Autodesk tried to kill Softimage right from the beggining. Since the very first time Softimage never showed up in the front page of their website. All they showed up was Maya and MAX. Never gave the deserved attention and right branding/marketing.
You never put enough attention and effort on really growing up the sales. The main dev team was ripped off and plugged into Maya, and delivered only lame upgrades year after year. Even with this, Softimage delivered amazing work created by amazing artists. Not only in the big studios, but from the independent freelancers to mid size studios. You want to listen, ok. listen well. You are blind with your Maya paradigm. Maya artists that trully went to start using Softimage, and not overwhelmed by such a pristine UI, that at first view from a Maya user, seems that it lacks of a lot of stuff, without stupid icons everywhere. Never went back to Maya. I personally know several of them. Here in my country, there were two studios that went into the endeavour of starting a full 3D animated feature film. Right from the beggining they chose Softimage. At my former small studio, the artists that I hired were Maya guys, after I trainned them in Softimage, they said in a meeting that Softimage opened them a new door. Recently one of them freelanced for the Eugenio Derbez latest movie doing some character animation for this film, and he used Softimage not Maya. At first he was asigned only one shot as he entered late. He deliver faster than other freelance guys using Maya, and he got two more shots. Softimage "The suite plugin", each time it is used in production is sorrounded by success. But each time such stories hit the media, you take care of diminishing the use of Softimage. Before Eric Mootz ported his addons to Maya, he was never in your spotlight, the same with Arnold and others. Now you present proudly Eric Mootz, and his tools in a Maya environment. If it is Softimage, you bury the name, but if it is Maya you don't hesitate to put into all the frontpages you can, and fill your mouth with it. Your statement of "we tried" it is nothing else but a big lie. You never tried. The PETA commercial. When did you featured that in the Area and in your front page and filled your mouth that it was made with Softimage? NEVER. Three awards given by the VES society and did you care to write even a few lines about being proud that Softimage was used for that amazing work? And you are saying that you tried????? You kept us all these years with rumors, rumors, and finally you ended these rumors. Meanwhile you were saying that Softimage was to stay with Autodesk, and in good hands... If Softimage has a name it is because of the Softimage community, not because of you. Do you really believe that Maya is the future? I call it going back to the past. If Maya was really a better choice for us, you wouldn't be now in this position. I suggest you take a look to a video I made to compare the workflow to achieve the same effect in Maya vs Softimage. This is just a small example of the general workflow. https://vimeo.com/87722342 Being unbiased you tell me which one, is the one that should be killed, and which one deserves your attention. You say you can't afford to put more money into Softimage? Well don't do it. Just keep fixing the bugs and deliver SP, but open the SDK to allow further development from 3rd party developers. You will still earn money from the subscriptions, and tech support, while you allow others to invest their money to develop new tools for Softimage. Since the time you acquired Softimage the real improvemnts are from 3rd pary devs. Not from you. You don't put to sale Softimage because you know that if another company acquires it, in a year or two Softimage will start kicking Maya's ass with the right branding and marketing. You also know that if you start to give Softimage the place it deserves, artists that never used Softimage before, will start using it. Maya sales will start to drop while more Softimage seats start to appear, and you don't want to look bad in front of your stock holders of the big amounts of money you have put in the wrong place. So what is the best you can do? Kill Softimage to cover your incompetence and your waste of money in Maya. As you know in deep that Softimage is better than Maya, and you don't want to look bad at your stock holders with the waste of resources that you made all of this years. You are loosing money not because of Softimage, it is because others like Houdini and The Foundry are taking over you. And they eventually will. You want to know why, because you chose to go with Maya and cover your mistakes. If you only had a light of vision and innovation, just by simple developing further Softimage and the FX tree, you will be ahead of what The Foundry is aming with Nuke and Modo. Everything is there to have a full round trip to a 3D and Comp solution in a single tool. If you care to take a close look at the FX tree and compare it to Nuke, they don't look very distant. Just add roto, tracking, and port the 3D space to the FX tree viewer, and guess what you will have... But again, you are more focused into covering your looses for placing good money on the wrong place. Keep going the direction you are going, and I can forecast that in a few years, not only Softimage will start to fade out. But also Autodesk, at least in this market. You want a strong contender for what is coming? The name is Softimage. Well I hope that you really listen, and this is not one more of your lies. ------------------------------------------------------- Emilio Hernández VFX & 3D animation.
