Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Stupid smartphone autocorrect...
Stack, not attack... and couple other idiotic things slipped in there.
Hopefully the gist of it is still clear.
On 16 Mar 2014 16:22, "Raffaele Fragapane" 
wrote:

> Yeah Nuno, I can easily enough. The stack is a patch for the lack of
> proper graph, not a feature worth promoting as the future. Maya has issues
> with evaluation missing certain things in default nodes, but the general
> paradigm of the graph is a superior approach.
> The lack of threading is more of an issue, but the stack doesn't
> facilitate that, ice works intra op, not across.
>
> Four the sake of all that's good in the world let's not push a attack
> against a proper DG as a superior feature, or make the mistake of thinking
> it's enabling in any regard. A proper sparse and arbitrary DG with the
> addition of simple entry and exit gates to facilitate things such as shape
> modeling at different stages, storing differentials and so on is an
> infinitely superior approach.
> On 15 Mar 2014 05:30, "Nuno Conceicao" 
> wrote:
>
>> Something just came up on my head while doing blendshapes and using ICE
>> to help along.
>>
>> Can you guys imagine how would ICE (or Biftrost) would work in Maya
>> without a proper modelling stack like XSI''s?
>>
>> Even something as simple as using ICE to invert weight maps that are
>> hooked with shapes with an already enveloped character or fixing some poses
>> maybe...
>>
>

Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

[Raffaele Fragapane]

Yeah Nuno, I can easily enough. The stack is a patch for the lack of proper
graph, not a feature worth promoting as the future. Maya has issues with
evaluation missing certain things in default nodes, but the general
paradigm of the graph is a superior approach.
The lack of threading is more of an issue, but the stack doesn't facilitate
that, ice works intra op, not across.

Four the sake of all that's good in the world let's not push a attack
against a proper DG as a superior feature, or make the mistake of thinking
it's enabling in any regard. A proper sparse and arbitrary DG with the
addition of simple entry and exit gates to facilitate things such as shape
modeling at different stages, storing differentials and so on is an
infinitely superior approach.
On 15 Mar 2014 05:30, "Nuno Conceicao"  wrote:

> Something just came up on my head while doing blendshapes and using ICE to
> help along.
>
> Can you guys imagine how would ICE (or Biftrost) would work in Maya
> without a proper modelling stack like XSI''s?
>
> Even something as simple as using ICE to invert weight maps that are
> hooked with shapes with an already enveloped character or fixing some poses
> maybe...
>

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

[Jason S]

Hi, while it was merely to prove a point, I'd like to point out that the 
intent was not to equate prematurely retiring software with practicing 
poor working standards. Had there been an edit button, I would have 
accordingly edited it.

thx

On 03/15/14 23:27, Jason S wrote:
Hi Eric,  of course coming back on a decision can have some effect of 
board-member/stockholder confidence.

(mostly (or exclusively) looking at daily ups-and downs)

Yet considering how "Public Perception" can be the main underlying 
driver of -confidence-,
and that in turn being the main driver of basically -everything- in an 
organisation, ..
(the whole purpose of "marketing" (sometimes taking-up 60% of entire 
budjets) is all around "perception")


The effects of persisting on a decision or actions that may widely be 
perceived as "not right",

( especailly when it's true (!) )
can absolutely far outweigh or dwarf the effects of reconsideration of 
such actions/decisions.


Shaken confidence can bring any organisation to it's knees,
regardless of it's size in a matter of "seconds" or days.

ie; only when a small (almost insignificant) textile factory crumbled,
did large manufactuers start spending billions in public campaigns, 
armies of lawyers,

(or a less insignificant % of revenue) on actually real reforms,
in respects to minimum standards in their "sweatshop" operations.

Resulting in some actions being only superficial,
others temporary t'il things blew over, and others more genuine.

Yet the only thing that motivated such actions was -public awareness-.

..

So what can make large machines turn around when exactly that ends up 
actually happening,

is when certain abstract fuzzy lines have been crossed,
thus affecting perception, therefore -confidence-.

While sometimes those reversals are from actual internal people waking,
more or less coming to grips with their moral compass,
and/or in other cases, merely or mostly just not to look too bad while 
plastering their stuff "non-sweatshop-made",

with all sorts of varying degrees in between...

(machines are run by regular everyday people after all)

.. yet the fact remains that, when something is widely perceived as 
wrong or unfair,

especially when you can't really hide, mask or distract attention,
is when the *RIGHT* thing has indeed the best chance of actually 
happening.




On 03/15/14 17:31, Eric Thivierge wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu > wrote:


Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one. 



But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence 
would plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with 
it. Business-wise, there is no going back.



Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

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

[skuby]

Well, seeing the responses from AD officials in this post, it looks like we
won't be getting even FBX/Mental Ray updates to extend Softimage's
retirement past 2016, it was only a defeatist's last wish anyways, but I
had to try.  I know Max, Maya and Softimage, I've spent some many dedicated
years in each of them.  The development of all 3 of them have sadly
stagnated under AD's roof (I'm not being rude, that's just an honest
observation from a user who doesn't run custom proprietary Pixar/ILM/Weta
versions of these software's, I run them out of the box, as is, with a few
preference changes and plug-ins and a few self-written scripts).

My plan is to keep using Softimage as is, and to learn Side Effect's
"Houdini" which I started yesterday (and it's quite promising so far) if
not to just have yet another tool in my bag of tricks.  Moving exclusively
back to Maya (or Max) as it sits now, would be a harsh downgrade.  I'm
excited (but honestly highly skeptical) to see what AD does with Maya and
their new refined focus development approach, -I'll be paying close
attention to Maya 2015 and Maya 2016 but as far as going back to Maya
exclusively, that doesn't make any good sense at this time.  My hopes are
high for the future and Maya will always and continue to be a useful tool
in my bag, but for it to return to number one spot again for me, it's just
a dream at this point as that isn't a realistic option at this time in
reality, now.

Max looks like it's next on the chopping block, although I think with Max
they will never officially say it is dead and just keep selling it to avoid
this sort of debacle but it's pretty clear Max will continue to be a second
class package.  If there is any package I will continue to leave on the
shelf, it will be Max, maybe that is paranoid but I think it's justifiably
paranoid and I really don't think I need to take anyone's word to the
contrary, considering how cheap words are in this business.

Anyways, best of luck to all of my fellow Softimage users out there.  I
hope you all find and come to the conclusions that are best for you,
individually, and have a great time forward.  I'm not going to keep posting
further, I've chosen my new path, wish me luck and I wish all the best of
luck back to you all and I wish the best of luck to Autodesk, in particular
to their continued development of Mudbox, Maya and Sketchbook in that
order.  -Cheers, respect and best regards to all.

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

[Ed Manning]

>
> Yeah.  The question itself, as well-intentioned as it may be, suggests
> such a fundamental misapprehension of ICE and why it's useful that it seems
> to confirm the worst fears of many of us.


It wasn't a pile of golden eggs, it was the goose.  And now it's dead.

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

[Jason S]

Hi Eric,  of course coming back on a decision can have some effect of 
board-member/stockholder confidence.

(mostly (or exclusively) looking at daily ups-and downs)

Yet considering how "Public Perception" can be the main underlying 
driver of -confidence-,
and that in turn being the main driver of basically -everything- in an 
organisation, ..
(the whole purpose of "marketing" (sometimes taking-up 60% of entire 
budjets) is all around "perception")


The effects of persisting on a decision or actions that may widely be 
perceived as "not right",

( especailly when it's true (!) )
can absolutely far outweigh or dwarf the effects of reconsideration of 
such actions/decisions.


Shaken confidence can bring any organisation to it's knees,
regardless of it's size in a matter of "seconds" or days.

ie; only when a small (almost insignificant) textile factory crumbled,
did large manufactuers start spending billions in public campaigns, 
armies of lawyers,

(or a less insignificant % of revenue) on actually real reforms,
in respects to minimum standards in their "sweatshop" operations.

Resulting in some actions being only superficial,
others temporary t'il things blew over, and others more genuine.

Yet the only thing that motivated such actions was -public awareness-.

..

So what can make large machines turn around when exactly that ends up 
actually happening,

is when certain abstract fuzzy lines have been crossed,
thus affecting perception, therefore -confidence-.

While sometimes those reversals are from actual internal people waking,
more or less coming to grips with their moral compass,
and/or in other cases, merely or mostly just not to look too bad while 
plastering their stuff "non-sweatshop-made",

with all sorts of varying degrees in between...

(machines are run by regular everyday people after all)

.. yet the fact remains that, when something is widely perceived as 
wrong or unfair,

especially when you can't really hide, mask or distract attention,
is when the *RIGHT* thing has indeed the best chance of actually happening.



On 03/15/14 17:31, Eric Thivierge wrote:


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu > wrote:


Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one. 



But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence 
would plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with 
it. Business-wise, there is no going back.



Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

Re: Wise up

[Sebastien Sterling]

A young Post graduate from my old animation course, recently shared  the
maya Comet resource page, excitedly proclaiming

all the great extra functionality he had found.


functions such as... :


   - *autoTangent* - Animation utility for nicely smoothing tangents but
   without overshoot.
   - *cometAttrEditor* - Quick attribute utility to re-order attrs up or
   down in the channel box.
   - *cometJointOrient* - Complete Joint Orient script for properly setting
   up joint axis
   - *cometMenu* - Builds a menu for all of the scripts found here.
   - *cometMirrorMesh* - Modeling util for polygon point mirroring,
   selecting, storing and more. Good for blendshape creation. Requires my free
   PoseDeformer plugin as it uses one of the nodes.
   - *cometRename* - Nice rename utility with complete Search/Replace,
   Prefix, Suffix and AutoNumbering.
   - *cometSaveWeights* - Save and Reload skin weights by point order or
   point position.
   - *cometSkinWeight* - A nice simple UI for setting weights without
   having to use the Component Editor.
   - *cometTransferWeights* - Transfer skin weights from one or more joints
   onto another.
   - *libBubbleSort* - MEL Library routines for custom bubble sort and
   comparison procs
   - *libMirror* - MEL Library routines for mirroring object transforms.
   - *libSkin* - MEL Library routines for working with skinClusters.
   - *libString* - MEL Library routines for working with strings.
   - *mirrorSelX/Y/Z* - Mirrors control objects for rotation behavior
   - *offsetConstraint* - Lets you set up a Point or Orient contraint
   keeping offsets using an extra group.
   - *snaps* - Basic snapping routines for snapping one object onto
   another.
   - *toggleAffected* - Toggles the pink Maya display of affected nodes in
   the viewport.
   - *toggleIsolateSelect* - Quick way to isolate select objects off and on
   in a viewport.
   - *toggleWireframeOnShaded* - Toggles a viewports wireframe on shaded
   display.
   - *toggleXRay* - Toggles a viewports XRay display.
   - *wireShape* - Builds a number of custom control curve shapes.
   - *zeroOut* - Zero out controls/transforms by inserting an extra group
   in the hierarchy.

Maya Plug-Ins

*PLEASE NOTE: I am not supporting these plug-ins past Maya version 8.0. I
do not have compiles for Maya 8.5, 2008 or after, if you wish to use it
with these versions you must compile it yourself.*

Posted in the complete incomprehension, that these features missing from
Maya, is not a good thing.

I remember exhibiting a similar thrill when having managed to create my own
MEL pivot align script,

until it hit me that i had just spent half a day creating compensations for
a pre-existing feature universally

accepted and integrated in every other DCC nae CAD nae PPS in the World !
...FOREVER !!!

I have not checked but how many of these simple as fuck features have made
there way into Maya 2015 release ?


On 16 March 2014 02:23, Eric Thivierge  wrote:

> Hahaha, this list needs more Brad. It's been a sad sight with your
> absence. :)
>
> 
> Eric Thivierge
> http://www.ethivierge.com
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 9:40 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:
>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTv1Dmu5CYc&t=0m33s
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:30 PM, David Saber  wrote:
>>
>>>  I read all these threads and the general feeling I get is: people are
>>> accepting what's happening... But didn't we accept too much since 2008?
>>>
>>> AD acquisition, AD not promoting Softimage, AD kicking Softimage's
>>> original developers: for all these slaps, we grumbled then we accepted. Now
>>> AD kills Softimage: we grumble then we accept! We're even helping AD to
>>> improve Maya!
>>>
>>> The last request to AD from our community is to keep Softimage half
>>> alive with some small fixes from time to time. I have a question for those
>>> who requested it: if AD grants you that, and if Softimage becomes a
>>> stagnant living dead app, will you be happy? Will you thank AD for that?
>>>
>>> Now AD says with some workflow ideas from Softimage, the future of Maya
>>> is bright (click). Do you buy it? Can they do it? A true nonlinear
>>> workflow? A modern GUI where everything is drag and droppable? A render
>>> region? An explorer so complete? A true animation mixer?
>>>
>>> If Ad asks you to leave your young beautiful wife, and choose your fat
>>> ugly mother in law instead, would you accept?
>>>
>>> Why not keeping Softimage's development instead! It already has a solid
>>> ground for improvements. When V7 came out and ICE was making a lot of buzz,
>>> who in this community would have thought our software of choice (and us)
>>> would head for this situation? It's like XSI was an orphan child, adopted
>>> by some cold, silent parents, who do not understand his talent or even his
>>> culture. They see no use for him so they kill him.
>>>
>>> Enough! Screw the fifth stage of grief! Acceptance? What AD is doing is
>>> NOT

Re: Wise up

[Eric Thivierge]

Hahaha, this list needs more Brad. It's been a sad sight with your absence.
:)


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 9:40 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTv1Dmu5CYc&t=0m33s
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:30 PM, David Saber  wrote:
>
>>  I read all these threads and the general feeling I get is: people are
>> accepting what's happening... But didn't we accept too much since 2008?
>>
>> AD acquisition, AD not promoting Softimage, AD kicking Softimage's
>> original developers: for all these slaps, we grumbled then we accepted. Now
>> AD kills Softimage: we grumble then we accept! We're even helping AD to
>> improve Maya!
>>
>> The last request to AD from our community is to keep Softimage half alive
>> with some small fixes from time to time. I have a question for those who
>> requested it: if AD grants you that, and if Softimage becomes a stagnant
>> living dead app, will you be happy? Will you thank AD for that?
>>
>> Now AD says with some workflow ideas from Softimage, the future of Maya
>> is bright (click). Do you buy it? Can they do it? A true nonlinear
>> workflow? A modern GUI where everything is drag and droppable? A render
>> region? An explorer so complete? A true animation mixer?
>>
>> If Ad asks you to leave your young beautiful wife, and choose your fat
>> ugly mother in law instead, would you accept?
>>
>> Why not keeping Softimage's development instead! It already has a solid
>> ground for improvements. When V7 came out and ICE was making a lot of buzz,
>> who in this community would have thought our software of choice (and us)
>> would head for this situation? It's like XSI was an orphan child, adopted
>> by some cold, silent parents, who do not understand his talent or even his
>> culture. They see no use for him so they kill him.
>>
>> Enough! Screw the fifth stage of grief! Acceptance? What AD is doing is
>> NOT acceptable. Everyone should go back to stage 2: RAGE. I'd just like to
>> see more fighting spirit here. Something should be possible to stop this
>> madness and to bring XSI back to the time it was dazzling everyone. The
>> open letters and Pooby's project are great initiatives. These days I'm
>> contacting all my friends to ask them to sign the petition. Perhaps I'm
>> unrealistic, but I can't let XSI die without a fight.
>>
>> David
>>
>
>

Re: Wise up

[Meng-Yang Lu]

Maybe bad form considering the host of this list...but I agree.

Maya cannot do all the things you've asked.  Even with the promises to
bring it up to speed, what governing factor (now that we've aired all the
dirty laundry about M&E percentages) will hold them to their promise?
 Money?  Nope.  Their word?  Comedy gold.

I'm trying to be realistic as possible here.  We need to find a partnership
where our tools and focus is a MAJORITY of the developer's market, not a
tiny fraction.  How else can you enforce that they have our best interest
at hand?  And I'm not just talking about just Softimage.  I'm talking about
everything from here on out and into the future.

I think we need to find a stronger foundation to build our future
partnerships.  It has never been they give and we take.  It has always, for
as long as I've been a part of this industry, a collaborative effort to
create the tools that we feed ourselves and our families with.  It doesn't
matter if you're Maya, XSI, Max, or Houdini.  The feedback, the time spent
mucking around to figure it all out, the development of cool tools from
talented developers, all of that is valuable.  Where do you want to invest
that effort??

I only see two options here for our future's sake.  Somehow, bring
Softimage back.  Or invest the effort we're about to embark on with another
entity.  If you want to get back at ADSK for what they've done, then simply
build a better product elsewhere.  What better people than the ones here on
the list with your wealth of experience to guide an energetic development
team to get this done?  It's going to take 5 years at least to get
Softimage back to where it is today IF all the promises are kept.  What can
WE do in that time?  What's is there left to lose?

There's an opportunity here to evaluate the current and future needs of CG,
and tackle those problems without all the legacy garbage that robs us of
performance and effort.  We have a new perspective of hardware technology
that weren't even on the radar 10 years ago.  Why not aim our roadmap
towards THAT future?

Does this sound absolutely crazy?  Probably.  But you know what else is
crazy?  Killing the best software on the market and telling us it for our
own good.

Time to make a choice...

-Lu



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:30 PM, David Saber  wrote:

>  I read all these threads and the general feeling I get is: people are
> accepting what's happening... But didn't we accept too much since 2008?
>
> AD acquisition, AD not promoting Softimage, AD kicking Softimage's
> original developers: for all these slaps, we grumbled then we accepted. Now
> AD kills Softimage: we grumble then we accept! We're even helping AD to
> improve Maya!
>
> The last request to AD from our community is to keep Softimage half alive
> with some small fixes from time to time. I have a question for those who
> requested it: if AD grants you that, and if Softimage becomes a stagnant
> living dead app, will you be happy? Will you thank AD for that?
>
> Now AD says with some workflow ideas from Softimage, the future of Maya is
> bright (click). Do you buy it? Can they do it? A true nonlinear workflow? A
> modern GUI where everything is drag and droppable? A render region? An
> explorer so complete? A true animation mixer?
>
> If Ad asks you to leave your young beautiful wife, and choose your fat
> ugly mother in law instead, would you accept?
>
> Why not keeping Softimage's development instead! It already has a solid
> ground for improvements. When V7 came out and ICE was making a lot of buzz,
> who in this community would have thought our software of choice (and us)
> would head for this situation? It's like XSI was an orphan child, adopted
> by some cold, silent parents, who do not understand his talent or even his
> culture. They see no use for him so they kill him.
>
> Enough! Screw the fifth stage of grief! Acceptance? What AD is doing is
> NOT acceptable. Everyone should go back to stage 2: RAGE. I'd just like to
> see more fighting spirit here. Something should be possible to stop this
> madness and to bring XSI back to the time it was dazzling everyone. The
> open letters and Pooby's project are great initiatives. These days I'm
> contacting all my friends to ask them to sign the petition. Perhaps I'm
> unrealistic, but I can't let XSI die without a fight.
>
> David
>

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

[Steven Caron]

i worked next to him for 8 months recently, between gravity and him  
winning that oscar, using softimage in fact... he is talented and  
doesnt care which tool he is using.


but i get your point Lu...

*written with my thumbs

On Mar 15, 2014, at 2:50 PM, Meng-Yang Lu  wrote:


That guy that won the Oscar probably didn't have to do the work... :P

You know better than that Brad!!

-Lu


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Bradley Gabe   
wrote:
heck a guy some of us used to work with every day back in the early  
XSI era just won an Oscar for best VFX!

Re: Wise up

[Bradley Gabe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTv1Dmu5CYc&t=0m33s


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:30 PM, David Saber  wrote:

>  I read all these threads and the general feeling I get is: people are
> accepting what's happening... But didn't we accept too much since 2008?
>
> AD acquisition, AD not promoting Softimage, AD kicking Softimage's
> original developers: for all these slaps, we grumbled then we accepted. Now
> AD kills Softimage: we grumble then we accept! We're even helping AD to
> improve Maya!
>
> The last request to AD from our community is to keep Softimage half alive
> with some small fixes from time to time. I have a question for those who
> requested it: if AD grants you that, and if Softimage becomes a stagnant
> living dead app, will you be happy? Will you thank AD for that?
>
> Now AD says with some workflow ideas from Softimage, the future of Maya is
> bright (click). Do you buy it? Can they do it? A true nonlinear workflow? A
> modern GUI where everything is drag and droppable? A render region? An
> explorer so complete? A true animation mixer?
>
> If Ad asks you to leave your young beautiful wife, and choose your fat
> ugly mother in law instead, would you accept?
>
> Why not keeping Softimage's development instead! It already has a solid
> ground for improvements. When V7 came out and ICE was making a lot of buzz,
> who in this community would have thought our software of choice (and us)
> would head for this situation? It's like XSI was an orphan child, adopted
> by some cold, silent parents, who do not understand his talent or even his
> culture. They see no use for him so they kill him.
>
> Enough! Screw the fifth stage of grief! Acceptance? What AD is doing is
> NOT acceptable. Everyone should go back to stage 2: RAGE. I'd just like to
> see more fighting spirit here. Something should be possible to stop this
> madness and to bring XSI back to the time it was dazzling everyone. The
> open letters and Pooby's project are great initiatives. These days I'm
> contacting all my friends to ask them to sign the petition. Perhaps I'm
> unrealistic, but I can't let XSI die without a fight.
>
> David
>

Wise up

[David Saber]

I read all these threads and the general feeling I get is: people are 
accepting what's happening... But didn't we accept too much since 2008?


AD acquisition, AD not promoting Softimage, AD kicking Softimage's 
original developers: for all these slaps, we grumbled then we accepted. 
Now AD kills Softimage: we grumble then we accept! We're even helping AD 
to improve Maya!


The last request to AD from our community is to keep Softimage half 
alive with some small fixes from time to time. I have a question for 
those who requested it: if AD grants you that, and if Softimage becomes 
a stagnant living dead app, will you be happy? Will you thank AD for that?


Now AD says with some workflow ideas from Softimage, the future of Maya 
is bright (click). Do you buy it? Can they do it? A true nonlinear 
workflow? A modern GUI where everything is drag and droppable? A render 
region? An explorer so complete? A true animation mixer?


If Ad asks you to leave your young beautiful wife, and choose your fat 
ugly mother in law instead, would you accept?


Why not keeping Softimage's development instead! It already has a solid 
ground for improvements. When V7 came out and ICE was making a lot of 
buzz, who in this community would have thought our software of choice 
(and us) would head for this situation? It's like XSI was an orphan 
child, adopted by some cold, silent parents, who do not understand his 
talent or even his culture. They see no use for him so they kill him.


Enough! Screw the fifth stage of grief! Acceptance? What AD is doing is 
NOT acceptable. Everyone should go back to stage 2: RAGE. I'd just like 
to see more fighting spirit here. Something should be possible to stop 
this madness and to bring XSI back to the time it was dazzling everyone. 
The open letters and Pooby's project are great initiatives. These days 
I'm contacting all my friends to ask them to sign the petition. Perhaps 
I'm unrealistic, but I can't let XSI die without a fight.


David

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

[Nuno Conceicao]

Nope


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:41 PM, 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: Storing Plugins in a UserPath

[Tiago Craft]

now THAT rocks!! ;))
thx Cesar


2014-02-21 15:52 GMT+01:00 Cesar Saez :

> Hey Andreas,
>
> I used to work with a similar setup until I discovered that there are real
> symbolic links in Windows since Vista (mklink in a prompt).
> Now I simply symlink plugin files to any location is needed keeping
> everything in sync by free. It works great :)
>
> Cheers
>

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

[Eugene Flormata]

>
> Not sure if any of you guys have tried the source film maker
>>>
>>
 http://youtu.be/iEz7TslI-fs

But I installed it for fun to try out and I discovered the animation
toolset in it pretty simplified and unique for pose to pose animation. I
also found that method they had other than the fcurve to be extremely
intuitive and almost faster than fcurves at some times. Is fabric capable
to alter the selection method in whatever dcc it's in with possibly custom
menus?

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

[Eric Thivierge]

To simplify further, this is a system to build the same control systems in
both applications using a common set of function calls that can be copied
and pasted from softimage to maya with super minor changes (mainly python
library import calls) and it will build the same nulls, controls, bones in
each app the same way. Then attach Splice operators to that which gives you
the same interaction. This allows you to use the native animation tools in
each application while utilizing the Splice performance and having a common
language to build your rigs with.

Hope that gives you a clear idea of what it is. :)


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 8:14 PM, Alan Fregtman wrote:

> Hi Greg,
>
> I think the initial idea is to build core components with Splice that
> allow the rig to behave identically on each DCC, not to disregard the DCC
> entirely and animate in Fabric alone.
>
>-- Alan
>
>
>
> 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..
>>
>

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

[Alan Fregtman]

Hi Greg,

I think the initial idea is to build core components with Splice that allow
the rig to behave identically on each DCC, not to disregard the DCC
entirely and animate in Fabric alone.

   -- Alan



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)
>>>
>>
>>
>

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

[Cristobal Infante]

insulting to say that the
film industry is mainly Maya?

All my friends that transfered to Maya did it because they wanted to work
in films that's a fact at least here in London. MPC, DNEG, Framestore,
Cinesite etc are all Maya. Nothing wrong with that by the way, but that's
just the way it is..



On Saturday, 15 March 2014, Eric Thivierge  wrote:

> I think it's kind of insulting to say that. It's not the software that
> makes people able to do that kind of work. It's their skills. It's just a
> fact that most film studios have had Maya as their backbone for so long
> that film is typically done with Maya. Then again, we do work at Hybride on
> films and we use Softimage... so does Animal Logic...
>
> 
> Eric Thivierge
> http://www.ethivierge.com
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:57 PM, Cristobal Infante 
> 
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi Brad,
>>
>> I guess you mean a lot of our xsi friends decided to go into film
>> industry and therefore had to switch to Maya.
>>
>> I am glad for them, they avoided the mess we are in but as I am sure you
>> know most of us work on commercials.
>>
>> This comes to mind :)
>>
>> it's an opportunity?
>> http://cgmemes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/it-opportunity.html?m=1
>>
>

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

[Eric Thivierge]

I think it's kind of insulting to say that. It's not the software that
makes people able to do that kind of work. It's their skills. It's just a
fact that most film studios have had Maya as their backbone for so long
that film is typically done with Maya. Then again, we do work at Hybride on
films and we use Softimage... so does Animal Logic...


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:57 PM, Cristobal Infante  wrote:

> Hi Brad,
>
> I guess you mean a lot of our xsi friends decided to go into film industry
> and therefore had to switch to Maya.
>
> I am glad for them, they avoided the mess we are in but as I am sure you
> know most of us work on commercials.
>
> This comes to mind :)
>
> it's an opportunity?
> http://cgmemes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/it-opportunity.html?m=1
>

Re: YOUR TOP 5

[Javier "El Elástico"]

It is not easy just 5 but I will try.

 * /Render Passes /(Partitions, Overrides, etc)
 * /Explorer /(I miss it always in the rest of software)
 * /ICE /(of course)
 * /Rigging tools/ and workflow in the process
 * /Modelling tools/

And that it is my contribution to the TOP 5.

*Javier Vega*
www.zao3d.com 

   Visita mi nuevo blog: http://blog.zao3d.com
   Tutoriales en http://tutoriales.zao3d.com


/móvil: *0034 616 647 357*
08922-Santa Coloma de Gramenet
Barcelona - (Spain)


/
El 13/03/2014 10:54, Alastair Hearsum escribió:

Hello

It seems as if I may have some contact with Autodesk shortly! I want 
to be armed with some points. What I'd like is your top 5 features 
that make Softimage great that we'd miss if we migrated to something 
else.


Please don't give me more than 5 and please don't go on too long 
describing them (It takes a while to read all the posts).


Thanks

Alastair

--
Alastair Hearsum
Head of 3d
GLASSWORKS
33/34 Great Pulteney Street
London
W1F 9NP
+44 (0)20 7434 1182
glassworks.co.uk 
Glassworks Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found at glassworks.co.uk
(Company registered in England with number 04759979. Registered office 
25 Harley Street, London, W1G 9BR. VAT registration number: 86729)

Please consider the environment before you print this email.
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail and attachments are strictly privileged, 
private and confidential and are intended solely for the stated 
recipient(s). Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the 
author and do not necessarily represent those of the Company. If you 
are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this 
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is received in error please kindly return it to the sender and delete 
this message from your system.

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

[Cristobal Infante]

Hi Brad,

I guess you mean a lot of our xsi friends decided to go into film industry
and therefore had to switch to Maya.

I am glad for them, they avoided the mess we are in but as I am sure you
know most of us work on commercials.

This comes to mind :)

it's an opportunity?
http://cgmemes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/it-opportunity.html?m=1


On Saturday, 15 March 2014, Meng-Yang Lu
>
wrote:

> That guy that won the Oscar probably didn't have to do the work... :P
>
> You know better than that Brad!!
>
> -Lu
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:
>
>> There is somewhat of a bright side folks, let's be realistic. Just about
>> every single hard core XSI user I'd known who fully committed to switching
>> over to Maya without looking back has gone on to do bigger and better
>> things in the industry. They work at places like Weta, ILM, Dreamworks,
>> Disney, heck a guy some of us used to work with every day back in the early
>> XSI era just won an Oscar for best VFX! Just drink the cool aid and go with
>> the flow, and better days await for you too. The last thing you want is for
>> Donald Sutherland to pick you out of a crowd, point at you, open his mouth
>> and shriek (it sucks, it happened to me back when I was at ILM).
>>
>> The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!... and spiders. Those
>> little bastards are evil!
>>
>>
>>
>

Re: YOUR TOP 5

[Adam Sale]

lol... Nice Sven!


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Christoph Muetze wrote:

>  ..don't forget the texture editor.. icon hell :)
>
>
> On 15/03/14 21:25, Arvid Björn wrote:
>
> 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.

[Michael Clarke]

Chris,

I think most here are actually desperate to hear about your plan — not 
objectives or goals, but the specifics and timing of a plan to move this thing 
forward.
You probably understand that the overwhelming feeling here is that we re being 
forced to take a giant step backward in many ways, and that we have no clear 
idea as to how many years it might take just to get back to our original point 
of departure. Adding capabilities to Maya is fine, but the greater concern here 
is building upon what Perry Harovas' letter aptly describes as an aging, 
inferior foundation. 

Anyway, more communication from Autodesk is needed right now. This is truly a 
disorienting moment, and I find it difficult to accept that AD would have made 
the EOL announcement without a coherent plan to communicate a vision to the 
Soft userbase, regardless of its size. 

Please. Tell us more.





On Mar 15, 2014, at 10:17 AM, 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.
> 


Michael Clarke Design
Blue C Studios
713-927-9835

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

[Meng-Yang Lu]

Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
reinventing the round wheel to a square one.

-Lu

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

[Eric Thivierge]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Meng-Yang Lu  wrote:

> Heh, it'd be less work just undo-ing the EOL decision instead of
> reinventing the round wheel to a square one.


But how would that look to stock holders / board members? Confidence would
plummet hard. It would do more damage then just sticking with it.
Business-wise, there is no going back.


Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

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

[Meng-Yang Lu]

That guy that won the Oscar probably didn't have to do the work... :P

You know better than that Brad!!

-Lu


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Bradley Gabe  wrote:

> There is somewhat of a bright side folks, let's be realistic. Just about
> every single hard core XSI user I'd known who fully committed to switching
> over to Maya without looking back has gone on to do bigger and better
> things in the industry. They work at places like Weta, ILM, Dreamworks,
> Disney, heck a guy some of us used to work with every day back in the early
> XSI era just won an Oscar for best VFX! Just drink the cool aid and go with
> the flow, and better days await for you too. The last thing you want is for
> Donald Sutherland to pick you out of a crowd, point at you, open his mouth
> and shriek (it sucks, it happened to me back when I was at ILM).
>
> The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!... and spiders. Those
> little bastards are evil!
>
>
>

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

[olivier jeannel]

Get data does 40%
Set data does another 40%
with 20% of various nodes in between

Ice is not exactly an assortment of chocolate sweets...

LOL


Le 15/03/2014 21:10, Ahmidou Lyazidi a écrit :
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 mailto:witha...@gmail.com>> 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 mailto:andy.jo...@gmail.com>> 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: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite.

[Bradley Gabe]

There is somewhat of a bright side folks, let's be realistic. Just about
every single hard core XSI user I'd known who fully committed to switching
over to Maya without looking back has gone on to do bigger and better
things in the industry. They work at places like Weta, ILM, Dreamworks,
Disney, heck a guy some of us used to work with every day back in the early
XSI era just won an Oscar for best VFX! Just drink the cool aid and go with
the flow, and better days await for you too. The last thing you want is for
Donald Sutherland to pick you out of a crowd, point at you, open his mouth
and shriek (it sucks, it happened to me back when I was at ILM).

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!... and spiders. Those little
bastards are evil!

Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Leoung O'Young]

Thanks for taking the time out to write this.
Leoung

On 15/03/2014 5:08 PM, Arvid Björn wrote:
Powerful stuff Perry. If there's one thing this debacle has proved, 
it's that this community is really is as strong and passionate as I've 
always perceived it to be.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:13 PM, 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.

Thi

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

[Andy Jones]

Bingo.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:31 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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Arvid Björn]

Powerful stuff Perry. If there's one thing this debacle has proved, it's
that this community is really is as strong and passionate as I've always
perceived it to be.


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:13 PM, 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
> som

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

[Cristobal Infante]

To be honest, we knew this was going to happen since the day Autodesk
bought softimage. Today, six years after
the acquisition is when we should be seeing a rejuvenated softimage, but
there was never long term plan for soft.

I understand the numbers between soft/Maya/max were not even
close. We are by far the least used 3D
app, and we know that. But it
hurts being treated like a number. There are actual people behind this, and
if a company can't see that then it just becomes a
machine.

The future was never bright.. At least admit that so we can finally draw a
line under it..


On Saturday, 15 March 2014, Bk  wrote:

> 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  c...@glarestudios.de >>
> >>> Reply-To:
> >>> "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com  softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >"
> >>>
> >>>  softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >>
> >>> Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 18:04:56 +0100
> >>> To:
> >>> "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com  softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >"
> >>>
> >>>  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: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The Toolset"

[Nick Martinelli]

I agree 100% with what everyone is saying.

I would like to add that ICE isn't a point and click system, so it's
impossible to give a universal list.  There isn't one way to do anything,
just ways that work.  Two artists can have a similar result with
drastically different ICE trees.

Imagine that you ask two people to write an equation that equals 10.  One
might say 7+3 and the other might go with 40/4, both are correct, they just
got there different ways.

That's the beauty of ICE.  It's versatility and efficiency to allow the
artist to work the way they want to without sacrificing quality and
production time.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 4:16 PM, Bk  wrote:

> 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 productio

Re: YOUR TOP 5

[Christoph Muetze]

..don't forget the texture editor.. icon hell :)

On 15/03/14 21:25, Arvid Björn wrote:
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 
mailto:sixsi_l...@imagefront.de>> 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.

[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

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

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

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

[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"

[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"

[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"

[Francisco Criado]

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"

[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"

[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: YOUR TOP 5

[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"

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

[Christoph Muetze]

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

[Christoph Muetze]

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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

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

[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

[Perry Harovas]

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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

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

[Christoph Muetze]

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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

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

[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"

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

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

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

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

[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

[Perry Harovas]

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.

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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Perry Harovas]

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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Perry Harovas]

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

[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

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

[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.

[Christoph Muetze]

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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[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.

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

[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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[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.

[Emilio Hernandez]

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

[Perry Harovas]

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

[Chris Vienneau]

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

[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.

[Francisco Criado]

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.

[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 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" 
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

[Francisco Criado]

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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[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

[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.

[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.

[Emilio Hernandez]

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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[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.

[Emilio Hernandez]

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

[Chris Vienneau]

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

[Emilio Hernandez]

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 Hernandez]

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

[Perry Harovas]

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.

[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

[Chris Vienneau]

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: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

[Emilio Hernandez]

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.

[Emilio Hernandez]

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".