Hi Greg,


Do you have any more info on what you mean by long standing low level requests 
and can you list the top 10 third parties you would like me to reach out to 
follow up with? Or is there anyone on the list who is a third party developer 
that can elaborate? For the SDK it is a really tough battle as it was just not 
part of the core of the original development but I can get a definitive answer.



cv/



________________________________
From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com 
[softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Mário Domingos 
[mdomingos.p...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:03 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer

Greg, can I post your letter on Facebook?
—
Sent from Mailbox<https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox> for iPhone



On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:49 AM, Greg Punchatz 
<g...@janimation.com<mailto:g...@janimation.com>> wrote:

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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