nearly a months worth of the worlds best artists telling 
you exactly that (years if you guys were listening on si-community). There is 
just no way that they can do the same work in the same time using Maya. That 
directly screws the bottom line. time = money. Going around a month or so 
telling your bigger clients what was happening was not nearly enough time and 
woefully inadequate..

For education it is a much bigger problem. While the commercial guys can go on 
using SI till you pry it from their cold dead fingers we cant. The day you 
announced it EOL we are no longer able to offer it as an option. No student in 
their right mind is ever going to play to learn EOL software. The irony is we 
have just last year gotten to the point of entering into international 
festivals (and being accepted and doing well) I can tell you that for a fact 
that would have been impossible using Maya. Because we will have to switch back 
to Maya (because of industry reasons) we will have lost all of that momentum.

We dont use ICE in our course due to time constraints but it very obvious to 
anyone in touch with the industry that Maya is a long way off providing a 
replacement for it. I am not against AD having fewer dcc apps. In fact if you 
go through my postings on si-community you will see I have called for AD moving 
to only one cross platform application. Until you do that you will always be 
out innovated no matter what technologies you put in. Mayas biggest problem is 
its a mass of really great tech with very little workflow benefit to show for 
it. The major problem is that SI EOL while inevitable (which I am sure to catch 
some flak for) was announced before Maya was in anyway able to replace it. 
Which brings me to my last point.

Maya should not have been the replacement to begin with. Take a step back and 
see that  trying to replace one 20+ year old software with another 20+ year old 
software  is a plan which will ultimately fail. No matter what great innovation 
you cram into Maya its base nuts and bolts has a limit. If your not working on 
a next Gen framework as of now you are in serious trouble. I have only heard of 
one commercial place locally looking at Maya as a replacement (our hand is 
somewhat forced in education for now) for SI. Everyone else is looking at apps 
like Houdini as they can see it as a long term investment. Autodesk has not 
only  opened the door to Alternatives with their handling of this whole thing 
they have practically invited them in. These are companies which are not bound 
by the same rules that you are. They are agile, they can tell people whats 
coming (and invite public opinion) and most importantly they actively engage 
with their communities. All of which you are unable to be.

I wish you the best of luck trying to integrate SI into Maya. Personally I 
think its a very bad idea. The last thing Maya needs is more workflow options.

Kind regards

Angus



From: Chris Vienneau [chris.vienn...@autodesk.com]
Sent: 15 March 2014 05:17 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

I just placed it on my website, you can use that, because the problem with
Facebook is you can't
see it if you don't have a Facebook account, even though it is marked as
"public".

Even so, here is that link:

http://www.facebook.com/harovas

Here is the direct link to the letter on my website:

http://www.theafterimage.com/#!vstc0=openletter

Thank you!

Perry

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Leendert A. Hartog wrote:

> What's the exact address of your Facebook page?
> That would seem a good place to link to...
>
>
> Greetz
> Leendert
>
> --
>
> Leendert A. Hartog - Softimage hobbyist
> AKA Hirazi Blue - Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com
>
>
>

-- 

Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com 

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering
Maya"
-Member of the Visual Effects Society
(VES)

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

Thank you for these, Chris.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:11 PM, Chris Vienneau <
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:

> carl.b...@autodesk.com
>
>
>
> And cc
>
>
>
> chris.brads...@autodesk.com
>
>
>
> as he is the new head of M&E that replaced Marc Petit.
>
>
>
> cv/
>
>
>
>
>
> 
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Perry Harovas [
> perryharo...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 12:06 PM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass
>
> Hi Greg,
>
> I don't have it, but I was going to look.
> I wanted to put it here first, since you are all the peers that I mention
> in the letter.
> If you have his email address, can you please send it to me?
>
> perryharo...@gmail.com
>
> Thank you!
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Greg Punchatz  > wrote:
> Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas  > wrote:
> Dear Mr. Bass
>
> My name is Perry Harovas.
>
> You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
> 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
> peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.
>
> I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.
>
> I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave
> in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
> I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
> software (over Lightwave) into
> feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.
>
> I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
> I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
> months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
> I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually
> co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".
>
> I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I
> couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
> in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
> would allow me to create anything I could dream of.
>
> Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
> larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
> largest obstacles
> with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code
> tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.
>
> A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG children's
> shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
> We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
> characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
> An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we
> plunged head on into doing it.
>
> Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
> our characters were coming
> into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
> all the animation we did gone?
>
> Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that
> the animation curves were still there,
> but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
> will).
> Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
> animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.
>
> We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
> issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
> We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
> similar issues. They refused to let us help.
> We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
> list of other things
> so long that I can't remember it now.
>
> Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
> consistent, and endangered our whole company.
>
> We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing
> to NEVER use Maya again.
> We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a
> new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
> and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what
> we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
> Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
> power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.
>
> Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which
> eventually became ICE.
> This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing
> things that I could not believe.
> I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon
> dog, in literally 20

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Will Robertson

nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>
>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>
>
> Nope
>



-- 

* Will Robertson*
  917.822.3746
 tinyelevator.com

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread David Barosin

"Nope" sounds about right.

Chris will all due respect.  It's like asking how many letters to you need
to say your favorite words.
ICE is an established visual language for the Softimage folk.  You can
program with it and it reaches far beyond just simulation.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>
>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>
>
> Nope
>

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

OK, I just emailed it to both Carl Bass and Chris Bradshaw.




On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Perry Harovas wrote:

> Thank you for these, Chris.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:11 PM, Chris Vienneau <
> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>
>> carl.b...@autodesk.com
>>
>>
>>
>> And cc
>>
>>
>>
>> chris.brads...@autodesk.com
>>
>>
>>
>> as he is the new head of M&E that replaced Marc Petit.
>>
>>
>>
>> cv/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [
>> softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Perry Harovas [
>> perryharo...@gmail.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 12:06 PM
>> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
>> Subject: Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass
>>
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> I don't have it, but I was going to look.
>> I wanted to put it here first, since you are all the peers that I mention
>> in the letter.
>> If you have his email address, can you please send it to me?
>>
>> perryharo...@gmail.com
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Greg Punchatz > > wrote:
>> Thanks for adding your voice .. you do have his email address right?
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Perry Harovas > > wrote:
>> Dear Mr. Bass
>>
>> My name is Perry Harovas.
>>
>> You don't know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user.
>> 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my
>> peers who having  been using Softimage for up to 20 years.
>>
>> I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this.
>>
>> I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave
>> in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer.
>> I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that
>> software (over Lightwave) into
>> feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ.
>>
>> I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly.
>> I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only
>> months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc.
>> I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually
>> co-authored the first book about Maya, "Mastering Maya Complete 2".
>>
>> I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet.
>> I couldn't get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness
>> in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that
>> would allow me to create anything I could dream of.
>>
>> Except, in reality, the word 'dream' is appropriate, because as I took on
>> larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the
>> largest obstacles
>> with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code
>> tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all.
>>
>> A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG
>> children's shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people.
>> We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the
>> characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc.
>> An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But
>> we plunged head on into doing it.
>>
>> Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that
>> our characters were coming
>> into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had
>> all the animation we did gone?
>>
>> Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that
>> the animation curves were still there,
>> but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you
>> will).
>> Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the
>> animation curves to the rig, saving months of work.
>>
>> We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this
>> issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue.
>> We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having
>> similar issues. They refused to let us help.
>> We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a
>> list of other things
>> so long that I can't remember it now.
>>
>> Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being
>> consistent, and endangered our whole company.
>>
>> We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing
>> to NEVER use Maya again.
>> We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a
>> new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didn't fail us,
>> and didn't need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than
>> what we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me!
>> Thoughts of "Why did we not do this earlier?" ran through my head. The
>> power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless.
>>
>> Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha te

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

2014-03-15 Thread Jason S

Hello Chris,  I think you got spot-on what (or types of things) everyone 
wanted to know,

and goes a long way at inspiring confidence in what lies ahead,
and everything genuinely sounds quite amazing to say the least!

And to top it all, pretty-much adresses the main points that were 
commonly to be expected in a truer "Softimaya".


   - Simpler UI

   - Smoother Workflow

   - More versatile Modeling

   - History stack

   - All with great performance.

And while (quite understandably) without going into details,
it definitely gave a broad idea of what is in the works.

(If you see me coming with a "but", well you would be right ;-)

BUT!..

.. what seems to be /wrong /in this situation, is the /forcing/ of 
people in directions

which really is what seems to be the crux of the issue people are having.

Many of SI's main advantages have been part of it almost since it's launch,
and are still today what enables average non-rocket scientist artists to do
what would otherwise be far more difficult, complicated, long, or 
basically impossible,

and similarly has been known to expand the reach of actual rocket scientist.

And from that time there were a number of other solutions out to match it's
straightforward access to complexity, all with varying results.

So what I'm getting at is, if some, all, or most of these truly great 
plans were to come to pass,
people would -naturally- gravitate towards it, as people aren't asking 
for an SI clone,

but in the end .. to be able to churn out as much work out of it,
and/or at the same (or higher) level, without all the excessive overhead
that usually comes with doing such high-end stuff.

So the point of my message is, or if one single thing were to come across,
it would be ... for goodness sakes... LET PEOPLE CHOOSE..  (!)

As people would CHOOSE to go with the simpler yet more enabling solution
if that would indeed turn out to be the case.

Which would of course imply to..  yes..  LET SOFTIMAGE LIVE (!)  (for 
/-goodness- /sakes... )

.. and may the (actual) "best"  (in their respective contexts)
take-over */naturally /*(right) ,
as opposed to /*forcibly*/
(very-much /wrong /in all accounts, or pretty-much at any way to look at 
it)


(only *if* people were actually a factor in, indeed, otherwise mostly 
money-driven corporate decision-making)

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Graham Bell

Interestingly, you could flip that around and apply that to a Maya/Max 
guy/studio talking about Softimage. In fact more often than not, they did.

From: Christoph Muetze mailto:c...@glarestudios.de>>
Reply-To: 
"softimage@listproc.autodesk.com" 
mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
To: "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com" 
mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.

On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:

I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one day that 
is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just a fact.

I'm so with you on this..

We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups seats 
to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but also to have a 
deep look at Maya.

Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer what i 
need on a day to day basis.

It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also that 
the tools that are available take more time away from me than their Softimage 
counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super tight deadlines 
(where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver) every click counts.

If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop Softimage. But 
this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will happen in the next 2 
years with someone using Maya.

Chris
<>

Re: Proposal for TDs and Artist - Expand Softimage ( and other ) tools

2014-03-15 Thread Leonard Koch

Yeah Olivier, I think that is how bothj Eric's emTopolizer and my LK Fabric
came about.

If we could set something like you guys are suggesting up it would be
amazing.
There is nothing I'd rather do than build tools for the community all day.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Arman Sernaz  wrote:

> My studio is planning to keep using Softimage and doing researchs with
> Fabric Engine as long as I'm not convinced that I can do better with the
> rest.
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:38 PM, Nicolas Esposito <3dv...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> For me the main problem is still that AD would never sell Softimage to
>> anyone, because they know they fucked it up, and they know for sure if
>> SideFX or The Foundry will buy Soft, they will literally kick out Maya and
>> Max in a couple of years.
>>
>> Regarding the subscription renewal I completely agree with you, I'd
>> rather invest that money for custom tools, instead of giving my money to
>> AD, so that developers would gladly build those tools and get paid...and
>> thats why I think that the "share for free" would be a kick in the nuts for
>> those who developed the custom tools that they use in Softimage.
>>
>> Greg, how much time and development you guys spent on developing the
>> "Janimation HeadTech" demo/character? looks like Facerobot, but I suppose
>> that is heavily modified together with ICE in order to achieve the
>> deformation technology.
>>
>> Thoat is something I would pay to have, together with the muscle systema
>> that the guys at Fabric engine are developing, or what Paul Smith did, or
>> an upgrade to the plugins from Exocortex or LK.
>>
>> I really would like to show my appreciation to those guys, and together
>> with others I think that we could give them the possibility to get their
>> money for the time they spent developing what they did, and for more future
>> tools if they want to.
>>
>> I thought about kickstarter, but could be something different as
>> well.in general something to keep track of those who contribuite to the
>> donation, then share the tools with them.
>> It would be highly unfair from my point of view to share those tools with
>> everyone who uses Softimage, because at this point it'll just be free stuff
>> paid by 20-30-40 people.
>>
>> Maybe, when Softimage will eventually die, some of the studios who
>> developed the tools will share them for free, but who knows
>>
>>
>> 2014-03-14 16:13 GMT+01:00 Greg Punchatz :
>>
>> I like the idea, I was thinking along the same lines but much BIGGER.
>>> Let's kick the shit of Autodesk at their own game...3d development.
>>>
>>> I think we should set up this has a PUBLIC challenge, us agasinst
>>> Autodesk Maya dev team, in a development death match. Thinking this would
>>> go much further in showing Autodesk what an incredible mistake it made by
>>> killing Softimage. Release after release... we will kick their fucking ass.
>>>
>>> Here is what I don't really think Autodesk really understands
>>> Softimage and particularly Ice allows you to develop features that are
>>> production ready to the public a much faster rate than you can in any of
>>> other full Dcc applications they own.
>>>
>>> I never understood why there wasn't a huge effort to create new tools
>>> with ice and after it had matured a bit. I was really hoping for an ice
>>> version of face robot, as it was not so linear... the idea of face robot is
>>> great.. but picking session is brilliant, but things can get terribly
>>> linear after that point on with no real way to fix what's under the hood.
>>>  So this really is my challenge--- to the user base and developers. We
>>> set up a kickstarter campaign or something to raise money to help out
>>> develop Maya...
>>>
>>> Show it for what it is, an aging dinosaur that's about to become
>>> fossilized.
>>>
>>> First off is a kick starter the right way to go? How do we get the money
>>> from a single kickstarter into the hands of multiple developers ? Ideally I
>>> would like to see something that benefits all Softimage users to contribute
>>> to the user build... it could be a single workgroup that we all share. I
>>> know that there a lot of plug-ins already that are very useful, but
>>> sometimes getting organized workgroup of all the latest and greatest core
>>> tools is difficult .
>>>
>>> I have 1 million ideas of what needs to be done, but I have no idea what
>>> it's capable with the current SDK . I'm sure everybody else has their list
>>> as well.
>>>
>>> We need BIG shiny features... as well as taking care of anything we can
>>> that will keep Softimage viable for years to come.
>>>
>>> Is it possible that any of the big studios would consider releasing some
>>> of their tools to the Softimage community? I've heard and seen some of
>>> these tools in action , if we could get something going quick enough we
>>> would already have a far more impressive release and what is most likely
>>> coming from Maya. These tools for your competitive advantage, but

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Jonah Friedman

Nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson wrote:

> nope.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
>> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>>
>>
>> Nope
>>
>
>
>
> --
> 
> * Will Robertson*
>   917.822.3746
>  tinyelevator.com
>
>
>
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite

2014-03-15 Thread Petr Zloty

Chris:
I'm looking forward for this transition training videos. I cannot find any
high quality level training (except few ones from Gnomon) that could speed
up transition of senior XSI user to senior Maya user.
Please be sure to show us in that upcoming trainings how to do stuff in
Maya we are used to do in XSI, in same time or faster in Maya. And show us
please also something we cannot do in XSI.
Will there be any sneak peek of that mentioned features in Maya? Or they
are far away from publishing?

It's quite disappointing that those videos aren't already published, It's
almost 10 days when EOL was announced and probably much more than when it
was planned and it looks like you started with this transition training
idea just now. Please don't take it offensive.

Will there be recording of the live Q&A webinar that was planned for the
monday (for viewing later on the web)?
Thank you very much, P.Z.


2014-03-15 17:37 GMT+01:00 Emilio Hernandez :

> Chris again. Thank you for helping in the transition and you are trying to
> do your job.  But you are still not listening to us. You just want to drag
> us. I have been working in Maya for three years from now for some
> particular projects that I needed to deliver in Maya.
>
> Maya again is no option for us.  If you had not kill Softimage there will
> be no transition at all. Still even that you killed Softimage, Maya today
> is not an option for us.
>
> We don't have the resources nor the time to work in Maya, even if we have
> the same level of skill to use Maya as we have in Softimage.
>
> Simple by digging into the connections of the nodes in Maya in the node
> editor, is a mayhem!  The channel/layer editor is another mayhem.  The way
> you work with objects and the selections in Maya are terrible. Rigging is a
> nightmare. Managing the blendshapes is really annoying.
>
> Doing math and expressions in Maya sucks. Your utility nodes have no
> coherence at all.  The inputs and outputs are presented in one way at the
> node editor and in another way in your connection editor.
>
> Just to address a few.
>
> Maya slows my workflow by twice the time at least to achieve the final
> result.
>
> I am working in a rig that if I had done it in Softimage I would have it
> finished by now. But Maya's workflow takes me triple the time.
>
> Believe me that if I had built the rig as fast in Maya as I do it in
> Softimage. Not because I do not know Maya. But because that is the way Maya
> works, we will be not having tgis transition conversation.
>
> Expect not a transition but a flee from Autodesk to other solutions.
>

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread todd peleg

nope.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson wrote:

> nope.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
>> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>>
>>
>> Nope
>>
>
>
>
> --
> 
> * Will Robertson*
>   917.822.3746
>  tinyelevator.com
>
>
>
>

RE: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Angus Davidson

Should probably be linked via si-community as well as they are not all on this 
list.

From: Perry Harovas [perryharo...@gmail.com]
Sent: 15 March 2014 07:08 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

I just placed it on my website, you can use that, because the problem with 
Facebook is you can't
see it if you don't have a Facebook account, even though it is marked as 
"public".

Even so, here is that link:

http://www.facebook.com/harovas

Here is the direct link to the letter on my website:

http://www.theafterimage.com/#!vstc0=openletter

Thank you!

Perry

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Leendert A. Hartog 
mailto:hirazib...@live.nl>> wrote:
What's the exact address of your Facebook page?
That would seem a good place to link to...

Greetz
Leendert

--

Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist
AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  
si-community.com

--

Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering 
Maya"
-Member of the Visual Effects Society 
(VES)

This communication is 
intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this 
communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original 
message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the 
permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to 
enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus 
advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the 
University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which 
are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the 
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and 
outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in 
writing to the contrary.

RE: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Angel Negron

NOPE

From: toddape...@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:21:00 -0400
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The  
Toolset"
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

nope.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Will Robertson  wrote:

nope.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau  
wrote:

Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all use 
that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?

Nope

-- 

 Will Robertson  917.822.3746

 tinyelevator.com

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

Not preaching a religion here... In the 15+ years i've been using 
Softimage products i've "converted" more hardcore Max and Maya users by 
just outrunning them time and time again than i can count. Admittedly 
realtime graphics is a very special field of profession and also very 
rare outside of the gaming industry so it's kinda easy to become a user 
of a tool that was just not designed to deliver here... and those users 
are more likely to learn a new app if its vastly superior...which 
Softimage (still) is.


Chris

On 15/03/14 18:15, Graham Bell wrote:

Interestingly, you could flip that around and apply that to a Maya/Max 
guy/studio talking about Softimage. In fact more often than not, they did.


From: Christoph Muetze mailto:c...@glarestudios.de>>
Reply-To: "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com" 
mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
To: "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com" 
mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya 
or Max or any Suite.

On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:

I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one day that 
is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just a fact.


I'm so with you on this..

We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups seats 
to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but also to have a 
deep look at Maya.

Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer what i 
need on a day to day basis.

It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also that 
the tools that are available take more time away from me than their Softimage 
counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super tight deadlines 
(where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver) every click counts.

If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop Softimage. But 
this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will happen in the next 2 
years with someone using Maya.

Chris

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Leendert A. Hartog


Let the retweeting commence...
https://twitter.com/HiraziB/status/444888249572786176

@Angus - please do, I post too much as it is!

Greetz
Leendert

--

Leendert A. Hartog – Softimage hobbyist
AKA Hirazi Blue – Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

Good idea, done:

http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5035




On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Angus Davidson
wrote:

>  Should probably be linked via si-community as well as they are not all
> on this list.
>
>
>  --
> *From:* Perry Harovas [perryharo...@gmail.com]
> *Sent:* 15 March 2014 07:08 PM
>
> *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> *Subject:* Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass
>
>   I just placed it on my website, you can use that, because the problem
> with Facebook is you can't
> see it if you don't have a Facebook account, even though it is marked as
> "public".
>
>  Even so, here is that link:
>
>  http://www.facebook.com/harovas
>
>  Here is the direct link to the letter on my website:
>
>  http://www.theafterimage.com/#!vstc0=openletter
>
>  Thank you!
>
>  Perry
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Leendert A. Hartog 
> wrote:
>
>> What's the exact address of your Facebook page?
>> That would seem a good place to link to...
>>
>>
>> Greetz
>> Leendert
>>
>> --
>>
>> Leendert A. Hartog - Softimage hobbyist
>> AKA Hirazi Blue - Administrator  @, NOT the owner of  si-community.com
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>  --
>
>
>
>
>
> Perry Harovas
> 203-448-7206
> Animation and Visual Effects
>
> http://www.TheAfterImage.com 
>
> -24 years experience
> -Co-Author of "Mastering 
> Maya"
> -Member of the Visual Effects Society 
> (VES)
>
>  This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. 
> If you have received this communication in error, please notify us 
> immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate 
> this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised 
> signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the 
> University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message 
> may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal 
> views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and 
> opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements 
> between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless 
> the University agrees in writing to the contrary.
>
>


-- 





Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com 

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering
Maya"
-Member of the Visual Effects Society
(VES)

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Graham Bell

I¹ve absolutely no doubt, but in all the time I¹ve demoed Softimage, even
pre-AD, there was never anyone who didn¹t like the software, tech or
couldn¹t see the potential benefits. However despite this, it wasn¹t easy
for people to simply adopt.
We could easily lead the horse to water, but never make it drink.
 



On 15/03/2014 17:34, "Christoph Muetze"  wrote:

>Not preaching a religion here... In the 15+ years i've been using
>Softimage products i've "converted" more hardcore Max and Maya users by
>just outrunning them time and time again than i can count. Admittedly
>realtime graphics is a very special field of profession and also very
>rare outside of the gaming industry so it's kinda easy to become a user
>of a tool that was just not designed to deliver here... and those users
>are more likely to learn a new app if its vastly superior...which
>Softimage (still) is.
>
>Chris
>
>On 15/03/14 18:15, Graham Bell wrote:
>> Interestingly, you could flip that around and apply that to a Maya/Max
>>guy/studio talking about Softimage. In fact more often than not, they
>>did.
>>
>>
>> From: Christoph Muetze mailto:c...@glarestudios.de>>
>> Reply-To: 
>>"softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"
>> 
>>mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
>> Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
>> To: 
>>"softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"
>> 
>>mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
>> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage
>>free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>>
>> On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:
>>
>> I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one
>>day that is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just
>>a fact.
>>
>>
>> I'm so with you on this..
>>
>> We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups
>>seats to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but
>>also to have a deep look at Maya.
>>
>> Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer
>>what i need on a day to day basis.
>>
>> It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also
>>that the tools that are available take more time away from me than their
>>Softimage counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super
>>tight deadlines (where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver)
>>every click counts.
>>
>> If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop
>>Softimage. But this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will
>>happen in the next 2 years with someone using Maya.
>>
>> Chris
>

<>

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

2014-03-15 Thread Dan Pejril


Well done...
Sums up perfectly how I feel, especially since I was one of your team 
screwed by Maya (nevermore)



On 3/15/2014 1:43 PM, Perry Harovas wrote:

Good idea, done:

http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5035




On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Angus Davidson 
mailto:angus.david...@wits.ac.za>> wrote:


Should probably be linked via si-community as well as they are not
all on this list.



*From:* Perry Harovas [perryharo...@gmail.com
]
*Sent:* 15 March 2014 07:08 PM

*To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

*Subject:* Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

I just placed it on my website, you can use that, because the
problem with Facebook is you can't
see it if you don't have a Facebook account, even though it is
marked as "public".

Even so, here is that link:

http://www.facebook.com/harovas

Here is the direct link to the letter on my website:

http://www.theafterimage.com/#!vstc0=openletter


Thank you!

Perry



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Leendert A. Hartog
mailto:hirazib...@live.nl>> wrote:

What's the exact address of your Facebook page?
That would seem a good place to link to...


Greetz
Leendert

-- 


Leendert A. Hartog -- Softimage hobbyist
AKA Hirazi Blue -- Administrator  @, NOT the owner of
si-community.com 





-- 






Perry Harovas
203-448-7206 
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com 

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering Maya"

-Member of the Visual Effects Society (VES)


This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is
confidential. If you have received this communication in error,
please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You
may not copy or disseminate this communication without the
permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are
competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and
recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may
not be legally binding on the University and may contain the
personal views and opinions of the author, which are not
necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University
and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the
University agrees in writing to the contrary.




--





Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com 

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering Maya" 

-Member of the Visual Effects Society (VES) 



--
Dan Pejril
Upbeat Unique Entertainment
www.UpbeatUnique.com

Re: YOUR TOP 5


Here is my top 5:

1) workflow speed & efficiency
2) ability to overcome most problems without scripting or plugins
3) non destructive workflow: there are almost no "point of no returns" 
in Softimage
4) text based buttons (huge plus if you suffer from certain forms of 
visual agnosia)

5) ICE

Cheers!
Chris

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.


I feel your pain, i really do..

I never had problems with Softimage in this regard, but we faced similar 
roadblocks 10 years ago when we spoke with huge Studios trying to sell 
them our realtime procedural content creation solution... Everyone was 
amazed and loved the outcome. Unfortunately the tool was too different 
and alienated all the resident artists, so we didn't come far with it 
with - just a few hardcore users out there. But unlike Autodesk we made 
everything open source when we stopped its production ;)


Chris

On 15/03/14 18:44, Graham Bell wrote:

I¹ve absolutely no doubt, but in all the time I¹ve demoed Softimage, even
pre-AD, there was never anyone who didn¹t like the software, tech or
couldn¹t see the potential benefits. However despite this, it wasn¹t easy
for people to simply adopt.
We could easily lead the horse to water, but never make it drink.
  




On 15/03/2014 17:34, "Christoph Muetze"  wrote:


Not preaching a religion here... In the 15+ years i've been using
Softimage products i've "converted" more hardcore Max and Maya users by
just outrunning them time and time again than i can count. Admittedly
realtime graphics is a very special field of profession and also very
rare outside of the gaming industry so it's kinda easy to become a user
of a tool that was just not designed to deliver here... and those users
are more likely to learn a new app if its vastly superior...which
Softimage (still) is.

Chris

On 15/03/14 18:15, Graham Bell wrote:

Interestingly, you could flip that around and apply that to a Maya/Max
guy/studio talking about Softimage. In fact more often than not, they
did.


From: Christoph Muetze mailto:c...@glarestudios.de>>
Reply-To:
"softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"

mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
To:
"softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"

mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage
free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:

I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one
day that is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just
a fact.


I'm so with you on this..

We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups
seats to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but
also to have a deep look at Maya.

Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer
what i need on a day to day basis.

It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also
that the tools that are available take more time away from me than their
Softimage counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super
tight deadlines (where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver)
every click counts.

If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop
Softimage. But this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will
happen in the next 2 years with someone using Maya.

Chris



--
---
Christoph Mütze / Mansteinstr. 18 / 20253 Hamburg / Germany
http://www.glarestudios.de
Phone: +49 40 18050886 / Mobile: +49 163-7261877
http://www.twitter.com/chris_muetze
c...@glarestudios.de

RE: YOUR TOP 5

2014-03-15 Thread Sven Constable

It's funny. There always seemed to be two kind of people. The ones  that
prefer text buttons and the ones that prefer icon style. Of course all
softimagers prefer text :)  It's just so much clearer what a certain
function does. It's also much more efficient and faster when you teach
people:

"click on path... then click on set path".
"ahh! nice, thank you!"
(student learned a new thing in a second)

 I would have gone crazy if I had to tell them instead: 
"click on the button that looks like an uhm... elephant with the...  red
quare in it"
...
"What button, you mean the red ant inside a triangle?"
"No. The button below the green thingy next to the uhm... the... the... blue
dotted triangle!"

"you mean the button with that uhm... blu turtle?
"No. the button here"! (touching the screen/ grabbing the mouse)
"This button right here!"
"but that doesn't look like an elephant!"

:)

sven



-Original Message-
From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Christoph
Muetze
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 7:27 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: YOUR TOP 5

Here is my top 5:

1) workflow speed & efficiency
2) ability to overcome most problems without scripting or plugins
3) non destructive workflow: there are almost no "point of no returns" 
in Softimage
4) text based buttons (huge plus if you suffer from certain forms of visual
agnosia)
5) ICE

Cheers!
Chris

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Cesar Saez

On a more constructive note:
- Visual debugging tools, I really miss to be able to show values between
connections (vectors, matrices).
- Abstract types? it's kinda embarrasing have to use a plusMinusAverage
node to emulate a vector constant in maya.
- Basic math nodes? like trigonometric functions, modulo, exponential...
look at any programming library (python math module could be a good
starting point) and implement those.
- Raycasting nodes and some equivalent to locations (or any mechanism to
interpolate data using baricentric coordinates).
- Sets and/or arrays, be able to drive a stream of data as a whole is
really what makes ICE special for me.

Of course there will be people asking for everything that makes the ICE
helpful and that's fine, but if you have to start somewhere I would take a
look at that list.

Cheers!

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Bradley Gabe

This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC 
flagships. Bullet-point thinking. 

It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, 
rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the 
application. 

Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the 
daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and maybe 
tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI 
community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, a 
particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing 
continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't 
want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.

In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, 
location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, 
splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit 
for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to resort 
to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of 
the system. 

It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound 
understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear 
algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the things 
I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day of 
experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering that 
feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that never 
arrived?

Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my 
ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had increased 
drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out the math, I 
could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with enough 
practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I could use it as a 
prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to 
sitting down to write out the code.

If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these are 
some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future of 
node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating 
particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, operator 
development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all kinds of 
production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible!

-Bradley

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
>>  wrote:
>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all 
>> use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
> 
> Nope

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:

> This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
> DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.
>
> It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
> useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
> rest of the application.
>
> Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
> the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
> (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
> despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
> than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
> providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
> had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
> didn't care.
>
> In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location,
> location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds,
> workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent,
> splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based
> toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds, without
> having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are
> merely a byproduct of the system.
>
> It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
> understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
> algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
> things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
> of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
> that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
> never arrived?
>
> Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
> my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
> increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
> the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
> me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
> could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
> concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.
>
> If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these
> are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the
> future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes
> for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
> developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
> simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
> workarounds are possible!
>
> -Bradley
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>
>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>
>
> Nope
>
>

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

Agree with Bradley, +1


2014-03-15 16:55 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic :

> Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
> system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
> features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
> The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
> communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
> workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:
>
>> This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
>> DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.
>>
>> It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
>> useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
>> rest of the application.
>>
>> Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
>> the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
>> (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
>> despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
>> than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
>> providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
>> had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
>> didn't care.
>>
>> In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
>> location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
>> workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a
>> highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual
>> node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
>> without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects
>> are merely a byproduct of the system.
>>
>> It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
>> understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
>> algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
>> things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
>> of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
>> that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
>> never arrived?
>>
>> Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
>> my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
>> increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
>> the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
>> me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
>> could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
>> concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.
>>
>> If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
>> these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us
>> the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of
>> nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
>> developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
>> simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
>> workarounds are possible!
>>
>> -Bradley
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
>> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>>
>>
>> Nope
>>
>>
>

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Ahmidou Lyazidi

Bradley is s right, I'm quite surprise about this question, it doesn't
mean anything at all.
It's not really about the nodes, it's how the whole system work.

---
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist
http://vimeo.com/ahmidou/videos
http://www.cappuccino-films.com


2014-03-15 20:55 GMT+01:00 Mirko Jankovic :

> Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD
> system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready
> features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales.
> The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful
> communications one with other...  communication that actually makes
> workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:
>
>> This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their
>> DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.
>>
>> It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and
>> useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the
>> rest of the application.
>>
>> Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into
>> the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system
>> (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And
>> despite the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important
>> than that, a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk,
>> providing continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually
>> had, didn't want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or
>> didn't care.
>>
>> In real estate, they say the most important things are location,
>> location, location. In CG production, the most important things are
>> workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a
>> highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual
>> node based toolkit for discovering and developing production workarounds,
>> without having to resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects
>> are merely a byproduct of the system.
>>
>> It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound
>> understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear
>> algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the
>> things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day
>> of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering
>> that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that
>> never arrived?
>>
>> Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE,
>> my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had
>> increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out
>> the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided
>> me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I
>> could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult
>> concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.
>>
>> If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI,
>> these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us
>> the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of
>> nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully
>> developed, operator development kit, from which particles, fluids,
>> simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, workarounds,
>> workarounds are possible!
>>
>> -Bradley
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau <
>> chris.vienn...@autodesk.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you
>>> all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>>>
>>
>> Nope
>>
>>
>

RE: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Angel Negron

Agree with Bradley, +1nailed it

Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 17:07:34 -0300
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The  
Toolset"
From: malcriad...@gmail.com
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

Agree with Bradley, +1

2014-03-15 16:55 GMT-03:00 Mirko Jankovic :

Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD system 
does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready features 
that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales. 

The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful 
communications one with other...  communication that actually makes workflow.. 
that doesn't mean much I guess.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:

This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC 
flagships. Bullet-point thinking. 
It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, 
rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the 
application. 

Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the 
daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and maybe 
tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite the SI 
community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, a 
particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing 
continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't 
want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.

In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, 
location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, 
splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit 
for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to resort 
to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of 
the system. 

It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound 
understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear 
algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the things 
I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day of 
experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering that 
feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that never 
arrived?

Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my 
ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had increased 
drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out the math, I 
could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided me with enough 
practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I could use it as a 
prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to 
sitting down to write out the code.

If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these are 
some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future of 
node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for creating 
particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, operator 
development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all kinds of 
production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible!

-Bradley

Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau  
wrote:

Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all use 
that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?

Nope

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread David Gallagher


You wrote all that on your phone?  :)

On 3/15/2014 1:31 PM, Bradley Gabe wrote:
This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes 
their DCC flagships. Bullet-point thinking.


It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and 
useful, rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of 
the rest of the application.


Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going 
into the daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle 
system (and maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to 
multiprocesses). And despite the SI community's repeated insistence 
ICE was far more important than that, a particle system is precisely 
how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing continuing evidence that 
Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't want to listen to 
the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.


In real estate, they say the most important things are location, 
location, location. In CG production, the most important things are 
workarounds, workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with 
a highly potent, splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, 
visual node based toolkit for discovering and developing production 
workarounds, without having to resort to coding for every little 
thing. Particle effects are merely a byproduct of the system.


It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more 
profound understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of 
how the linear algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence 
operators to do the things I could only imagine in times past. Every 
day in production is a day of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do 
you have any idea how empowering that feels after years of waiting for 
technical help from developers that never arrived?


Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with 
ICE, my ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, 
etc, had increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for 
me to work out the math, I could develop in less than a day, because 
ICE had both provided me with enough practice to greatly enhance my 
thinking, but also because I could use it as a prototype laboratory to 
quickly hash out more difficult concepts, prior to sitting down to 
write out the code.


If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, 
these are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince 
us the future of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list 
of nodes for creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's 
a fully developed, operator development kit, from which particles, 
fluids, simulations, and all kinds of production workarounds, 
workarounds, workarounds are possible!


-Bradley


Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones > wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:


Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and
compounds you all use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?


Nope

Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

2014-03-15 Thread Bk

Bradley has expressed exactly, what I have been trying to compose over the last 
week. Yet better than I could.

1 Autodesk either never room the time to understand ICE,
2  or kept it under wraps in order to not let it steal the thunder from Bifrost 
in the future. Weird decision, as they could have used it as a taster to get 
people excited.
3 Or of course, there remains the possibility they are just a bit simple and 
confused and deserve our sympathy.

Ironically, the team that actually Made ICE are onto what could be seen as "ICE 
version 2 standalone or in any package". Fabric Engine. (cue "binary sunset on 
tatooine" music)

I have no doubt that the successor to ICE is the future. I do actually thing 
that Bifrost is heading there, but if option 3 (above) is not the case, I'd be 
nervous, to say the least. Because I believe Fabric is going to get in there 
first by a long shot.
And we SI users have learnt the hard way, about how important it is to get 
tools into studios and pipelines first.

On 15 Mar 2014, at 19:55, Mirko Jankovic  wrote:

> Bradley you nailed it with this one, and also points out what really AD 
> system does look like.. bunch of bullet points of separate marketing ready 
> features that looks nice on list when you showing it to sales. 
> The matter that those separate features have little to non meaningful 
> communications one with other...  communication that actually makes 
> workflow.. that doesn't mean much I guess.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:
> This is what concerns me about the future for where Autodesk takes their DCC 
> flagships. Bullet-point thinking. 
> 
> It's not any specific list of ICE nodes that make it so powerful and useful, 
> rather it's how well it plays within the data structures of the rest of the 
> application. 
> 
> Everyone who ever looked at ICE from the outside, without ever going into the 
> daily battle that is production, simply saw it as a particle system (and 
> maybe tipped their hat to it's clever ability to multiprocesses). And despite 
> the SI community's repeated insistence ICE was far more important than that, 
> a particle system is precisely how it was marketed by Autodesk, providing 
> continuing evidence that Autodesk didn't know what they actually had, didn't 
> want to listen to the people who were actually using it... or didn't care.
> 
> In real estate, they say the most important things are location, location, 
> location. In CG production, the most important things are workarounds, 
> workarounds, workarounds. ICE has provided SI users with a highly potent, 
> splendidly integrated, reasonably artist friendly, visual node based toolkit 
> for discovering and developing production workarounds, without having to 
> resort to coding for every little thing. Particle effects are merely a 
> byproduct of the system. 
> 
> It was through interacting with ICE that I developed a much more profound 
> understanding of CG data structures, an intuitive sense of how the linear 
> algebra drives transforms, of how I could influence operators to do the 
> things I could only imagine in times past. Every day in production is a day 
> of experiment and discovery using ICE. Do you have any idea how empowering 
> that feels after years of waiting for technical help from developers that 
> never arrived?
> 
> Furthermore, after years of tech experimenting and workarounds with ICE, my 
> ability to develop non-ICE tools for animation, deformation, etc, had 
> increased drastically. Tools that used to require a week for me to work out 
> the math, I could develop in less than a day, because ICE had both provided 
> me with enough practice to greatly enhance my thinking, but also because I 
> could use it as a prototype laboratory to quickly hash out more difficult 
> concepts, prior to sitting down to write out the code.
> 
> If you're wondering why people are concerned about life without XSI, these 
> are some pretty major reasons. You're going to have to convince us the future 
> of node-based work in Maya/Max isn't a bullet point list of nodes for 
> creating particle or fluid sim effects. Rather, that it's a fully developed, 
> operator development kit, from which particles, fluids, simulations, and all 
> kinds of production workarounds, workarounds, workarounds are possible!
> 
> -Bradley
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Mar 15, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Andy Jones  wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Chris Vienneau 
>>  wrote:
>> Do you guys think there is a top list of nodes in ICE and compounds you all 
>> use that cover 80% of what you do with the toolset?
>> 
>> Nope
>

Re: Proposal for TDs and Artist - Expand Softimage ( and other ) tools

2014-03-15 Thread Cristobal Infante

there had been discussion of the same thing in Si-community:

http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=4947

I think it's a good idea of developers are up for it and there is demand
for the tool.



On Saturday, 15 March 2014, Leonard Koch  wrote:

> Yeah Olivier, I think that is how bothj Eric's emTopolizer and my LK
> Fabric came about.
>
> If we could set something like you guys are suggesting up it would be
> amazing.
> There is nothing I'd rather do than build tools for the community all day.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Arman Sernaz  wrote:
>
> My studio is planning to keep using Softimage and doing researchs with
> Fabric Engine as long as I'm not convinced that I can do better with the
> rest.
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:38 PM, Nicolas Esposito <3dv...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> For me the main problem is still that AD would never sell Softimage to
> anyone, because they know they fucked it up, and they know for sure if
> SideFX or The Foundry will buy Soft, they will literally kick out Maya and
> Max in a couple of years.
>
> Regarding the subscription renewal I completely agree with you, I'd rather
> invest that money for custom tools, instead of giving my money to AD, so
> that developers would gladly build those tools and get paid...and thats why
> I think that the "share for free" would be a kick in the nuts for those who
> developed the custom tools that they use in Softimage.
>
> Greg, how much time and development you guys spent on developing the
> "Janimation HeadTech" demo/character? looks like Facerobot, but I suppose
> that is heavily modified together with ICE in order to achieve the
> deformation technology.
>
> Thoat is something I would pay to have, together with the muscle systema
> that the guys at Fabric engine are developing, or what Paul Smith did, or
> an upgrade to the plugins from Exocortex or LK.
>
> I really would like to show my appreciation to those guys, and together
> with others I think that we could give them the possibility to get their
> money for the time they spent developing what they did, and for more future
> tools if they want to.
>
> I thought about kickstarter, but could be something different as
> well.in general something to keep track of those who contribuite to the
> donation, then share the tools with them.
> It would be highly unfair from my point of view to share those tools with
> everyone who uses Softimage, because at this point it'll just be free stuff
> paid by 20-30-40 people.
>
> Maybe, when Softimage will eventually die, some of the studios who
> developed the tools will share them for free, but who knows
>
>
> 2014-03-14 16:13 GMT+01:00 Greg Punchatz :
>
> I like the idea, I was thinking along the same lines but much BIGGER.
> Let's kick the shit of Autodesk at their own game...3d development.
>
> I think we should set up this has a PUBLIC challenge, us agasinst Autodesk
> Maya dev team, in a development death match. Thinking this would go much
> further in showing Autodesk what an incredible mistake it made by killing
> Softimage. Release after release... we will kick their fucking ass.
>
> Here is what I don't really think Autodesk really understands
> Softimage and particularly Ice allows you to develop features that are
> production ready to the public a much faster rate than you can in any of
> other full Dcc applications they own.
>
> I never understood why there wasn't a huge effort to create new tools with
> ice and after it had matured a bit. I was really hoping for an ice version
> of face robot, as it was not so linear... the idea of face robot is great..
> but picking session is brilliant, but things can get terribly linear after
> that point on with no real way to fix what's under the hood.
>  So this really is my challenge--- to the user base and developers. We set
> up a kickstarter campaign or something to raise money to help out develop
> Maya...
>
> Show it for what it is, an aging dinosaur that's about to become
> fossilized.
>
> First off is a kick starter the right way to go? How do we get the money
> from a single kickstarter into the hands of multiple developers ? Ideally I
> would like to see something that benefits all Softimage users to contribute
> to the user build... it could be a single workgroup that we all share. I
> know that there a lot of plug-ins already that are very useful, but
> sometimes getting organized workgroup of all the latest and greatest core
> tools is difficult .
>
>

Re: YOUR TOP 5

2014-03-15 Thread Arvid Björn

Exactly right, about the only thing I ever have to point with my fingers at
is the script button, and that's usually not the first button they need
anyway =)


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Sven Constable wrote:

> It's funny. There always seemed to be two kind of people. The ones  that
> prefer text buttons and the ones that prefer icon style. Of course all
> softimagers prefer text :)  It's just so much clearer what a certain
> function does. It's also much more efficient and faster when you teach
> people:
>
> "click on path... then click on set path".
> "ahh! nice, thank you!"
> (student learned a new thing in a second)
>
>  I would have gone crazy if I had to tell them instead:
> "click on the button that looks like an uhm... elephant with the...  red
> quare in it"
> ...
> "What button, you mean the red ant inside a triangle?"
> "No. The button below the green thingy next to the uhm... the... the...
> blue
> dotted triangle!"
> 
> "you mean the button with that uhm... blu turtle?
> "No. the button here"! (touching the screen/ grabbing the mouse)
> "This button right here!"
> "but that doesn't look like an elephant!"
>
> :)
>
> sven
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
> [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Christoph
> Muetze
> Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 7:27 PM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: YOUR TOP 5
>
> Here is my top 5:
>
> 1) workflow speed & efficiency
> 2) ability to overcome most problems without scripting or plugins
> 3) non destructive workflow: there are almost no "point of no returns"
> in Softimage
> 4) text based buttons (huge plus if you suffer from certain forms of visual
> agnosia)
> 5) ICE
>
> Cheers!
> Chris
>
>

Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

2014-03-15 Thread Bk

Thats the pipeline talking. Which demonstrates how disrupting it is to 
introduce something new.
Now imagine if, not only do you have to introduce something new, but your whole 
foundation has to fundamentally change.
This is what's being forced upon us. (I know you know this, and this isn't 
aimed at you. It's me throwing this out into the ether)

It's the bullying I can't stomach. The whole time-limit aspect, that undermines 
every sound and though out comment from AD representatives. It's so transparent 
that they are using their practical monopoly to leverage and force people to 
their ideal future. One where you toe the AD line and trust them, insensitive 
to the fact they have given us every reason not to.

On 15 Mar 2014, at 17:44, Graham Bell  wrote:

> I¹ve absolutely no doubt, but in all the time I¹ve demoed Softimage, even
> pre-AD, there was never anyone who didn¹t like the software, tech or
> couldn¹t see the potential benefits. However despite this, it wasn¹t easy
> for people to simply adopt.
> We could easily lead the horse to water, but never make it drink.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 15/03/2014 17:34, "Christoph Muetze"  wrote:
> 
>> Not preaching a religion here... In the 15+ years i've been using
>> Softimage products i've "converted" more hardcore Max and Maya users by
>> just outrunning them time and time again than i can count. Admittedly
>> realtime graphics is a very special field of profession and also very
>> rare outside of the gaming industry so it's kinda easy to become a user
>> of a tool that was just not designed to deliver here... and those users
>> are more likely to learn a new app if its vastly superior...which
>> Softimage (still) is.
>> 
>> Chris
>> 
>> On 15/03/14 18:15, Graham Bell wrote:
>>> Interestingly, you could flip that around and apply that to a Maya/Max
>>> guy/studio talking about Softimage. In fact more often than not, they
>>> did.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> From: Christoph Muetze mailto:c...@glarestudios.de>>
>>> Reply-To: 
>>> "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"
>>> 
>>> mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
>>> Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
>>> To: 
>>> "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com"
>>> 
>>> mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
>>> Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage
>>> free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.
>>> 
>>> On 15/03/14 17:24, Greg Punchatz wrote:
>>> 
>>> I want to use the best out of the box 3d DCC app in the world, if one
>>> day that is Maya, I am all aboard.  Right now it is not, its kinda just
>>> a fact.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I'm so with you on this..
>>> 
>>> We did take Autodesks offer a while back and upgraded two of our groups
>>> seats to the Maya Entertainment Creative Suit. Mainly for Mudbox, but
>>> also to have a deep look at Maya.
>>> 
>>> Fast forward 1 year and i'm more than convinced that Maya doesn't offer
>>> what i need on a day to day basis.
>>> 
>>> It's not only that there are many things not available in Maya but also
>>> that the tools that are available take more time away from me than their
>>> Softimage counterparts. And in the field that i work in with its super
>>> tight deadlines (where you have days, sometimes only hours to deliver)
>>> every click counts.
>>> 
>>> If anyone can beat me with another tool i will instantly drop
>>> Softimage. But this hasn't happened so far and i highly doubt it will
>>> happen in the next 2 years with someone using Maya.
>>> 
>>> Chris
>> 
> 
>

Re: YOUR TOP 5