outstanding and level headed, another excellent post that no-one at autodesk will bother to read.....
can we repost/retweet this? the more well thought out, eloquent reasons we can publicly share, demonstrating why autodesk should rethink their position, the better a _____ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of pete...@skynet.be Sent: 11 March 2014 11:46 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer Hi Greg, this is pretty much along the lines of what I've been thinking. Retiring Softimage as announced is way too abrupt and disruptive. While not a big success in the market place, it has it's place, is very much alive and in good shape. Yes, we would all love to see some huge development and commercial efforts put into Softimage to make it ready to take on another decade and really compete in the market place, but that's not going to happen, and we can hardly expect this from Autodesk - I think most of us have accepted that. But keeping the software on life support as it has for the past few years should be an acceptable compromise. It has more than 2 years of life left, and should be perfectly usable until a next generation offering comes along. Migrating to other current software, from Autodesk or the competition just doesn't appeal. If it did, we'd be there already. We are not blind fools who don't know any better. As a freelancer I have been in a wide variety of productions, of all sizes, in several countries, in several industries. I've seen many multi software productions, and have personally touched upon Maya, Lightwave and Modo in production, each on more than one occasion, and have furthermore been confronted with Max in production repeatedly. Coming from Poweranimator in the past, I really wanted to like Maya, and I have looked into it several times over the past 15 years. And I know I disliked XSI in the very beginning. But there is no helping it - it truly is a next generation software, built up from a fresh start and carefully thought out and groomed into an efficient, elegant, usable whole that is much more than the sum of it's parts. I'll abandon it for a better offering, but Maya, as popular and widely spread and industry standard as it is, is not it. No amount of AD representatives saying it is superior is going to make it so. No amount of copying tools from Softimage into Maya is going to turn this around. It has mostly become a platform to run proprietary tools on, just as Max is a platform for running 3rd party tools. If that's not what you are looking for, then it's not your solution. (and Modo and Houdini are better suited alternatives) That is the situation most remaining Softimage users are confronted with I think. They have deliberately chosen Softimage as their homebase, against all odds, mostly because out of the box it just works and fills most of their needs. It is friendly to artists as well as the more technically savvy - it adapts itself well to any industry, any scale of production, from a single individual to triple digit seats and anywhere in between - and can be used without the need for custom development, while allowing for it where desired. ICE was just the icing on the cake to put it in this unique position in the industry but it is by no means the only worthwhile bit - something that seems to elude Autodesk if their presentation of things is to be judged. Softimage is perhaps not the absolute best in any discipline when compared to all other (specialized) software out there - but is comfortably above average in every discipline and thus uniquely equipped for multidisciplinary productions. No other software out there offers a comparable experience. This is why there is this loyal user base - despite the slowing pace of development, a bleak outlook, a total lack of marketing and commercial efforts and a constant push and pull from the competition. As has been mentioned, Softimage studios and productions often punch well above their weight - and the software allows productions to grow, from small to large scale, from startup to established studio, as well as evolve into new directions when the opportunity or need arises. It gives the company and individual an edge to fend in a difficult marketplace - and taking that tool away is pretty much a frontal assault to those who have made their livelihood around it. So, Autodesk have decided to kick the ant's nest, hoping the ants would swarm to this piece of candy Maya they are holding up. It's kind of obvious: taking away Softimage developers, putting them on Bifrost, presenting it as a mix of Naiad and ICE, and then retiring ICE (because in AD marketing speak that's all Softimage is) in order to pave the way for Bifrost's release - offering a free (duh) path to Maya. I'm sure there will be fancy powerpoint graphs of Softimage users flocking to Bifrost/Maya, which the board and stockholders will adore. Well, I guess some ants will stay put while others flock to Maya, Houdini and Modo in equal parts and the rest will scatter elsewhere. Surely, a more graceful solution exists - one where the larger part of the ant colony migrates to a new anthill when it's ready for moving in. But that requires a little more forward thinking. If Autodesk bought Softimage to get a hold of it's userbase, then surely it's premature to disrupt it now - rather than migrate it to something that is actually appealing. Peter Boeykens freelance From: Greg Punchatz <mailto:g...@janimation.com> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 3:49 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: A more graceful retirement - my counter offer 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 ...
