Why Fanboi, and why conspiracy? I consider Paul and Co. to be smart enough to know that that is EXACTLY what they should be shooting for. AD knows it themselves IMO, as does SideFX, and the Foundry, and many others.
The writing couldn't be plainer on all walls that the industry is shifting again. >From blackboxed, fragmented specialistic apps in the end80s to mid nineties, to the rise of the artist friendly monolith in the end 90s, to the monolithic but moderately open app from end-90s until now, we're now moving fast towards a common stream of OSS standards which will be injected into by various small footprint, very specialized and tailored apps (ZB, Mari, Katana etc.), and have a layer floating on top to interface pipe and content/operation management on top of that will be platform centric. You have pointed out bits of that youreself. Maya and Soft are more and more used as mere scene assembly and animation platforms. That type of approach is becoming more widely available by the minute to smaller and smaller entities, even to individuals. It's only the middle end caught into hard software locks at this point. The age of the platform is coming. Everybody already manages shots with shotgun, assets with tank (or perforce, or propietary, or what else you have it), models with ZB, retopos with 3DC or Topogun, textures with mudbox or mari, does effects in Houdini, or Realflow, hair is left to plugins (shave, yeti), lights with katana, renders with PRMan, composites with Nuke, finals with DaVinci... Who caches with something other Alembic (or propietary formats) or writes images other than EXR? All UIs are Qt, threading is beind coalesced in fewer solutions by the day, libraries emerge to abstract and generalise many things (OCL, Thrust etc.). What little is left out has initiatives that might be caught up on (OSL, partIO, openVDB), or will one day see an alternative that will become the standard. What's left for Maya or Soft to do but assemblying assets and rig/animation? Which are ultimately just scene Management tasks, a specialized type of graph which, of the lot, is the most backwards and dated of all sections of the pipe. There will be churn, as always for a few years one sub-field using CGI is left better or worse serviced than others, one size more or less competitive, but I don't think there will be a next-gen big app, not one as big (proportionally) as Soft was, or Maya is. Fabric did the right thing, all they have to do is garner the attention and sustenance to punch through the industry catching up to the obvious through lean years. On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Matt Lind <ml...@carbinestudios.com> wrote: > And to throw some fanboi conspiracy theory gas into the flames: > > If you integrate with all the DCC apps, you’ve essentially built up the > trust with all the user bases and have the ability to suck them into your > DCC of the future to reduce any and all risk of switching a production > pipeline to another base application.**** > > ** ** > > At least give us a ray of hope, Paul. ;-)**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Matt >
