Thx Alan, I knew about the render region, and I'm not surprised of the toon and
quick stretch ones either.
What I really wonder is: how could any developer these days write commercial software and
hope not to infringe any patents by accident? It's a total minefield, let alone
financially prohibitive due to cost of patent research. Heck, I hear even the progress
bar is, or was until recently, patented! It's coming to a point where it's getting
impossible for small companies and individuals to develop anything commercially. And
that's not a problem in a land far far away. It already affects my daily work, as
illustrated by the lack of decent hair modeling solutions for Soft other than that Shave
version from stone age. Peregin's Yeti cannot be sold in America due to legal dispute
with Joe Alter, and I believe that other "hair mesh modeling" tech is also
Patented by Cem Yuksel (Hair Farm), and I doubt he has plans to port it to Softimage
himself.
Patents are to protect those who take risks and invest in research and
development, I understand that, but I feel it's getting to a point where it
does more harm than good. They simply remain effective for too long, anything
longer than 5 years is a lifetime in software development.
All one can do is either not write software or just don't give a fuck, close
his eyes and push forward in hope that nobody sues his ass off. Did I miss
anything?
Softimage has a bunch of patents actually.
Render region:
http://www.google.com/patents
?id=1k8EAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=avid%20technology%20render&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false
XSI's QuickStretch deformer:
http://www.google.com/patents
?id=NxcgAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=softimage&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false
There's a few more, including one for toon shading:
https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=inassignee:%22Softimage%22
Oh, and Avid appears to have a patent on editing f-curves in 2D space:
https://www.google.com/patents/WO2000063847A1?cl=en&dq=avid+softimage&hl=en&sa=X&ei=a4cTUrOxC46g4AP7p4HYCA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA
On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 5:28 AM, Stefan Kubicek <s...@tidbit-images.com>wrote:
(http://patent.ipexl.com/**inventor/Michael_C_Sheasby_1.**html<http://patent.ipexl.com/inventor/Michael_C_Sheasby_1.html>
)
What? The XSI Property Editor is actually patented?
On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Christoph Muetze <c...@glarestudios.de>
wrote:
...He didn't just do the skin but also the functional design of the user
interface, right? I was always under the impression that he was the
designer
behind the UI. Am i wrong about this?
I always have a hard time explaining people that i do interface design -
and
that sometimes includes (but is entirely not about) button painting ;) I
couldn't care less about the (admittedly beautiful) skin of Softimage -
but
the UI... oh boy, that's (for the largest part) a piece of true art.
No, he only did the look and skin of the UI. In an interview on
xsibase, it was implied he did "ui design" but this is wrong, it was
only graphic design.
For the functional design, we had at many people in the early days who
designed that.
They were called Program Managers, which is how that job was called
at Microsoft in the 1990s, but in this decade we'd call them
interaction designers. For example, one person from Softimage|DS
called Michael Sheasby
(http://patent.ipexl.com/**inventor/Michael_C_Sheasby_1.**html<http://patent.ipexl.com/inventor/Michael_C_Sheasby_1.html>)
is
responsible for all the "modeless inspector" design, i.e. everything
about how the PPGs work, without which XSI wouldn't feel like XSI.
There were different people for each areas.
--
------------------------------**---------------
Stefan Kubicek ste...@keyvis.at
------------------------------**---------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43 (0) 699 12614231
www.keyvis.at
-- This email and its attachments are --
-- confidential and for the recipient only --
--
---------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek ste...@keyvis.at
---------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43 (0) 699 12614231
www.keyvis.at
-- This email and its attachments are --
-- confidential and for the recipient only --
