Hello Autodesk,

My name is Greg Punchatz , Senior Creative Director at Janimation. I have a
proposal, or call it a counter offer on the proper way to retire Softimage.

First off, if you don't know who I am, I feel like I have been part of the
Softimage team since the beginning of Sumatra testing. I spent countless
hours creating content on my own time and letting Softimage use my personal
work as the sample scenes that make up a good deal of the Softimage
library. Because of this relationship I have many, many very dear friends
from all eras of Softimage. From the very top to the bottom of Softimage, I
was always welcomed as one of the family.
 Our company, Janimation, was instrumental in helping promote XSI from its
earliest days from being its first customer demo at the XSI launch party.
To its final days giving Avid and Autodesk permission to use our work for
promoting Softimage launches. We did this because we truly believe it is
the best software on the planet for what we do.... and that's commercial
work. Softimage is lighter on its feet out of the box for the kind of work
the post production world is doing today in commercials. I don't know a
single CG supervisor that knows each package equally that would rather take
a commercial through a single package other than XSI.

 That being said, I believe Autodesk needs to be working on a completely
new 3d software package. I would hope that is the plan. I also understand
that if you are working towards moving us all to one package, Softimage by
market share alone is the logical one to first retire as it creates the
least income.

So if it's time has truly come (even though I believe it is the most
complete out-of-the-box 3-D solution you provide currently) I think there
is a more elegant... let's say, a kinder gentler way for Softimage to be
put into retirement. You can continue to benefit from our subscription
support while we have enough time to move our existing pipeline to somthing
else.

Please consider keepinng the current small development team you already
have for FOUR more years.

With a single focus on these three things: opening up the SDK,

working with 3rd party folk,

and fixing long outstanding low-level requests.

It's nothing but a win-win situation, you still get our money, and we get
to evalute Maya along the way. It's going to take a lot more than two years
for a lot of us to be able to make a tranistion completely.

I'm not sure if Autodesk realizes this, but while the team in Singapore was
not making giant leaps technologically, they were on their way to leaving
Softimage in a much better state. They need a bit more time than you are
giving them.

At the end of the four years, we can at least consider staying in the
Autodesk family because they listened to the users....gave us pleanty of
heads up of its EOL, and did thier darndest to make sure the last version
of softimage is the best version ever...XSI deserves that....we deserve
that ... and quite frankly I deserve that.

Sincerely

Greg Punchatz

Senior Creative Director at Janimation ...

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