So true, so true. I'd like to eco how amazing softimage is for
individual freelancers and small shops, especially since it's been
backed by the talented td and programmers here and online.
I'll add that softimage will continue to be my tool of choice for years
to come. This makes it easier for me at least as I'm often creating
assets that can be ported to maya or elsewhere or contracted on a start
to render job.
On 3/11/2014 11:21 AM, Tim Borgmann wrote:
Hi,
unfortunately my english is not good enough to express my feelings and
thoughts about all this in a good and polite way and I think some
mails like the open letter from Alastair or the mails from Greg,
Peter, Jean, Sly, Daniel and so on express them much better than I
could do.
I'm just an artist, a simple freelancer, so my opinion will not be
from interest for AD I'm sure. But nonetheless here are just some
additional thoughts from my side:
The main thing that surprises me about the decision from AD right now
is that they make this step (stopping SI) even before they can offer
any kind of alternative.
A personal view from the artist point of view:
A lot of my work is based on ICE and at the moment I'm simply not able
to see a real alternative. Will I take a look at Houdini? Sure. Will I
take a look at Modo? Sure. Blender? Sure. ... I will take a look at a
lot of software within the next months, maybe years, to hopefully find
something that will fit again like SI did until now. ICE gives me the
ability to create things I would not be able to do before. I'm not a
TD, I'm not able to write my own tools, I'm just a plain artist and so
what ICE was a pure revolution for me and still is a joy to work with.
As some of you maybe know I did some advertising material for the
launch of XSI 7. Although I didn't use ICE for these images because of
the fact that I didn't know ICE at all at this time I very quickly
realised the enormous power of it. Today I would do it with ICE for
sure and it would be much faster and more flexible and so I would have
much more time to work on the design and content and would also get
more sleep during production.
As an artist you spend a lot of time in finding and learning the tools
which maybe fit best to you or better said to your work. At a certain
point you than hopefully reach a level with the tools where you can
care more about design or creativity than about technical issues. But
it's maybe a very long and hard way to get there and if you are there,
if you can work with a tool without too much thinking about technical
issues (some will be there always and you never stop learning for
sure) you are very happy about this (at least I am). You are happy
that you can focus on the creative side of the work and not only on
solving technical problems.
For sure you can learn a lot of things in another software rather fast
since the concepts are similar, but to get at a point where you are
really familar with a tool, where you really have a good feeling about
what you can do and what you better avoid is a long way. Moving a
spotlight around is one thing but finding the reason why your are
getting unexpected results for example is often a complete different
story.
Who knows, maybe I will find a new tool which even fits better, maybe
not, but just at the moment I feel like downgraded from a senior to a
junior artist within some days. And what's even more important I'm
afraid that I have to spend my time again on just solving technical
issues instead on creating images.
I simply feel like an artist who get told that there will be no
canvas, brushes, oil colours any more soon and that I have to take a
ball pen and some finger colours instead to do the work I did before.
But that's just my personal point of view and it's for sure not from
interest for AD.
A more profesional view from the freelancer point of view and maybe a
thought worth for AD:
In my opinion the reason why SI does so well in particular in the
advertising area is simply because it provides a solid toolset out of
the box but even more important: it's flexible and fast. And that is
was working in the advertising area is about. Flexibility and speed.
You have a lot of different tasks, changes, corrections whatever to
solve in sometimes extremly short timeframes. Often there is simply no
time and also no budget for a big TD team which provides you the basic
tools you need to do the work. It has to be right out of the box. And
this is what AD does not offer with maya right at the moment. It's
maybe a good tool for big pipelines/movie productions or whatever,
it's maybe a good framework for custom tools, I don't know, but I
doubt it is a good solution for doing quick and creative productions
where you maybe have to rethink or rebuild a concept within an
evening. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Alone the passes and partions system from SI is pure gold in these
kind of advertising productions. ICE is an option to create stuff
where you normally would need a bigger TD team and the accordingly
time for development. Or you can just use it to fix some smaller
issues in the last moment on top of your operator stack. The overall
workflow of SI simply fits in many areas of these kind of productions.
So I'm really afraid for all these innovative and great shops which
deliver outstanding work in short turnarounds and within a heavy
competetion situation. During the last years and due to for example
additional tools like Arnold or the ones from Eric, Helge and so on
the quality of advertising productions done with SI reaches a very
high level in my opinion. Small shops or small teams are able to
create really outstanding work.
As Daniel from Sehsucht stated out: "How can Autodesk get the timing
so wrong?"
You simply leave them with a big gap and no solution to fill it at the
moment.
So in the end, I will use SI for as long as possible (at least as an
artist) and hope others will do so also. It's one of the best and most
productive tools I've ever used for my work and maybe will still be
within the next years.
Best regards
Tim Borgmann
--
*Rares Halmagean
___________________________________
*visual development and 3d character & content creation.
*rarebrush.com* <http://rarebrush.com/>
