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

[Chris Vienneau]

Sorry guys. I got a nasty case of tonsillitis and have been laid out for the 
last three days.

CV/

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Eric Thivierge
Sent: ‎Wednesday‎, ‎March‎ ‎19‎, ‎2014 ‎9‎:‎15‎ ‎AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com

No it's a joke, but Chris V. has been MIA when questions are being
asked...

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:09:53 AM, Matt Morris wrote:
> Seriously? Well my faith in the management of autodesk just reached a
> new low, didn't think that was possible.
>
>
> On 19 March 2014 12:58, Eric Thivierge  > wrote:
>
> Guys, I think we lost another PM... Chris V. has moved on to
> better pastures... :(
>
>

<>

Re: Maya UI aesthetics

[Chris Vienneau]

Great post

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Eugen Sares
Sent: ‎Monday‎, ‎March‎ ‎17‎, ‎2014 ‎7‎:‎22‎ ‎AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com


Cite from Chris Vienneau:



As for the workflows we have an internal project called Project H (or Humanize 
Maya) where we are working with all sorts of users from students to pros to 
studios to come up with proposals to the problems that have come up here and in 
the Maya user base. We invite anyone here and many of you have taken up our 
offer to contribute and it is up to us to show that we are delivering over the 
next two years during the transition period. If we don't at the end than you 
will all have choices and plenty of time to evaluate your options.





'Humanize Maya'... I like that!

It brings me to a topic that often seems to falls short in discussions about a 
user interface, due to the technical nature of 3d applications: 
aesthetics/readability.
Not workflow logic/consistency/ergonomics, which are of course absolutely vital 
(and also one of Maya's big weaknesses, but I'm leaving this out intentionally 
for now), but just the sheer visual appearance.
An equally important piece in the puzzle in my opinion.

As someone with an education and background in graphics design, I dare to say 
that Maya's UI is ugly. Like the devil's old grandmother.
Why?
Imagine the cockpit of a jet plane riddled with such a motley bunch of deranged 
elements and icons... get the point?

Presenting complexity in a way that can be processed by our visual cortex with 
the least effort is an art form, and Maya fails miserably. Softimage did it 
right.

Ironically, where Maya shows it's qualities mostly (...) is as a studio 
'backbone' - exactly where you would least expect people fancying funny little 
fiddly colored icons.
Like putting a hello kitty sticker on the airplane's throttle control


Some recommendations:
Generally, reduce the visual clutter! Hide everything that isn't important - 
show in only in the proper context.

Hire graphics designers, in addition to user interface designers, if you didn't 
already - the best you can find. The ones with a good taste.

Text instead of icons, wherever you can!
For me, it's no question that text is easier to 'read' than icons, from a 
certain (quite low) level of complexity on. A simple arrow is ok, but just 
don't tell me most of those Maya icons are intuitive...
Tastes are different, true, but at least give the user the option to switch 
icon/text, or both!

Offer a colorless UI scheme, or at least one with a much reduced palette!

Make the UI steplessly scalable! You probably have the chance now, after all 
you use Qt.

The hypergraph/hypershade icons, also the Bifröst nodes, from what I see... 
horrible design. Compare this to ICE!
Try to find a color code where the different colors have the same lightness. 
E.g. dark blue is barely visible, and you get a confusing and misleading visual 
contrast between elements of equal importance.

Get inspired... Softimage has this noble, modest and efficient appearance. 
Windows Metro - if Microsoft has the courage for such a step, maybe you do, too.

Less is more - I can't think of a better example of that old saying!

We all eat with our eyes also, don't we, and after all 3d users are mostly 
visual people (sometimes I'm not so sure about developers).

All this might sound superficial, but when it helps keeping track, it ain't 
anymore.

And, finally, what harm is done when your girlfriend puts one some mascara... ; 
}

Thanks for your attention!
Respectfully,
Eugen



[http://static.avast.com/emails/avast-mail-stamp.png] <http://www.avast.com/>

Diese E-Mail ist frei von Viren und Malware, denn der avast! 
Antivirus<http://www.avast.com/> Schutz ist aktiv.


<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Yeah I wasn't talking data types. Things like syflex and crowds was the main 
gist of the question.

Sent from Windows Mail

From: Enoch Ihde
Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎March‎ ‎18‎, ‎2014 ‎7‎:‎08‎ ‎PM
To: softimage

@chris:
i use pretty much all of the generic & general nodes, as i think any user of 
ice does.
whether or not people use syflex stuff will depend on if they're doing syflex 
specific cloth work.
you understand that this question of "which of this list of datatypes do you 
use?" is a bit ridiculous?
i suppose you're trying to prioritize what to implement and when, but you're 
basically saying "do you use floats, ints, for loops, arrays, data comparisons, 
and logic operations, and which ones do you use the most?"
a very odd question, don't you think?


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the 
Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here 
(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the 
creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would 
argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. 
I think it is great that there are two companies following this path and that 
will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do believe there are 
many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Array<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm>

  *   
Color<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm>
  *   
Constant<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm>
  *   
Conversion<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm>
  *   Data 
Access<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm>
  *   
Debugging<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm>
  *   
Execution<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm>
  *   Geometry 
Queries<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm>
  *   Math 
Basic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm>
  *   Math 
Comparison<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm>
  *   Math 
Logic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm>
  *   Math 
Matrix<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm>
  *   Math 
Statistics<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm>
  *   Math 
Trigonometry<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm>
  *   Math 
Vector<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm>
  *   Point 
Cloud<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm>
  *   
Rotation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm>
  *   
Simulation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm>
  *   
String<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm>
  *   
Topology<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm>
  *   
Crowds<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Simu

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

[Chris Vienneau]

ich show the power of such an approach. In this release we had several 
features that were developed in house like Geodesic Voxel Binding and the whole 
viewport effort was built on technology entirely developed by Autodesk. So Eric 
by that logic are you saying that putting effort into Ptex support, UV tiling, 
Alembic, Open EXR 2.0, python, etc... are not good things?
5. Lastly, who are these other key people who remained at AD that worked on 
ICE? It may give us reassurance to know what good hands we've been left in. 
(Not really expecting an answer here because it'd be dangerous for AD to list 
their employees, but it's more the point that we don't know who these other key 
people are and thus, have no reason to be confident in them.)

-I will ask those employees if they want to have their names listed but I can 
understand if they don't want to do so. ICE was derived from a very novel 
programming methodology that had fallen out of favor and which is why Fabric 
can start up with no harm of IP infringement on ICE.  I have many names over 
the years mentioned as key contributors of ICE and wanted to make sure that the 
fact that many people who worked at Soft still work at Autodesk and that key 
people from the ICE team work at Autodesk and on Bifrost was understood as well.


Thanks,

----
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face to face and it 
is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for the thought as it is 
consistent with what other people have said.



cv/
<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Eric,

I will go back up as our inline inline is getting too hard to follow. What we 
have been doing the last few years is bringing on very focused dev talent like 
the NEX guys or unfold 3D guys and signing them to multi-year contracts so we 
do not get the plugin pasted in and it dies. This gives us 2-3 releases to 
avoid the rot syndrome that we have seen in other packages. 

The concerns over Bifrost are totally valid. I told you that at our meeting. 
Again revamping the UI with QT, the viewport, and the data model has taken many 
years and lots of hard lessons learned in the heart of production. Bifrost will 
get put immediately into the hands of hundreds of thousands of students, 
professionals, pipelines and pirates so we will know if the base engine will 
run on the shittiest hardware we track all the way up to the machines of 
tomorrow we run in the labs of places like HP and Intel. Again the first 
important thing we wanted to get out of Bifrost was scale and performance. As 
we build out the TD UIs (node based and python) and then developer platform 
there will be challenges at each step but with Maya in the most grueling 
pipelines in the world we get the hard feedback very quick.

I understand why everyone here is skeptical about our ability to innovate or 
trust what is being written. We have to show progress on these topics in short 
order and keep it up or you will find other solutions eventually. 

cv/

From: Eric Thivierge [ethivie...@hybride.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12:35 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Cc: Chris Vienneau
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset"

Replying Inline as well. :)

> A few questions:
> 1. How do you respond to the people who have been long time die hard 
> Softimage users who have also been exposed to other DCC's, maya specifically, 
> who have little to no faith in AD being innovative or responsive to their 
> user base as history has shown. I can give you a specific example. Skin 
> painting. How many years has it been that it has been in its current form, 
> and your user base asking for it's interaction model and tool set cleaned up 
> and extended. Yet here we are just prior to the 2015 release and it's gotten 
> no attention. It's been years people have been asking for this. Yet nothing 
> from AD. Same with the blend shape tools. No attention. Take a look at the 
> various threads on this list and 3D Pro where Maya veterans say that the use 
> of 3rd Party tools is a must! We need a developer that actually listens and 
> turns around results quickly. Not taking 5+ years to not even address it.
>
> - As we have been saying the last few weeks the main drive for the last few 
> years was to modernize Maya's core so that we could start to modernize the 
> workflows on top of it. Having a good workflow for fluids or particles and 
> not be able to generate the quality and scale required to generate the fx 
> that are the norm was not acceptable. The first two areas we focused on was 
> FX and modeling and yes we started with the NEX toolkit but we have kept the 
> developers that built the plugin on to integrate all the technology correctly 
> into Maya. I think if you look at the work done in uv editing, retopology, 
> base modeling operations, and workflow the work is detailed and broad/ We are 
> looking at making big progress in animation and lighting/rendering very 
> shortly. Maya LT is releasing every three months and we are looking at 
> building back up the pace with Maya.

Thanks. As per the NEX devs, is it intended only to keep them on until
integration is done or are you guys thinking that their strategies can
be useful in the future and plan to have them work on other areas? In
the same vain as the core modernization, will there be other things
that may come up that prevent you from working on the various tool sets
much like the core modernization has?

>
> 3. So the first release of a tool built with your node graph will be released 
> in Bifrost. How long do we have to wait until the node graph is accessible? 
> (Granted I know you can't tell us, it just has to be asked). It's known that 
> with Maya releases and new features that the first version is never 
> production ready. You could say that for most new features in all software, 
> but when we think about it, if we hypothetically say the node graph is 
> another year off, that first release won't be usable and so that puts us to 
> the next year's release, 2017. At that time most studios will need to have 
> had to transitioned off of Softimage and onto another platform, such as Maya. 
> So at that point we have more or less zero time to get acquainted with the 
> new system and integrate it into the pipeline an

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Martin,



Graphical programming/data flow graphs are not a programming methodology. ICE 
is based on a functional style programming like the type you see in Scheme, 
Clojure from Google, and even Lisp. This methodology was very much out of style 
in the object oriented C++ world of the 90s. Bringing it back in ICE was what I 
was talking about as what was novel (i.e. not the standard practice) and Paul 
can correct me if I am wrong but Fabric uses a functional approach to their 
programming. Bifrost uses the same functional approach with data-flow which is 
the way to get parallelism with big data sets.



So to call bullshit on your bullshit call:  ICE, Fabric, and Bifrost are 
leveraging programming methodologies that started in the 60s and are owned by 
no one. These methodologies did fall out of favor in the big C++ object 
oriented desktop adventure and the move back to the big data / cloud world has 
brought them back which is great as the data in film and games is growing year 
by year and we need to find way to separate the data and functions. Fabric 
started out on their own with a clean slate and nothing I said implied 
differently.



cv/














From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Martin Chatterjee 
[martin.chatterjee.li...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:42 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset"

Chris,

(...) ICE was derived from a very novel programming methodology that had fallen 
out of favor and which is why Fabric can start up with no harm of IP 
infringement on ICE. (...)

Excuse me, say what? I'm so calling 'bullshit' on that statement.

I don't even know where to begin...

a.) Autodesk surely did not invent the concepts of graphical programming/data 
flow graphs.
b.) these concepts definitely did not fall out of favor anywhere
c.) your implication that the technology behind Fabric Engine is essentially a 
v2.0 of ICE (and therefore your indirect accusation that the Fabric team simply 
took the groundwork for their engine with them when they left Autodesk) is 
ridiculous to put it mildly.


-M



--
   Martin Chatterjee

[ Freelance Technical Director ]
[   http://www.chatterjee.de   ]
[ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]

<>

RE: Mornning Autodesk

[Chris Vienneau]

Don't forget to click the top ten live tv farts of all time on the right


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Arvid Björn 
[arvidbj...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 5:33 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Mornning Autodesk

Smell ya later Fartydesk.


On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Ben Beckett 
mailto:nebbeck...@gmail.com>> wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWBUl7oT9sA

<>

Final Call for April validation webinars

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Everyone,



Thanks to everyone who reached out to me. If I have not reached out back to you 
to schedule dates please resend your request. We have over 60 requests which is 
great but have a few more slots available for April if you are interested just 
send me a private mail before end of day Monday.



thx.



cv/
<>

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

Toxik and Matchmover will be available on Autodesk xchange in a week or two 
with no eula. You won't need a license to use them anymore. 
http://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/MAYA/en/Home/Index .



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Maurice Patel 
[maurice.pa...@autodesk.com]
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 3:48 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

Hi Emilio,
I am not sure I follow the question
Maurice

Maurice Patel
Autodesk : Tél:  514 954-7134

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Emilio Hernandez
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 3:44 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

Thank you for your response Maurice.
Another question.  Are you still going to include Toxic after 2 years if I am 
new customer?  fe.  If I open a new studio and I want to buy brand new seats of 
Maya, MAX?



---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.

2014-03-24 13:27 GMT-06:00 Maurice Patel 
mailto:maurice.pa...@autodesk.com>>:
The bundle is a transition bundle therefore it is only for those who already 
have Softimage to get access to Maya or 3s Max for free
Existing customers can also purchase new seats to increase capacity if they 
need to
Softimage is discontinued from sale because we would prefer for anyone starting 
a career or a business not to do so on a product we are no longer developing. 
However if you really want it there is an option: Softimage will be in the 
Ultimate Suite for 2 more years, If you are a student with an accredited 
institution you should qualify for special discount rate too.
BTW - everything has a cost and implementing and maintaining offerings in our 
systems is not trivial
Maurice


Maurice Patel
Autodesk : Tél:  514 954-7134
From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com]
 On Behalf Of Emilio Hernandez
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 2:59 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass
What I still don't understand is why Autodesk cannot still deliver Softimage 
last version to Max or Maya suite, bundle or whatever name it has.
I know they've saying a lot of reasons, but really none of them makes anysense 
to me.

After all we will be buying Maya, MAX seats to get Softimage.  It still means 
revenue from them for a software they are going to stop devoloping, addressing 
bugs or fixes.
Ok. Don't sell Softimage seats perse, but package Softimage like Toxic.  Let 
the user decide what tool he wants to work with.  Just keep the Send to 
Softimage button regardless of the Maya version.
This is no additional cost to Autodesk.

Is this too much to ask?



---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.
2014-03-24 12:23 GMT-06:00 Nuno Conceicao 
mailto:nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com>>>:
So for what I understood you can buy your first license only till the 28th then 
after this you are able to purchase more.
If you have no licenses after this date you wont be able to purchase Softimage 
anymore... :(
So I would suggest you get in touch with a retailer asap, he will be able to 
confirm this info obviously

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 6:19 PM, Nuno Conceicao 
mailto:nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com>>>
 wrote:
I think you have until the 28th March to be able to purchase Softimage for the 
first time (not a current client)
On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Martin 
mailto:furik...@gmail.com>>>
 wrote:
Hi Maurice,
Where can I have more info about this ? I was contemplating the possibility to 
buy a few licenses in the near future before the EOL announcement because I 
will most probably have some SI projects on my own and I don't have a 
commercial license right now (I work with my current employer license) and may 
need extra hands later, so If I buy the current version would I be able to 
purchase a few more seats later? Or am I too late for this?

Thanks

Martin
Sent from my iPhone
> On 2014/03/25, at 1:07, Maurice Patel 
> mailto:maurice.pa...@autodesk.com>>>
>  wrote
>
>  Softimage will be available too but under slightly different conditions: 
> prior version usage.



<>

RE: humanize maya, SOFT top 5

[Chris Vienneau]

That is why we are offering webinars on the roadmap privately.



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Nicolas Esposito 
[3dv...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 7:37 AM
To: r...@casema.nl; softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5

Is there a Maya roadmap to check what effort they'll make in order to have the 
same functionalities that Softimage currently have?

Translated into: How many years we have to wait to get Maya at the same level 
of Softimage?


2014-03-25 12:29 GMT+01:00 Rob Wuijster mailto:r...@casema.nl>>:
And how about letting you build your own custom UI, like in SI.
And no, having the windows reopen in the same place doesn't count.

Rob

\/-\/\/

On 25-3-2014 11:30, Daniel Kim wrote:
If I add some more about interface,

* Right click to bring contextual menu which is related to selected element 
(not just like always fixed popup menu)
* All remap-able user keyboard

Daniel


---
Daniel Kim
Animation Director & Professional 3D Generalist
http://www.danielkim3d.com
---


No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2014.0.4354 / Virus Database: 3722/7243 - Release Date: 03/25/14


<>

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

HI Emilio,



I think that now you have heard from Carl I think I will weigh in here and what 
I am writing comes from having been in and around softimage for twenty years as 
I grew up in Montreal and came onto the tech scene around 1993 when Softimage 
was on fire and right before it got bought by Autodesk. There is no doubt that 
Softimage starting in 1986 had the early lead in animation software and when I 
started at Discreet Logic even had a claim on Flame code with Eddie. Microsoft 
was a crazy rising star at that point and bought them up as all entertainment 
tools were sold on big ass SGI systems which almost killed me once or twice. 
They wanted to have a team to build out pro tools on windows at all costs. That 
was when Sumatra (1996) was started and many of the early decisions made then 
to highly leverage windows only tech was one of the biggest handicaps that this 
new code base developed around when Maya developed from an IRIX base. Maya 
started to appear in the late 90s and started to gain a lot of traction as 
people did not see the movement they wanted and many were scared by the windows 
direction. Given that 80% of work in film revolves around 20-30 companies that 
were around back then it is pretty easy to see how losing many of those 
customers back then can have a big impact now as the hundreds of companies that 
make up the film/vfx world mostly spawned from people coming from those 
original seed fx companies. And yes people built their own tools on top of Maya 
but back in 1998-1999 there were not that many tools period in either Sumatra 
or Maya except that Maya had a great API to build tools upon so it started to 
take off.



As the transition to Avid happened the product and team were focused on the 
Digital Studio and more television workflows. They wanted to have a full suite 
around the media composer with DS and Soft being the poster children for a full 
post production workflow. Avid like many of us got hit really hard in the 2001 
crash and if you want to read a great article on what happens when companies 
don't constantly re-invent themselves this is it: 
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml . While 3dsmax continued down the 
path of being 3500$ and building a monster library of plugins Maya and 
Softimage fought customer by customer from 2002 to 2006. Maya was bought and 
sold three times and Avid starved out the softimage team while they were in a 
fight for their life. There have been other posts on other forums but Sumatra 
simply took too long to go from demo to product and many customers got tired of 
waiting. I was working on Combustion back in 2002-2004 and we saw Maya take off 
in many markets and many people switch away from Softimage. The numbers don't 
lie. In 2000 Softimage 3D had a bigger market share than 3dsmax and Maya in 
entertainment.



By the time Autodesk acquired Maya in 2006, Avid was in the middle of its 
financial troubles having spent a lot of money to buy tons of companies and 
having a real hard time getting back to growth. Softimage was losing out in 
schools by that point and when Autodesk acquired Maya and got access to the 
global network of sales people places like India and east asia began to really 
solidify around Maya. Softimage always suffered at Avid because it was a 
broadcast company that did not really know what to do with this small 
independent minded group. So Softimage got the freedom to be themselves but 
they suffered when it came to resources. Autodesk is primarily driven by 
resellers and has been that way since 1978 when the founders started letting 
the first users of AutoCAD sell to their friends. Autodesk invests a huge 
amount in emerging markets and education. As work started to get outsourced to 
India and China there was a network of 3dsmax and Maya users waiting and that 
really was the biggest boom in the last few years for things like episodic 
animation, vfx (starting with rotoscoping), and games asset production.



The product manager that was around for driving the ICE direction was my 
ex-boss and a very smart guy. Let's not mince words when this was an attempt to 
leap frog Houdini, 3dsmax and Maya as Softimage was not growing and losing 
money at Avid. ICE started as a particle project and then morphed into a more 
general framework. No one here at Autodesk is arguing you can't do amazing 
things with ICE and I think we have made it clear we are working on how that 
can complement Maya but you can't argue that it failed to convert enough 
Houdini, 3dsmax, and Maya users to Softimage to stop the decline of the 
revenue. This was despite every major FX house having the opportunity to try it 
and evaluate it. It was just not enough to switch from the tool base they had 
built in the early 2000s and it was just easier to find talent and new users 
from schools.



So as we get to the acquisition by Autodesk the big damage to what was once a 
strong market share in film and games had already been

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

doh first sentence mistake "Bought by Microsoft"


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Chris Vienneau 
[chris.vienn...@autodesk.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:34 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass


HI Emilio,



I think that now you have heard from Carl I think I will weigh in here and what 
I am writing comes from having been in and around softimage for twenty years as 
I grew up in Montreal and came onto the tech scene around 1993 when Softimage 
was on fire and right before it got bought by Autodesk. There is no doubt that 
Softimage starting in 1986 had the early lead in animation software and when I 
started at Discreet Logic even had a claim on Flame code with Eddie. Microsoft 
was a crazy rising star at that point and bought them up as all entertainment 
tools were sold on big ass SGI systems which almost killed me once or twice. 
They wanted to have a team to build out pro tools on windows at all costs. That 
was when Sumatra (1996) was started and many of the early decisions made then 
to highly leverage windows only tech was one of the biggest handicaps that this 
new code base developed around when Maya developed from an IRIX base. Maya 
started to appear in the late 90s and started to gain a lot of traction as 
people did not see the movement they wanted and many were scared by the windows 
direction. Given that 80% of work in film revolves around 20-30 companies that 
were around back then it is pretty easy to see how losing many of those 
customers back then can have a big impact now as the hundreds of companies that 
make up the film/vfx world mostly spawned from people coming from those 
original seed fx companies. And yes people built their own tools on top of Maya 
but back in 1998-1999 there were not that many tools period in either Sumatra 
or Maya except that Maya had a great API to build tools upon so it started to 
take off.



As the transition to Avid happened the product and team were focused on the 
Digital Studio and more television workflows. They wanted to have a full suite 
around the media composer with DS and Soft being the poster children for a full 
post production workflow. Avid like many of us got hit really hard in the 2001 
crash and if you want to read a great article on what happens when companies 
don't constantly re-invent themselves this is it: 
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml . While 3dsmax continued down the 
path of being 3500$ and building a monster library of plugins Maya and 
Softimage fought customer by customer from 2002 to 2006. Maya was bought and 
sold three times and Avid starved out the softimage team while they were in a 
fight for their life. There have been other posts on other forums but Sumatra 
simply took too long to go from demo to product and many customers got tired of 
waiting. I was working on Combustion back in 2002-2004 and we saw Maya take off 
in many markets and many people switch away from Softimage. The numbers don't 
lie. In 2000 Softimage 3D had a bigger market share than 3dsmax and Maya in 
entertainment.



By the time Autodesk acquired Maya in 2006, Avid was in the middle of its 
financial troubles having spent a lot of money to buy tons of companies and 
having a real hard time getting back to growth. Softimage was losing out in 
schools by that point and when Autodesk acquired Maya and got access to the 
global network of sales people places like India and east asia began to really 
solidify around Maya. Softimage always suffered at Avid because it was a 
broadcast company that did not really know what to do with this small 
independent minded group. So Softimage got the freedom to be themselves but 
they suffered when it came to resources. Autodesk is primarily driven by 
resellers and has been that way since 1978 when the founders started letting 
the first users of AutoCAD sell to their friends. Autodesk invests a huge 
amount in emerging markets and education. As work started to get outsourced to 
India and China there was a network of 3dsmax and Maya users waiting and that 
really was the biggest boom in the last few years for things like episodic 
animation, vfx (starting with rotoscoping), and games asset production.



The product manager that was around for driving the ICE direction was my 
ex-boss and a very smart guy. Let's not mince words when this was an attempt to 
leap frog Houdini, 3dsmax and Maya as Softimage was not growing and losing 
money at Avid. ICE started as a particle project and then morphed into a more 
general framework. No one here at Autodesk is arguing you can't do amazing 
things with ICE and I think we have made it clear we are working on how that 
can complement Maya but you can't argue that it failed to convert enough 
Houdini, 3dsmax, and Maya users to Softimage to stop the decline of the 
re

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

Ok part II. Toxik and Matchmover were not part of the DCC nuclear arms race so 
they developed in relative vacuums and because they ran on multiple platforms a 
lot of code was written just to do basic things as there were very few 
libraries available. The only real big expense there was codecs and in the free 
versions we have had to turn off some codecs. To keep up, Softimage got 
features by integrating third party technology and those agreements are only 
for commercial versions of the software. Given they were not the market leader 
they often paid more for technology.

For Softimage, here are the big things that are third party libraries that are 
part of the commercial offering:


* Mental ray

* Syflex

* Shave and a hair cut

* Physx

* Lagoa

This is just touching the surface as there are libraries we license for all 
sorts of things like codecs, importers, linux emulation, etc... . If we wanted 
to do what we did with Toxik you would have to remove all those features above, 
no ability to render any video longer than 5 seconds, and no linux. This is a 
massive code base requiring at least 4-5 developers plus support just to keep 
it running and maintaining and to give you an idea the lines of code in Soft 
are about 10 times that of Toxik and 20 times that of Matchmover. Open source 
is not an option given how much code that is in Maya and 3dsmax is in 
Softimage. We could not release enough of it to be worth putting a team around.

Someone here referred to the linked in numbers of 3dsmax, Maya, and Softimage 
and it comes down to 25000 for max, 25000 for maya and 1000 for Softimage. 
Since linked in does not usually capture Asia and Africa this is more of a 
north American/European view but it gives you a sense of the overall relative 
sizes that Carl referred to. Just to give you another idea of scale there are 
over 1 m trial downloads of 3dsmax and Maya per year and hundreds of thousands 
of students who get to download and use every piece of software we make for 
free. We track student usage very heavily and they are split with max and maya 
with soft less than 5%. That is with no marketing and no prompting. Now there 
are exceptions but the amount of young people that have used a pirated copy of 
max or maya is huge and that was due to Autodesk investing heavily in early 
education as far as twenty years ago.

So two years of paying support to all these companies and maintaining a team 
big enough to deal with all the bugs, escalations, and fixes is a big 
commitment dollar wise and a far better send off than what XSI's brother DS got 
last year. We respect what XSI brought to this industry and we are working with 
all of our customers who want to work with us to help with the transition. Many 
of the larger customers had already begun this transition a couple of years ago 
and they might take a few more as multi-year projects work their way through 
the system. Schools have a much more tough transition and the main group who 
has the biggest group to make is the group of freelancers who either ran their 
own businesses or supported the larger business with contract work.

The big customers are happy we changed the policy for keeping soft licenses 
alive as that covers older projects but they are full blast into planning their 
next moves whether that be with Autodesk or The Foundry or Side FX or all of it 
mashed together. I am glad we have had some constructive threads on what we can 
do to make Maya better for everyone (Not just softimage users) and we have to 
show progress fast. We have enough bandwidth to handle unique cases and a lot 
of private threads are going on to deal with them so Maurice and I are the 
conduits.

I am not a suit. I was in the DCC wars where we fought to have 3dsmax and then 
Maya switch back and forth vs Softimage and I always respected their spirit 
given the odds against them and the bum hand they were dealt by being part of 
Avid. I will not stop working to help out those that want our help.

Cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Emilio Hernandez
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:28 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

Thank you for taking the time to response Chris.
This is all clear to me as I bought a couple of Digital Studio stations at 
version 2.0  while it was still Microsoft.  If it wasn't because they were 
dependable on the Intergraph video board that eventually got fried after 15 
years, and they lacked of HD support, I will still be using them.  Those 
turnkey systems were the ones that kept me out of the Inferno, Smoke, etc. 
solutions more expensive by far than the DS solution.

I agree that Avid did not a lousy but a terrible job with the Softimage asset 
as they were running like headless chickens towards anywhere but where the 
useres needed, and that is when Final Cut got in.
I un

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Perry,

Email is not the best way to express anything. I have spoken to many of you 
live in the past few months and you can interpret words in so many ways. For 
those that want to make this a conspiracy leading back to the acquisition you 
are wrong. Marc Petit did believe in having all the products under one roof. 
Like I said yesterday we spent a lot of money making sure that Softimage got 
plugged into the Autodesk channel and education engines and we put the product 
in the suites to try to get more usage from the big 3dsmax and Maya user base. 
There is all this talk of marketing. Everyone these days makes their buying 
decisions based off their peers from information in forums like this. Marketing 
isn't about press releases and web sites as nobody visits autodesk.com. With 
tens of thousands of kids graduating each year from professional programs each 
year most pick their 3D tool of choice or arsenal by the time they are 18-19 
and they can do 3d, edit, comp, and make web sites. So we tried to get more 
usage for softimage through suites and education and it did not work. All the 
marketing and demos for Autodesk the last few years has been around suites just 
like with Adobe who rarely markets Photoshop or After Effects. 

If you feel like that strategy is the main cause of the continued decline of 
Softimage then that is fair. Avid did not have the money to compete with 
Autodesk and according to Marc Stevens sold it after Marc said there was no 
chance of Soft lasting. The other mystery buyers were other CAD companies that 
wanted to have a product to compete with 3dsmax and Cinema 4D in the massive 
visualization market. Autodesk was the only buyer that wanted to keep Softimage 
alive in entertainment. 

So the clear announcement of change of intent was made this month based off a 
decision only made a few months ago. We gave a two year window to transition 
and for many a fair offer to go to 3dsmax or Maya. Our strategy to get soft 
adoption in the much larger 3dsmax and Maya user base was through suites and 
education and it did not work. We are sorry it did not work. 

I have listened to many of the personal stories of how this affects people. 
Like the story you had with your father I have a story about mine. My father 
ran a pharmaceutical research company and when I was a kid the workers in the 
plant went on strike for higher pay. They picketed in front of the plant and 
when things got more tense someone came to our house in the middle of the night 
and through a big rock right through the window next to my room where me and 
brother would play legos all day. Being six years old you can imagine that was 
some pretty scary shit. But my dad took me aside and told me that you have to 
take responsibility for the actions you take and how they affect people.

We can say sorry but that will not change the decision and it rings hollow 
because it could be a monkey typing on a keyboard. What we can do is listen to 
how this has impacted you and be responsible for helping you get back to a 
place where each of you are back to creating 3D art without thinking about the 
platform you use. 

I have been very happy to meet a lot of you on this forum for the first time 
which sucks but is still a good thing. The calls that I have more than make up 
for being called a liar or an idiot or a callous corporate suit. 

cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Perry Harovas 
[perryharo...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:44 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

I guess what the issue (at least for me) is, is that while you are
correct that Autodesk did talk about moving development to Singapore,
Autodesk did NOT say that the product was
in a state of minimal development. This, along with Chris V.'s
statement led everyone (and how could it not) to think things were
business as usual. Different team, but everything would be fine,
things would be the same, just with  new people. This should not
denigrate the Singapore team, who did great work, especially towards
the end right before EOL announcement.

You all may have intended to keep Softimage alive, but had we known
that the status had changed to one of very little, or minimal
development, we would have known that the status had changed
with regards to what we would be getting in the future and how
Autodesk saw the product in the future.

Look, I fluctuate back and forth as to if Softimage was on the
chopping block when purchased, or not. I feel that the people
involved, especially Marc Petit, really thought it would survive.
And really, it doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that it was
not clear (it was basically hidden) that the status of Softimage
within the company
had changed to one where it would be maintained, or minimally developed.

I will gladly change my mind if you, Maurice, or

RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

I think we can all agree ICE is a unique thing and everyone here is skeptical 
we will be able to recreate what it was inside of Maya through Bifrost or will 
just never see Maya as their main platform. Many here (most notably Jordi) are 
claiming Houdini is the place for those that like the programmatic procedural 
node workflows. The jury is still out whether Modo will hold together as you 
add on the various workflows required to be a complete DCC and they have not 
got traction in the plugin community. 

So no today you do not have an equivalent to what is in ICE/Softimage. We set 
the two year transition window for the two big camps of Soft users. For games 
(biggest camp) there is no little to no ICE usage so the main issues are 
animation tools (mixer), pipeline (metadata transfer, baking, viewport API) and 
porting existing tools. This industry just had its once every five year update 
as the PS4 and Xbox One pipelines came online.

The second camp is the mid sized boutiques specializing in commercial post with 
a sprinkle of film VFX. Most everyone here has an arsenal of 3D software from 
Maya to Houdini to Modo to Arnold to Nuke to PF Track and grow and shrink 
through free lance pools. Some of you are softimage only but there are more 
studios that have more than one toolset than there are that have just one. This 
is where ICE grew the most and I think the heart of the users in this forum. 
Why it did not capture more Houdini users as was the plan or more 3dsmax and 
Maya users did not see the benefit is open to debate too. 

Behind the scenes we have shown the first procedural demos of our version of 
the waving Torus which was the first ICE demo. We want to keep growing from the 
procedural core shipping in Maya 2015. In the next two years and beyond you can 
continue to use Softimage. With Houdini, Modo, Fabric, and Maya all saying that 
they have an answer to the question what will be your next platform at least 
you have a group of people listening. The DS guys were given a coupon for 
Digital Fusion. 

Another analogy is Shake. When Shake was EOLed, Nuke was not ready for prime 
time. Digital Fusion, Toxik, and even After Effects all went after the Shake 
user base and in the end the compositors arguably have a better industry 
standard than Shake in Nuke. 

You have some great threads going here and he who listens will get your 
business. You have a Softimage forum on Houdini and I would push to get one on 
the Foundry's community and repost the threads from here that are starting to 
gel into concrete things people need to do.  

cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of p...@bustykelp.com 
[p...@bustykelp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:55 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass

"What we can do is listen to how this has impacted you and be responsible
for helping you get back to a place where each of you are back to creating
3D art without thinking about the platform you use. "

And what if your "Creating 3D art" relies on the unique abilities that ICE
affords you? To be able to control everything programatically down to its
fundemental component parts?

There seems to be an assumption that skills can just be swapped over to
Maya, and this is probably true if your work doesn't deeply involve
inventing tools with ICE.
If you just model, put some bones in and add some blendshapes, animate and
render, then I'm sure Maya will do fine. What about those of us who evolved
way past that kind of workflow years ago?

I'm not just "thinking about the platform I use".  Its the ONLY platform
that can actually do what I'm doing unless you include Houdini or Fabric,
and neither of them are near the speed of iteration of ICE yet.

Please could I request that you get a Maya guy to try making Maya
equivalents of some ICE tools I could demonstrate.. I think the problem
would soon become very clear and its not about personal preference. Its
about being able to do this stuff at all.

Paul<>

RE: March 28, 2014

[Chris Vienneau]

Give Maya 2015 retopo a try when it comes out as we have a lot of the beta 
users who use Topogun very happy with the performance given these meshes can be 
10s of millions of polys. The maquette workflow of using Zbrush/3D coat/Mudbox 
(had to throw it in but Zbrush is still #1) is pretty standard for hero 
characters or concepts. The same goes for photogrammetry as you can get great 
results with tools like agisoft or our service (recap.autodesk.com) but the 
topology is awful. The final thing we are seeing in previz is the use of 
standins from places like turbosquid or sketchup files from concept. The key is 
that all of these workflows help sell the concept quicker and allows for quick 
changes up stream. Most concept artists we have talked this year have already 
switched to this 2.5 D workflow of DCC + Photoshop.



Every one of the tools above has an automatic retopo feature that does not work 
in all cases so we see users try it in Zbrush and Mudbox and plugins before 
going the route of manually recreating the topology.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Raffaele Fragapane 
[raffsxsil...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 7:09 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: March 28, 2014

3Dcoat has a great set of tools for retopo, ZBrush not really if you want 
precise control, it's clunky at best. The retopo it has IS brilliant, but for 
sculpting purposes (redistributing detail, especially now that reprojecting is 
solid).

I love Topogun, but it's kind of dead software. It's dirt cheap, so you can 
always pick it up, license it to a usb network card (so you get a dongle, it 
relies on mac address), and bleed it dry while it lasts, it's a pleasure to 
use, but don't expect updates.

Maya 2015 might actually be kind-of-OKish for retopo with the work done to 
integrate NEX more and to be able to have GPU caches as live (snappable 
surfaces in maya). XSI is still better than OK but if the source to retopo is 
extremely HR it will choke, so you might need to produce interim meshes (say, 
decimated) to retopo before reprojecting if you use it.
Live snappng through wrapping isn't fast enough over a multi-mill polymesh.


On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Martin Yara 
mailto:furik...@gmail.com>> wrote:

- Retopo
I've heard good things about ZB and 3D Coat retopo tools but haven't use them.  
I've never used Topogun either but I've heard that that was the standard a few 
years ago. Is still topogun the best tool for this?

<>

Listening

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi everyone,

I just want to let you know there are people from the maya dev and pm teams 
coming online to this forum but we are shipping software and answering a lot of 
calls but the mails you are writing are being passed back and forth as they are 
coming at a furious pace. Stay tuned for some answers and we plan on doing some 
private webinars under NDA for soft users to ask questions direct to us. Anyone 
interested in such a thing please write me a private mail at 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com .

Thx.

Cv/
<>

RE: Listening

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Mihai,

I wouldn't be on this list and expect a big welcome. This one is a little harsh 
but the offer still stands. People on this list have choices to make. The offer 
to get information from us about what we are doing is being taken up by a lot 
of people. We are going to try to keep listening to change things based off 
these forums like the licensing and potentially other things and we will be 
having webinars and training for those people that choose to stay with us.

Cv/

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Mihai Iliuta
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2014 4:43 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Listening

You are listening??
Ok, listen to your own bullshit:

"The first is to flatly call out that the rumor that the eol of Softimage and 
3dsmax is upon us is totally false."

"Cory Mogk is now also responsible for Softimage and we have been working with 
the team on the future of the product with lots of key customers."

"We understand people make their living from this software and that they make 
huge decisions about their projects and companies and we take that 
responsibility very seriously."

"Again the door is open to contact us or challenge us. Please let everyone you 
know their products are safe."

So today, we can safely say you are a lying piece of shit. You have no dignity, 
you have no character, and you have no word. I can't imagine any developer 
feeling any pride anymore working for you or this fucked up company. What you 
have done here and HOW you've done it, is irreparable and you and your company 
is from now on going downhill. You expect anybody to ever trust you or your 
company again? Is that worth anything for a business? It's worth everything.
Nobody finds it in the least suspicious why SI was killed now? When the whole 
community around SI and the nr of independent developers working developing 
tools for it was at an all time high???
I don't know when you lost your balls and your word Mr. Vienneau, but "good 
luck" regaining both.

Piece of shit.




On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Perry Harovas 
mailto:perryharo...@gmail.com>> wrote:
While Dan's heart is breaking (and so is mine), I still have (at least) one 
nagging question:

Clearly this has been under discussion for a while at Autodesk, so why were the 
following comments
from September 5th of 2012 made:

"The rumor that the EOL of Softimage and 3DS Max is upon us is totally false."

So, if I understand this correctly, what I get out of it is that when Autodesk 
assures customers that their product is not on the chopping block,
that statement is really only good for about a year and a half (less if you 
take into account that this EOL must have been decided a while back).

That doesn't imbue anyone with much confidence. I am not a 3DS Max user, but if 
I was, I think I'd be worried, and would take any Autodesk assurances that 
there was no reason to worry
with a very large grain of salt.

Can someone please, finally, address this?

Thank you



On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Tim Crowson 
mailto:tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com>> wrote:
Thanks Chris! And thanks as well for the update to the licensing terms. That's 
a big deal.
-Tim

On 3/7/2014 2:14 PM, Dan Pejril wrote:
Good to know you are listening.

If you listen closely, you can heart my heart breaking

On 3/7/2014 3:01 PM, Chris Vienneau wrote:

Hi everyone,

I just want to let you know there are people from the maya dev and pm teams 
coming online to this forum but we are shipping software and answering a lot of 
calls but the mails you are writing are being passed back and forth as they are 
coming at a furious pace. Stay tuned for some answers and we plan on doing some 
private webinars under NDA for soft users to ask questions direct to us. Anyone 
interested in such a thing please write me a private mail at 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com<mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>
 .

Thx.

Cv/


--





--





Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com<http://www.theafterimage.com/>

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering 
Maya"<http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Maya-Complete-Perry-Harovas/dp/0782125212>
-Member of the Visual Effects Society 
(VES)<http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/>

<>

RE: Listening

[Chris Vienneau]

esk assurances that 
there was no reason to worry
with a very large grain of salt.

Can someone please, finally, address this?

Thank you



On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Tim Crowson 
mailto:tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com>> wrote:
Thanks Chris! And thanks as well for the update to the licensing terms. That's 
a big deal.
-Tim

On 3/7/2014 2:14 PM, Dan Pejril wrote:
Good to know you are listening.

If you listen closely, you can heart my heart breaking

On 3/7/2014 3:01 PM, Chris Vienneau wrote:

Hi everyone,

I just want to let you know there are people from the maya dev and pm teams 
coming online to this forum but we are shipping software and answering a lot of 
calls but the mails you are writing are being passed back and forth as they are 
coming at a furious pace. Stay tuned for some answers and we plan on doing some 
private webinars under NDA for soft users to ask questions direct to us. Anyone 
interested in such a thing please write me a private mail at 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com<mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>
 .

Thx.

Cv/


--





--





Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com<http://www.theafterimage.com/>

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering 
Maya"<http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Maya-Complete-Perry-Harovas/dp/0782125212>
-Member of the Visual Effects Society 
(VES)<http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/>




--
gonebadfx.com<http://gonebadfx.com>
- your source for bad fx


<>

RE: Listening

[Chris Vienneau]

hit in subscriptions and l'ora of developers switch to 
other companies,because this is a really really bad decision

I hoped that they would keep up Softimage at least as a VFX tool (because of 
ICE) and push it for game development (which is widely used inside big game 
developers ),but no,they "create" Maya Lite for thatwhile Softimage (since 
release 7?) have already lots of tools for game development

Cheers AD CEOs, you fucked it up big time

Il 07/mar/2014 22:44 "Mihai Iliuta" 
mailto:mihai...@gmail.com>> ha scritto:

You are listening??

Ok, listen to your own bullshit:

"The first is to flatly call out that the rumor that the eol of Softimage and 
3dsmax is upon us is totally false."

"Cory Mogk is now also responsible for Softimage and we have been working with 
the team on the future of the product with lots of key customers."

"We understand people make their living from this software and that they make 
huge decisions about their projects and companies and we take that 
responsibility very seriously."

"Again the door is open to contact us or challenge us. Please let everyone you 
know their products are safe."


So today, we can safely say you are a lying piece of shit. You have no dignity, 
you have no character, and you have no word. I can't imagine any developer 
feeling any pride anymore working for you or this fucked up company. What you 
have done here and HOW you've done it, is irreparable and you and your company 
is from now on going downhill. You expect anybody to ever trust you or your 
company again? Is that worth anything for a business? It's worth everything.

Nobody finds it in the least suspicious why SI was killed now? When the whole 
community around SI and the nr of independent developers working developing 
tools for it was at an all time high???

I don't know when you lost your balls and your word Mr. Vienneau, but "good 
luck" regaining both.

Piece of shit.






On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Perry Harovas 
mailto:perryharo...@gmail.com>> wrote:
While Dan's heart is breaking (and so is mine), I still have (at least) one 
nagging question:

Clearly this has been under discussion for a while at Autodesk, so why were the 
following comments
from September 5th of 2012 made:

"The rumor that the EOL of Softimage and 3DS Max is upon us is totally false."

So, if I understand this correctly, what I get out of it is that when Autodesk 
assures customers that their product is not on the chopping block,
that statement is really only good for about a year and a half (less if you 
take into account that this EOL must have been decided a while back).

That doesn't imbue anyone with much confidence. I am not a 3DS Max user, but if 
I was, I think I'd be worried, and would take any Autodesk assurances that 
there was no reason to worry
with a very large grain of salt.

Can someone please, finally, address this?

Thank you




On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Tim Crowson 
mailto:tim.crow...@magneticdreams.com>> wrote:
Thanks Chris! And thanks as well for the update to the licensing terms. That's 
a big deal.
-Tim


On 3/7/2014 2:14 PM, Dan Pejril wrote:
Good to know you are listening.

If you listen closely, you can heart my heart breaking

On 3/7/2014 3:01 PM, Chris Vienneau wrote:
Hi everyone,

I just want to let you know there are people from the maya dev and pm teams 
coming online to this forum but we are shipping software and answering a lot of 
calls but the mails you are writing are being passed back and forth as they are 
coming at a furious pace. Stay tuned for some answers and we plan on doing some 
private webinars under NDA for soft users to ask questions direct to us. Anyone 
interested in such a thing please write me a private mail at 
chris.vienn...@autodesk.com<mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com><mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>
 .

Thx.

Cv/


--





--





Perry Harovas
203-448-7206
Animation and Visual Effects

http://www.TheAfterImage.com<http://www.theafterimage.com/>

-24 years experience
-Co-Author of "Mastering 
Maya"<http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Maya-Complete-Perry-Harovas/dp/0782125212>
-Member of the Visual Effects Society 
(VES)<http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/>



<>

Webinars and training

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Everyone,



I am hoping to have the first webinar for soft users to show them the roadmap 
within a week or two so I will get back to everyone who wrote me privately or 
publicly with the dates. We will go through the upcoming release and the 
roadmap. We have been on the road with many soft users in the last two months 
so we hope you will see many things in there from the threads that are being 
written here. Again for those of you not interested we understand. We are also 
going to start to roll out transition training aimed at experienced users who 
just want to know the equivalent function in Maya. Every month starting in 
April we will have an ask the expert webinar like this 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Gz54a6GTg ) where you can in advance give us 
specific topics you want us to cover with a live chat.



cv/
<>

RE: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

[Chris Vienneau]

I will agree that a doc is a good thing especially if we can get ideas in there 
like opening up the sdk where we can at least address it and have answers. Marc 
Stevens will be leading a webinar online on March 17th. If you can get the 
questions in order of priority I can get them in front of him next week to 
start looking at them. We can hopefully answer some in the meantime and like 
with the license change also do things that help.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Emilio Hernandez 
[emi...@e-roja.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 2:56 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

I agree that we need to setup rules.  So the doc will contain proper language 
and be well focused.

What I really don't understand is why when someone comes with an initiative, 
there is alwasy somebody coming back with "It is useless. Bear with it, Leave 
and move forward".

Well strictly to the last "Leave it, and move forward".  Is really moving 
forward dumping Softiamge

I will say that if you feel, and believe there is nothing to do.  Please stop 
jumping in when someone is trying to do something.

If you don't want to follow, it is ok.  No one is going to point at you.  It is 
your own decision and others will respect you.

But again.  Please stop jumping in into these actions with negative statements 
of "dump it, move on, leave, there is nothing you can do".

So far, we won a small battle.  At least now if we want, we can still continue 
to use Softimage without any further development from Autodesk, on a legal 
basis.

What you will do is your own choice.

With all my respect for those of you that are thinking "it is useless..."

Cheers!



---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.


2014-03-08 13:35 GMT-06:00 Leendert A. Hartog 
mailto:hirazib...@live.nl>>:
But moving the items from the Mailing List to a Google doc won't do much good, 
unless you are able to set some clear "ground rules" as to its usage and the 
intended content (what should and what should not be included)...

Greetz
Leendert

--

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



<>

RE: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

[Chris Vienneau]

For the next two years you will be able to rent and for those people with 
existing pipelines get more seats.



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Mirko Jankovic 
[mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 3:08 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

One small issue tho.. what if later down the road like next year or two... you 
need couple more SI seats for bigger project you just got or something?
Any idea how to deal with that then?



On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 9:04 PM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
I will agree that a doc is a good thing especially if we can get ideas in there 
like opening up the sdk where we can at least address it and have answers. Marc 
Stevens will be leading a webinar online on March 17th. If you can get the 
questions in order of priority I can get them in front of him next week to 
start looking at them. We can hopefully answer some in the meantime and like 
with the license change also do things that help.



cv/




From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>
 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>]
 on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com<mailto:emi...@e-roja.com>]
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 2:56 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>
Subject: Re: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

I agree that we need to setup rules.  So the doc will contain proper language 
and be well focused.

What I really don't understand is why when someone comes with an initiative, 
there is alwasy somebody coming back with "It is useless. Bear with it, Leave 
and move forward".

Well strictly to the last "Leave it, and move forward".  Is really moving 
forward dumping Softiamge

I will say that if you feel, and believe there is nothing to do.  Please stop 
jumping in when someone is trying to do something.

If you don't want to follow, it is ok.  No one is going to point at you.  It is 
your own decision and others will respect you.

But again.  Please stop jumping in into these actions with negative statements 
of "dump it, move on, leave, there is nothing you can do".

So far, we won a small battle.  At least now if we want, we can still continue 
to use Softimage without any further development from Autodesk, on a legal 
basis.

What you will do is your own choice.

With all my respect for those of you that are thinking "it is useless..."

Cheers!



---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.


2014-03-08 13:35 GMT-06:00 Leendert A. Hartog 
mailto:hirazib...@live.nl><mailto:hirazib...@live.nl<mailto:hirazib...@live.nl>>>:
But moving the items from the Mailing List to a Google doc won't do much good, 
unless you are able to set some clear "ground rules" as to its usage and the 
intended content (what should and what should not be included)...

Greetz
Leendert

--

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




<>

RE: Migrate Ice

[Chris Vienneau]

Talking about this very topic and what we could do with this new framework is 
where we want contributors. The big thing we have tried to deal with this in 
this new framework is scale. A decent machine is chunking through 30-40 m 
particles and displaying that in the viewport which is impossible in Maya 2014. 
A great machine with lots of RAM (64 g) was working with 200 m flip particles. 
We are literally rendering out the scenes that will make up the new feature 
videos to show this off and I will probably just leak it here to keep the 
conversation going. The best starting point for the discussion is this article:



https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/



But for those of that have signed up for a private discussion we will talk much 
more about what we are doing and what we could do to in the transition time 
frame so you can compare your options.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Gustavo Eggert Boehs 
[gustav...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 10:51 AM
To: SI mailing list
Subject: Re: Migrate Ice

I hope it gets as broad a scope as ICE and can be used for other things than 
flip fluid sims...
Although just those great flip fluid sims will attract much attention by itself 
I bet...

ducks
<>

RE: Your postings...

[Chris Vienneau]

We want this forum to be the users and hopefully everyone respects each other. 
I have had lots of private threads where people express concern that this is 
not the forum they have known for many years and that is understandable given 
what happened. If people have different reactions to what has happened and will 
take different paths that is understandable as well.



If the forum wants us to create an SI-transition forum where these discussions 
can continue and this one can be maintained for those people who want to 
continue to discuss si as it was before we will do that.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Leendert A. Hartog 
[hirazib...@live.nl]
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 12:02 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Your postings...


Agreed...

Emilio Hernandez schreef op 9-3-2014 16:51:
Well I read a more unprofessional post of someone telling other one, that he 
was biased because he was fired from Autodesk.

We were all professionals 20 years ago?

If fresh blood is coming to this list, in first place to seek help and 
knowledge, and he gets caught in the middle of this mayhem suddenly he is not 
able to express how he feels, while the rest of us are doing it?

I am not judging, nor I am who to say if it was right or wrong for Mauricio to 
post a private mail.

But he has the right to do it.

True is this list because of the events that developed just last Tuesday, has 
been driven away from its essence.   It is normal.  Will it ever be the same?

I don't know.  I hope so.  So the people like me, that are staying with 
Softimage until Autodesk or some one else comes with a better solution for me.  
That by conviction I will adopt, like it was the case with Softimage 3D and not 
because I am forced to, can continue learning, sharing and why not?  Have a 
good time with all of you, as we are spread all over the world.  And even that 
I don't know you in person, at this stage I feel I am part of a big family.

I never saw Mauricio jumping on threads about tech stuff and start posting out 
of place.

But anyway the tidal wave is settling and after the waters retire we will see 
what is left.

Then we can start bulding again.

You can count with my two hands to do so.

Cheers!







---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.





--

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


<>

RE: Migrate Ice

[Chris Vienneau]

For those of that don't know the notion of the within the quarter rule we can 
only speak about news that will happen within each quarter. A quarter is the 90 
day period and we just had one starting on February 1st. If you talk about 
future things and someone buy's your software based on things you don't deliver 
in that period you can can't say you made that money in that 90 day period.



I know it sounds like a cop out but Avid was just delisted from the NASDAQ 
because they could not follow those rules 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbyowsinski/2014/02/27/major-changes-around-the-corner-for-music-as-avid-delists/
 .



So that usually means future looking stuff for Maya is discussed on the beta 
boards whereas the public stuff is usually about just using Maya. I am really 
interested to hear about how the group wants to split the conversation but not 
the community.



For those that have not got it the way to get a view of what we are doing in 
Maya to make it more palatable to soft users and a viable alternative is to 
send me a private email. I am way behind on catching up on them but I will 
start this week. The goal is to help everyone who wants to understand their 
options all the information you need to move forward. There are also people on 
here with large facilities, small boutiques, and individual freelancers, 
students, and teachers. Before the announce we did trips to Tokyo, Sydney, 
Paris, London, Frankfurt, New York, and Los Angeles. We also spent time with 
several Montreal soft houses. We will do some web meetings for a while and then 
in a month or two hit out again with training and onsite help.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Raffaele Fragapane 
[raffsxsil...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 7:53 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Migrate Ice

In some regards things have to be private, Chris. Beside the over-abused 
"within quarter" rule for traded companies it's extremely hard to juggle a 
public discussion, and the sheer amount of noise and crusading isn't exactly 
encouraging anybody on either side to be too public.

Just be one of the many that is getting in touch if you want to be part of it. 
Public with AD has never meant much. I agree in principle it will be nice, but 
it just doesn't seem to be how it works out for a mix of factors both internal 
and external to it.


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 9:41 PM, Chris Marshall 
mailto:chrismarshal...@gmail.com>> wrote:
But actually nothing should be private, to be honest. We are all in the same 
effin boat here and should all be given all the information that's needed to 
help us out. Just because some shout louder than others, we are ALL screwed by 
the decision to scrap Softimage so this process should be all inclusive.


<>

RE: Headus UV Layout

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Everyone,



We are very close to the announce of the new features. We worked with Polygonal 
Design to include their new UV unfold plugin in the next version of Maya. It is 
a new in that it is very robust with larger meshes. There is also a lot of work 
done in Maya's uv editor especially around selection and uv tiling. Maya will 
also support uv tiling in the viewport, editor, file in node (multiple load 
methods depending on whether you are coming from mari, mudbox, or zbrush) and 
mental ray.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Orlando Esponda 
[orlando.espo...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 6:32 AM
To: softimage
Subject: Re: Headus UV Layout

AFAIK the only official plugin is for Maya. That said, I think the one for Soft 
is rock solid.

One feature not mentioned yet, and one that I really find useful, is the 
repaint module. Basically let's you bake existing textures for a different UV, 
onto a new one, and the cool thing is it supports multiple tiles. Very useful 
feature honestly.

Also, you can set polygon clusters from within Soft and UV Layout will read 
them as groups. This way you can set up your main "chunks" of polygons and just 
add a couple of cuts here and there.

IMO the best UV app out there with tons of features. Except of course, its UI.


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:34 AM, Sofronis Efstathiou 
mailto:sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk>> wrote:
That's excellent news. Glad there is a decent connection between itself and the 
3D app.

I always found Zbrush lack of UV editing tools odd...It seemed to unwrap 
awkwardly with the UV space...not very efficient if i remember.

Thanks again. ..

-Original Message-
From: Szabolcs Matefy [szabol...@crytek.com]
Received: Monday, 10 Mar 2014, 8:02AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage@listproc.autodesk.com]
Subject: RE: Headus UV Layout

I prefer UVLayout, it’s smart, and fast, has plenty of tools. However, 
unwrapping might be ridiculous, so in many cases I unfold in Softimage, and the 
work on the rets in UVLayout. There are some greta connection between UVLayout 
and SI too

From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com]
 On Behalf Of Angus Davidson
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 11:22 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: Headus UV Layout

Its as intuitive as a copper duck. However once to get used to the UI its a 
very good at what its designed to do.

From: Sofronis Efstathiou 
[sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk]
Sent: 10 March 2014 12:05 AM
To: 
softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>
Subject: Headus UV Layout
Hi,

A few staff have asked to purchase licenses of Headus UV Layout for students. I 
haven’t used it – any thoughts?

Cheers

Sofronis Efstathiou

Postgraduate Framework Leader and BFX Competition and Festival Director
Computer Animation Academic Group
National Centre for Computer Animation

Email: 
sefstath...@bournemouth.ac.uk>

Tel: +44 (0) 1202 965805

Profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/sofronisefstathiou

Student Work:
http://www.youtube.com/NCCA3DAnimation
http://www.youtube.com/NCCADigitalFX
http://www.youtube.com/NCCAAnimation

[cid:image001.jpg@01CF3C3F.05502B60]

[cid:image002.jpg@01CF3C3F.05502B60]  
[cid:image003.png@01CF3C3F.05502B60] 


[cid:image004.jpg@01CF3C3F.05502B60]

Awarded for world-class computer animation teaching
with wide scientific and creative applications


[http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/Images/QueensAwardLogo.jpg]

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subsidiary companies via ema

RE: Did the offer really change?

[Chris Vienneau]

I have been having some private threads on this and will break out to the group 
a little technical than what Maurice has been describing. 

Every license of softimage out there today from v 1.0 to 2015 is permanent. No 
one can stop you from using those licenses. Some of the private threads are 
simply Soft users who are on an older version wanting to understand how they 
can get the latest version or get some more seats. Autodesk will release 
service packs for 2015 for the next two years so in 2016 there will be an 
official last service pack from Autodesk. As many have said they will continue 
to use that as long as possible. I still have a Shake seat that I open up to do 
work and the license still works. 

For those that want to take advantage of the transition offer you can get a 
license from us that will be Softimage 2015 + either Maya 2015 or 3dsmax 2015. 
For suites anyone on the Premium suite will be upgraded to the Ultimate suite 
for 2015 which will include Softimage. To get that offer you have to be on 
subscription. In the original plan we were going to remove Softimage 2015 from 
those two paths after two years. 

In the new plan Softimage 2015 will stay on in those licenses so if you are on 
Maya or ECS 2018 and on subscription it will start up Softimage 2015 and so on. 
This will allow people to keep working with Soft or use it to open old setups.

Hope this helps clarify what we are doing.

cv/




 















From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Christoph Muetze 
[c...@glarestudios.de]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 8:17 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Did the offer really change?

I've just been told that accessing "prior" versions might mean that
softimage 2015 will stay in all future license files of the MYECS. is
that true? Can somebody please confirm this to me?

Thanks!
Chris

On 10/03/14 13:08, Christoph Muetze wrote:
> On 10/03/14 12:42, Alastair Hearsum wrote:
>> I've taken out the sentence referring to the threat of discontinuing
>> Softimage licenses if the Maya offer is taken up.
>
> They didn't change their position on this afaik. They just rephrased
> it imho.
>
> Read carefully what Maurice wrote:
>
> --
>
> 1.  You make the transition and let your subs expire before April
> 30th 2016.
> In this case you will retain the right to use both Softimage 2015 and
> whatever version of Maya you were on at the time your contract expires
> in perpetuity.
>
> 2.  You make the transition, remain on Subscription after April
> 30th 2016, but choose not to install any future versions of Maya after
> that date. In this case you would also be able to keep both your Maya
> and Softimage versions frozen in perpetuity if you wish to. It is only
> on installing software that you have to accept a new license
> agreement. Any licenses that you have purchased are yours in
> perpetuity and are only replaced on installing new software.
>
> 3.  You make the transition, remain on Subscription after April
> 30th 2016, and install a new version of Maya after that date. In this
> case the new license will replace the transition bundle license and
> will be Maya only. Previously that meant losing access to Softimage.
> With the changes we have just made you will now be able to access
> Softimage via Subscription in the same way as you can access prior
> versions today.
>
> --
>
>
> ..so basically nothing really changed from the original "offer", right?
>
> The way I understand it there is no way that I can use my current Maya
> Entertainment Creation Suite, stay on Subscription and fire up
> Softimage 2015 next to Mudbox 2019 in 4 years time..
>
> :/
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>
>
>
><>

RE: Your postings...

[Chris Vienneau]

Yeah it seems like the mailing list is showing its tech limits right now. Seems 
best to keep it as one list.



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Raffaele Fragapane 
[raffsxsil...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 9:46 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Your postings...

I have mixed feelings about an additional list.
On one hand I thought about putting that up for popular vote to see if people 
wanted to separate all the Maya questions from the actual Softimage focus, I 
know some do, and there's some merit to a narrow signal. On the other hand, 
that will be a lot of traffic in months to come, and I'm afraid taking it away 
from this list will result in it quickly withering down.

It's probably worth its own thread, as this one has a marked stench to it due 
to an unfortunate inception.


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
We want this forum to be the users and hopefully everyone respects each other. 
I have had lots of private threads where people express concern that this is 
not the forum they have known for many years and that is understandable given 
what happened. If people have different reactions to what has happened and will 
take different paths that is understandable as well.



If the forum wants us to create an SI-transition forum where these discussions 
can continue and this one can be maintained for those people who want to 
continue to discuss si as it was before we will do that.



cv/






From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>
 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>]
 on behalf of Leendert A. Hartog [hirazib...@live.nl<mailto:hirazib...@live.nl>]
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 12:02 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>
Subject: Re: Your postings...


Agreed...

Emilio Hernandez schreef op 9-3-2014 16:51:
Well I read a more unprofessional post of someone telling other one, that he 
was biased because he was fired from Autodesk.

We were all professionals 20 years ago?

If fresh blood is coming to this list, in first place to seek help and 
knowledge, and he gets caught in the middle of this mayhem suddenly he is not 
able to express how he feels, while the rest of us are doing it?

I am not judging, nor I am who to say if it was right or wrong for Mauricio to 
post a private mail.

But he has the right to do it.

True is this list because of the events that developed just last Tuesday, has 
been driven away from its essence.   It is normal.  Will it ever be the same?

I don't know.  I hope so.  So the people like me, that are staying with 
Softimage until Autodesk or some one else comes with a better solution for me.  
That by conviction I will adopt, like it was the case with Softimage 3D and not 
because I am forced to, can continue learning, sharing and why not?  Have a 
good time with all of you, as we are spread all over the world.  And even that 
I don't know you in person, at this stage I feel I am part of a big family.

I never saw Mauricio jumping on threads about tech stuff and start posting out 
of place.

But anyway the tidal wave is settling and after the waters retire we will see 
what is left.

Then we can start bulding again.

You can count with my two hands to do so.

Cheers!







---
Emilio Hernández   VFX & 3D animation.





--

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





--
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and 
let them flee like the dogs they are!
<>

RE: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Greg,



Do you have any more info on what you mean by long standing low level requests 
and can you list the top 10 third parties you would like me to reach out to 
follow up with? Or is there anyone on the list who is a third party developer 
that can elaborate? For the SDK it is a really tough battle as it was just not 
part of the core of the original development but I can get a definitive answer.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Mário Domingos 
[mdomingos.p...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:03 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer

Greg, can I post your letter on Facebook?
—
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone



On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:49 AM, Greg Punchatz 
mailto:g...@janimation.com>> wrote:

Hello Autodesk,

My name is Greg Punchatz , Senior Creative Director at Janimation. I have a 
proposal, or call it a counter offer on the proper way to retire Softimage.

First off, if you don't know who I am, I feel like I have been part of the 
Softimage team since the beginning of Sumatra testing. I spent countless hours 
creating content on my own time and letting Softimage use my personal work as 
the sample scenes that make up a good deal of the Softimage library. Because of 
this relationship I have many, many very dear friends from all eras of 
Softimage. From the very top to the bottom of Softimage, I was always welcomed 
as one of the family.

Our company, Janimation, was instrumental in helping promote XSI from its 
earliest days from being its first customer demo at the XSI launch party. To 
its final days giving Avid and Autodesk permission to use our work for 
promoting Softimage launches. We did this because we truly believe it is the 
best software on the planet for what we do and that's commercial work. 
Softimage is lighter on its feet out of the box for the kind of work the post 
production world is doing today in commercials. I don't know a single CG 
supervisor that knows each package equally that would rather take a commercial 
through a single package other than XSI.


That being said, I believe Autodesk needs to be working on a completely new 3d 
software package. I would hope that is the plan. I also understand that if you 
are working towards moving us all to one package, Softimage by market share 
alone is the logical one to first retire as it creates the least income.

So if it's time has truly come (even though I believe it is the most complete 
out-of-the-box 3-D solution you provide currently) I think there is a more 
elegant... let's say, a kinder gentler way for Softimage to be put into 
retirement. You can continue to benefit from our subscription support while we 
have enough time to move our existing pipeline to somthing else.

Please consider keepinng the current small development team you already have 
for FOUR more years.

With a single focus on these three things: opening up the SDK,

working with 3rd party folk,

and fixing long outstanding low-level requests.

It's nothing but a win-win situation, you still get our money, and we get to 
evalute Maya along the way. It's going to take a lot more than two years for a 
lot of us to be able to make a tranistion completely.

I'm not sure if Autodesk realizes this, but while the team in Singapore was not 
making giant leaps technologically, they were on their way to leaving Softimage 
in a much better state. They need a bit more time than you are giving them.

At the end of the four years, we can at least consider staying in the Autodesk 
family because they listened to the usersgave us pleanty of heads up of its 
EOL, and did thier darndest to make sure the last version of softimage is the 
best version ever...XSI deserves thatwe deserve that ... and quite frankly 
I deserve that.

Sincerely

Greg Punchatz

Senior Creative Director at Janimation ...

<>

RE: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

[Chris Vienneau]

Let us know which way you lean. For Maya we have two forums:



One forum is small annoying things that you run into every day and they drive 
you nuts.



http://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/forums/160518-small-annoying-things-to-fix-in-maya-forum/filters/top



The second forum is big ideas



http://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/forums/160514-ideas-for-maya-forum/filters/top



We triage the list every week. The release coming out soon has about 50 items 
fixed from the lists. If anything you can go and vote on the areas of Maya 
where you agree the effort has to go or create a specific @softimage tag that 
indicates your voice on this forum.



cv/








From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Nicholas Breslow 
[n...@nbreslow.com]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 11:29 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

I agree with the original sentiment of this thread and Eric’s comment.  I like 
the idea of using something like UserVoice - I think IdeaScale is a good 
solution as well.  Voting sites make it easier to quantify what the 
questions/concerns are than a running list.  This would make it easier to 
present issues that the community would like to see addressed before 
development ceases.

-Nick

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Rob Wuijster
Sent: Sunday, March 9, 2014 10:05 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: URGENT: Consolidation of Questions

I see only a blank page..






Rob



\/-\/\/
On 8-3-2014 21:33, Jason S wrote:
Can this link be accesed? or is it just me?

On 03/08/14 14:22, Doeke Wartena wrote:

here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10reItsMpXD309tOH7ZVF3trh6cHMmEtlNEdJWK7pnpM/edit?usp=sharing



-
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2014.0.4335 / Virus Database: 3722/7170 - Release Date: 03/09/14


<>

RE: YOUR TOP 5

[Chris Vienneau]

Please keep responding to this thread. Great info!

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alastair Hearsum
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 5:55 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: YOUR TOP 5

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 e-mail in error and that any use, 
dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this e-mail is strictly 
prohibited. If this transmission is received in error please kindly return it 
to the sender and delete this message from your system.
<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi guys,



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



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



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



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



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

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

[Chris Vienneau]

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



thx.



cv/




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

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

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

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



<>

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

[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<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 

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.

[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<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>
 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>]
 on behalf of Emilio Hernandez [emi...@e-roja.com<mailto:emi...@e-roja.com>]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 11:13 AM
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.


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]

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

[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: Open Letter to Carl Bass

[Chris Vienneau]

Just to let everyone know Carl got the letter and is asking questions and will 
write back when he gets into the office on Monday.



cv/


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Leoung O'Young 
[digim...@digimata.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 5:13 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Carl Bass

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 
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. 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' commercia

RE: ICE in Maya is it really possible?

[Chris Vienneau]

Raf is right. We focused a lot on modernizing the core of Maya so that we can 
enable third parties to play nice within the Maya environment and Bifrost works 
much the same way splice works in that it is a node inside Maya that passes 
data back and forth to another world that is more suited to a given task.  For 
example with crowds we now have Golem, Mirarmy, and Massive for Maya. A perfect 
example of the work ahead of us is something like Gator. Maya has all the 
transfer tools inside of Gator but they are spread out and inconsistent. A DG 
master can do many of the things in the operator stack but the UI sucks. 
Designing a proper workflow and UI is a lot harder than coding one and we have 
hired real interaction designers and not just maya experts. The consistent 
thread is something out of the box that is not daunting and is consistent and 
properly presented in an interactive way.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Raffaele Fragapane 
[raffsxsil...@googlemail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 7:11 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: ICE in Maya is it really possible?


You already have most of what is possible in ice in Maya, it's called splice 
for Fabric. The only thing missing are some primitives and the visual 
programming paradigm and GUI,  performance and portability are mostly better 
already.

Honestly, I don't know why people keep  mentioning things such as she of vote 
or rewrites and the such. XSI wasn't rewritten to get ICE with its current 
considerable set of limitations (some of which aren't present in splice on 
Maya), but everybody wants so badly for Maya to be called older, when in 
actuality it's clunkier, horribly fragmented, but arguably a lot younger and 
more modern than Soft at this point.

People have a perception of modernity based on their interaction with a mix of 
look, slickness and use experience, and then think and wasn't too the mythical 
"core" of the app to be equally modern or ancient based on how it feels, but 
the two things are seldom related.

And on the same note, of Maya will get ICE, it still won't be Soft ;)
What Chris mentioned with H Maya, if it will ever get anywhere, would be a lot 
more important than "rewriting the core".

Modern software development and software modernisation don't work the way most 
people seem to perceive it.

On 16 Mar 2014 21:20, "Nuno Conceicao" 
mailto:nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Yeah I get your point, but for that to happen i can imagine that maya would 
have to be almost totally rewritten, right?

Em 16/03/2014 05:22, "Raffaele Fragapane" 
mailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com>> escreveu:

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" 
mailto:nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com>> 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: Antitrust Class Action Lawsuit

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi everyone,



Things are very different than six years ago. In terms of competition for 
Autodesk, you can now argue in different industries there is Cinema 4D, Modo, 
Houdini, Zbrush, 3D coat, and even Unity (now has modeling tools) that can 
replace functionality that was once only available in 3dsmax, Maya, and 
Softimage. Things are more and more about playing nice with other tools in an 
ecosystem than one package to rule them all.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Ben Barker 
[ben.bar...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 12:38 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Antitrust Class Action Lawsuit

I'm not a lawyer either, but a few thoughts. When AD first bought Softimage 
there were talks of monopoly. Unfortunately for us, AD's biggest market is CAD, 
and they have several competitors in that arena. The government doesn't really 
parcel out the market in a way that favors a claim on monopoly for 3D artists. 
We are just a small bulb on a large tree.

Secondly, and this is a more serious problem, antitrust basically doesn't exist 
anymore in the US like it did in the days of Ma Bell. I talked with my partner, 
who is a larval lawyer, about this issue quite a bit. Every antitrust decision 
for the past 70 years has gnawed away at plaintiff power in antitrust cases and 
now there is essentially nothing left. Combined with the weak case we would 
already have from the first part, and I think this would be a really difficult 
row to hoe. That money and energy would probably be better spent re-educating 
and resource sharing among SI artists so they can move on, or perhaps fighting 
the subsidy/tariff issue.

I understand the anger, and it's heartbreaking to watch a superior product die 
in favor of Maya, but this wouldn't be a good way to retaliate IMO.




On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 12:06 PM, skuby 
mailto:sku...@gmail.com>> wrote:
There may be a case here for an Antitrust Class Action Lawsuit against 
Autodesk.  We would need to have a lawyer look at the details and I'm not the 
person to be able to do this, as I don't have the resources, connections or 
credibility to do so.

However, if successful, it is potentially possible that Autodesk could be 
forced to divest their Softimage assets, aka. they could be compelled by a 
court to sell Softimage to a competitor at it's fair market value.

Anyways, maybe someone out there in the aether can give the idea a shot, I 
would not know where to start outside of this initial suggestion.

The Federal Trade Commission along with the Department of Justice Antitrust 
Division jointly regulate and enforce Antitrust Law and Anti-Competitive 
Monopoly practices.

Anyways, this might work a little better than a petition to Autodesk or 
other-such cries for a change of heart, but the petition someone put out there 
to Autodesk might serve some use when presenting the idea to a Lawyer(s).  I 
think a lot of people and interested parties might just support crowdfunding 
for legal fees.  Good luck.

<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Hi Julian,

I feel like the open letter written by Perry captures the best sentiments of 
the threads I have read the last few weeks. Carl will respond as he is very 
pragmatic and down to earth and was a software developer writing tools for many 
years. Sending the letter to Chris and Carl is the right place to put the 
effort and I thought the letter was balanced, passionate and fair. We looked at 
how Shake, FCP, and Avid DS went down and wanted to provide a two year 
transition window with support, a roadmap for the transition under NDA with key 
features and workflows being brought over, and a training plan that could be 
agile enough to work with the community to tailor it over time and do hands on 
work in central soft hotspots like Tokyo, London and Montreal.  

I think this article captures for many what has been a brutal three years in 
the vfx business as we have seen so many good companies (Modus FX being the 
latest) get taken under by the broken business model of the film industry:

http://www.thewrap.com/dear-hollywood-fix-vfx-will-fix-movie-business/

I think there are great ideas here on how to make the transition better and I 
will let Carl and Chris comment on whether they want to change that plan.  

cv/

From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of pete...@skynet.be 
[pete...@skynet.be]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 5:32 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
w/Mayaor Max or any Suite.

excellent stuff Julian.

-Original Message-
From: Julian Johnson
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 9:47 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free
w/Mayaor Max or any Suite.

On 15/03/2014 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.

Graham, as everyone at Autodesk seems convinced there is no market for
Softimage what harm could there be in selling it? If the might of
Autodesk's marketing resources had no impact then it stands to reason
that no one else is going to be able to make a success of it. I mean
you've tried your best, right? It's just not possible to market
Softimage. Avid tried and failed, you tried and failed. It stands
absolutely no chance of ever  becoming a competitor to Maya or Max as
it's too hard to adopt. Why not, therefore, sell it on to an interested
third party who could solely cater for the niche Softimage audience?
Don't we all win that way? We have an interested 'owner' - you can focus
your resources on Maya and Max and walk away with a lump sum for
'innovative' R&D and you still have no competition. You no longer have
an alienated and hostile Softimage customer base.

Better still, as soon as Maya becomes a more attractive option we then
have the choice to adopt or not. Given the myriad improvements listed by
Chris that adoption in a few years time should be a no-brainer for us,
shouldn't it?  We can once more re-enter the Autodesk fold willingly and
migrate to the better product. If you, Chris and Maurice genuinely
believe in 'new' Maya and Autodesk's own marketing abilities it should
be relatively easy to sell it to Softimage customers in a few years
time. I'm sure we're going to be blown away by the new innovations that
Maurice talked about. With the current roadmap and user input Maya will
undoubtedly be a better product than Softimage is now. I know you
wouldn't be asking us to transition to an inferior product - that just
wouldn't make business sense. No billion dollar business would treat
their customers that way.

Fundamentally, it seems as though if the initial decision to buy XSI was
motivated by a desire to move the product forward and market it in
earnest (with a genuine business case that demonstrated either more
sales or additional revenue - and why else would you have bought XSI?)
then there has been a colossal failure in that business plan by
Autodesk. The burden of that failure has been placed solely on the
customers to whom, surely, Autodesk has some level of responsibility.

And yet, that burden of responsibility doesn't seem to have been
reflected in the manner in which Softimage is currently being EOL'd. I
can't think of a more brutal scenario - immediate cessation of
development; no prior warning; no safe-harbour alternative option; no
pre-planning or understanding of the essential migratable features in
Softimage; no in-place transition training; no concept of recompense for
your failure; and no willingness to negotiate or ameliorate the terms of
the EOL in any substantial way.

Julian<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

;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




--

Nick Martinelli
(201) 424 - 6518
www.nickMartinelli.net<http://www.nickMartinelli.net>
n...@nickmartinelli.net<mailto:n...@nickmartinelli.net>
<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

great site


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Adam Sale 
[adamfs...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:49 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, the possibilities when using ICE are so endless, that all nodes are fair 
game. Hard to narrow it down to just a few, especially with a lot of the heavy 
duty ICE users. Just have a look at the vast repository on 
rray.de<http://rray.de>

There are some very innovative ideas to be found there, it's also the way ICE 
communicates seamlessly with the rest of Softimage.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:17 PM, Nuno Conceicao 
mailto:nunoalexconcei...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Nope


On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 1:41 PM, 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?



thx.



cv/




From: 
softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>
 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>]
 on behalf of Rob Chapman [tekano@gmail.com<mailto:tekano@gmail.com>]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 8:43 AM
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.

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

[Chris Vienneau]

? ad ?


From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Francisco Criado 
[malcriad...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:17 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset"

Chris, seriously? yo ad want it all right?
F.


On Sunday, March 16, 2014, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
The topic was bringing over ICE graphs into Bifrost. We will not show the 
Bifrost graph in the first version but if you click here 
(https://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost-the-return-of-the-naiad-team-with-a-bridge-to-ice/)
 you can see what we showed at Siggraph last year in terms of the graph.



Let me ask a very open question to Paul Doyle. Paul when people say the 
creators of ICE work at Fabric do you agree? Many on the Bifrost team would 
argue they were just as much a part of it than the hard working guys at Fabric. 
I think it is great that there are two companies following this path and that 
will only mean competition which is a good thing but I do believe there are 
many people who came together and not just 1-2 who drove the whole thing.



ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.



We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Array<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm>

  *   
Color<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm>
  *   
Constant<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm>
  *   
Conversion<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm>
  *   Data 
Access<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm>
  *   
Debugging<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm>
  *   
Execution<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm>
  *   Geometry 
Queries<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm>
  *   Math 
Basic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm>
  *   Math 
Comparison<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm>
  *   Math 
Logic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm>
  *   Math 
Matrix<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm>
  *   Math 
Statistics<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm>
  *   Math 
Trigonometry<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm>
  *   Math 
Vector<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm>
  *   Point 
Cloud<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm>
  *   
Rotation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm>
  *   
Simulation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm>
  *   
String<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm>
  *   
Topology<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm>
  *   
Crowds<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Simul<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Force<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Collision<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-9CDA70F0-F9F3-4897-8698-72A9B887

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Thanks Paul. I think everyone here respects all the hard work everyone put into 
ICE and that the whole team did not leave and many of the key people involved 
in ICE kept working on what eventually became Bifrost. Bifrost will be launched 
this week so people will get their first real glimpse of the technology. We are 
clear that we are using the procedural core to power liquids in the form of the 
rewritten Naiad solver using a generalist UI. We will be more open about the 
technology like we were in the FX guide article as the year goes on but will 
have any such discussion with customers under NDA as you know since we seem to 
keep the same circles these days.



cv/




From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Paul Doyle 
[technove...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 3:51 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset"

Hi Chris - Ronald was the main (very gifted) designer and he's now at Ubisoft, 
so I'd suggest he's really the key person from the original ICE team and 
doesn't work for either AD or Fabric. At Fabric we have Jerome and Peter who 
were involved in much of back-end multi-threading work, and Phil and Helge who 
built a lot of the nodes and demos that went into 7.0. That's by no means the 
entire team.

Lots of people at Softimage were involved throughout, and given that a ton of 
work went into ICE since 7.0 it would be unfair to say there's nobody at AD or 
in the Bifrost team worked on ICE. ICE was exciting and a success because the 
whole of Softimage was sold on the idea - it was prevalent throughout the 
company. I wouldn't denigrate anyone that was involved in XSI 7.0, it was a 
colossal team effort that is still the high point of my career.

I also have immense respect for the team that worked on Skyline and am 
confident that whatever they build will be impressive. There are many talented 
people that I worked with in the Games group, so I'm not going to say anything 
but good things about them.

What is unclear is how the ICE approach (as a high-level visual programming 
paradigm) meshes with Bifrost as publicly shown to date - I expect that is 
driving the questions people are raising. Because of that, I think it is 
problematic to say that Bifrost is the spiritual successor to ICE. Nobody is 
really explaining how that's the case, beyond it's also going to have a visual 
programming system - but that's like saying Maya and Softimage are the same 
because they both have a scene graph.

There is also just an issue of rubbing people up the wrong way. Many people 
feel that ICE is a phenomenal piece of technology that had the potential to 
become something even more amazing (and valuable to AD at the FX end of the 
pipeline) - sadly that was not where efforts were invested post-acquisition. It 
is hard for your customers to understand why Softimage is being EOL when award 
winning work is being produced with that toolset - and being told 'just wait 
till Bifrost comes out' doesn't really sweeten the pill. I understand the logic 
behind that, but you're asking people to have a lot of faith in something they 
haven't seen yet.

Thanks,

Paul




On 16 March 2014 14:59, Emilio Hernandez 
mailto:emi...@e-roja.com>> wrote:

Correct me if I am wrong but Bifrost at this moment seems to me that it is only 
for fluid sim from that article. What about the rest that ICE is for?

<>

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

[Chris Vienneau]

Fair enough. I have had this conversation with a few people face to face and it 
is obviously easier than a mailing list. Thanks for the thought as it is 
consistent with what other people have said.



cv/






From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Steven Caron 
[car...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 5:00 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: "Top List of ICE Nodes That Cover 80% of What You Do With The 
Toolset"

you don't have to explain ICE to us, i personally have been using some 
incarnation of ICE for about 7 years now. grabbing a list of categories from 
the docs and asking us which ones we use the most makes me wonder if you know 
what are doing... we need all of those lower level nodes to create the 
compounds, missing even a handful and it becomes very difficult and some what 
impossible to make them.

but going along with your question, the geometry queries are probably some of 
the most important nodes. as you already pointed out the underlying data type 
'location' is the backbone of how we store and query scene data which drive our 
simulations and effects. they are the inputs to our functions.


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Chris Vienneau 
mailto:chris.vienn...@autodesk.com>> wrote:

ICE is a set of base function nodes built into higher order operations 
(compounds) with a super slick visual programming language and strong ways of 
querying scene data. Given we have the source code of ICE we can put in nodes 
that match 1 for 1 the code instead of reverse engineering it which is usually 
where things fall apart in terms of migration tools.

We can even open this up to the fabric guys who are here so of these node types 
which do you use the most on a daily basis and which do not use or find need 
work:



Array<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Array.htm>

  *   
Color<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Color.htm>
  *   
Constant<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Constant.htm>
  *   
Conversion<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Conversion.htm>
  *   Data 
Access<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_DataAccess.htm>
  *   
Debugging<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Debugging.htm>
  *   
Execution<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Execution.htm>
  *   Geometry 
Queries<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_GeometryQueries.htm>
  *   Math 
Basic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathBasic.htm>
  *   Math 
Comparison<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathComparison.htm>
  *   Math 
Logic<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathLogic.htm>
  *   Math 
Matrix<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathMatrix.htm>
  *   Math 
Statistics<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathStatistics.htm>
  *   Math 
Trigonometry<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathTrigonometry.htm>
  *   Math 
Vector<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_MathVector.htm>
  *   Point 
Cloud<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_PointCloud.htm>
  *   
Rotation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-DCAC50A6-C3FD-47D0-8F5A-6A161EBD3E68.htm>
  *   
Simulation<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/icenode_ref_Simulation.htm>
  *   
String<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/iceref_nodes_String.htm>
  *   
Topology<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-FBD0D4AB-F90F-4C2C-A3D5-2EA677678349.htm>
  *   
Crowds<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-1D883E93-17DD-4CB2-AA3D-C50A33E2F7FF.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Simul<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-96B37421-0112-41FE-8255-B8D7EE37AE63.htm>
  *   Syflex 
Force<http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2014/en_us/userguide/files/GUID-3CD0-CE7F-4EF9-9E5C-A1A0C35D2B14.htm>
  *   Sy