So they have a scarcely maintained aging PoS they are still managing to sell for gazillions as a high prestige product, and have insofar managed to distract the audience from the fact the emperor is freeballing it, and you'd go to the board asking for the management who's pulling that hat trick off to be replaced? :)
They do feel increasingly dysfunctional in their communication and user base management, but so does nearly any large enough media oriented large house these days. Only the Foundry seems to be closer in touch with the top tiers of the VFX industry. It's very possible AD is simply more Adobe than Alias/Soft, and we just can't (nor should we be supposed to) be served by a company with that kind of mentality. All that said, Foundry is doing better than ok and they seem to care a lot for the VFX business at many levels, unlike AD as a larger entity (which you have to remember is NOT Soft or Alias), and pipelines are going atomic with OSS glue, so the days of Maya/Soft/MAX not being required across the whole pipe are upon us already. When you think about it already entire chunks of the pipe in the top end reflect that, and a lot of that is trickling down to the middle, and will soon enough trickle further down again. With Katana + PRMan + Alembic Surfacing and lighting is likely the next bit breaking off the AD continent, much like modelling did already with ZB + Topogun. If Fabric manages to wedge in with splice and slowly abstract things away from Maya and convert it from host to client of platform, that's another big chunk going. There is less every day in an A to B scenario I open Soft or Maya for really. Whether that'll be viable for the small user, given the small user needs the whole stretch of software for himself and doesn't get to divide the expense across departments only needing parts of it like the bigger pipes do, well, that remains to be seen. The monopoly feels less and less like it's going to stay every day though. If you're a small unit or work in a small shop, maybe it's time to stop thinking like they want you to, that you NEED the all in one, and start figuring out how you can re-engineer a staged process into your needs and workflow. I'm succeeding pretty well at home these days, better than I ever expected to. Even as an individual I'm finding the big-arse DCC apps are more and more expensive OGL and graph eval hosts than anything else. This was simply impossible five years ago, We could barely do it at the 300+ staff project scale, now... not so much. On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Greg Punchatz <g...@janimation.com> wrote: > Frankly M&E AD needs new TOP down leadership.... > > It's so beyond broken that no matter how hard the people below them try to > show them the light they refuse to look. > > They still think Flame is still a valid product.. Single threaded piece > of poo IMO. I am so surprised they can still sell the product at all, > especially for the outrageous prices. There are just a lot of people who > have not realized yet that the emperor has no clothes. > > And Maya is the future of 3d ... A code base nearing or past its 15 year > mark... Really? > > Sorry but I am just not a happy AD customer. > > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Jul 24, 2013, at 7:19 PM, Steven Caron <car...@gmail.com> wrote: > > they, you, need a better PR department. > > it is simple, don't give us reason to speculate so wildly. > > *written with my thumbs > > On Jul 24, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Graham Bell <graham.b...@autodesk.com> wrote: > > > I'm saying nothing more, though if anyone wants to pvt me, then feel free. > > > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
