You don't talk about.... oh right... hmm. You get invited by someone on the list willing to vouch for you.
Well its going to be something ICE-like it seems. Honestly though think about it. Any new technology that is being developed these days is going to be procedural or node based. Look at Coral and Nanode and probably Fabric. Even Max has some node editors now. Its just the way things are going. If they DIDN'T put a node editor into Maya that would be surprising. Also the best flatery is imitation. Just proves that it works and work well. Softimage is inspiring Maya! The Softimage is a red headed step child of Maya and Max is a long drawn out beaten to death topic that we're going to have to agree to disagree on. Try taking an outside look without any loyalty to any of the 3 apps and with no history of the 3d apps. You would see that Maya has a crap ton more seats in VFX studios. To get more of those studios who are already established and having pipelines based around Maya to use more of your apps, you bundle them and improve interop. That gets you more sales and makes studio to studio asset sharing easier. Thus you market a Maya suite to the majority since they are using it. Same with Max. Lets not kid ourselves, we all know we're in the minority, we're probably never going to be the majority. Good for us, we get to use cool stuff and have a more flexible app out of the box. Lastly on this thought, keep in mind they have to build their node editor on their already aging core. As the statement I posted above states, its years of hard work and lots of things had to change (and break) because of it. Softimage users are specialists in awesome and at the core, we're all still 3D artists. I've been finding myself more and more lately realizing that while I love this one software, it'd be silly not to embrace the overall area of expertise (for me rigging and tool dev). I wouldn't ever want to be someone who only knew how to do 3D in 1 application. If that 1 application tanks I'll be hard pressed to continue in the field easily and I don't ever want to have to relearn the lion's share of my chosen profession. Plus it makes me more valuable (at least I think so). Softimage isn't going anywhere. It's been stated numerous times by numerous people, Softimage is huge in Asia and provides a crap ton of income for AD and that market isn't going to just up and switch to Maya just as the majority of VFX houses aren't going to do the reverse. AD is a business that needs money to survive. Regardless of whether you have overlap and redundant features in apps, you don't get rid of something that is making you money. He did state that he's open to questions and I'll email and ask if he would mind if I posted his email here. * My personal opinion and outlook. 2014 is going to be an interesting release with the new devs in the drivers seat. Hoping for great things. -------------------------------------------- Eric Thivierge http://www.ethivierge.com
