I think we can all agree ICE is a unique thing and everyone here is skeptical we will be able to recreate what it was inside of Maya through Bifrost or will just never see Maya as their main platform. Many here (most notably Jordi) are claiming Houdini is the place for those that like the programmatic procedural node workflows. The jury is still out whether Modo will hold together as you add on the various workflows required to be a complete DCC and they have not got traction in the plugin community.
So no today you do not have an equivalent to what is in ICE/Softimage. We set the two year transition window for the two big camps of Soft users. For games (biggest camp) there is no little to no ICE usage so the main issues are animation tools (mixer), pipeline (metadata transfer, baking, viewport API) and porting existing tools. This industry just had its once every five year update as the PS4 and Xbox One pipelines came online. The second camp is the mid sized boutiques specializing in commercial post with a sprinkle of film VFX. Most everyone here has an arsenal of 3D software from Maya to Houdini to Modo to Arnold to Nuke to PF Track and grow and shrink through free lance pools. Some of you are softimage only but there are more studios that have more than one toolset than there are that have just one. This is where ICE grew the most and I think the heart of the users in this forum. Why it did not capture more Houdini users as was the plan or more 3dsmax and Maya users did not see the benefit is open to debate too. Behind the scenes we have shown the first procedural demos of our version of the waving Torus which was the first ICE demo. We want to keep growing from the procedural core shipping in Maya 2015. In the next two years and beyond you can continue to use Softimage. With Houdini, Modo, Fabric, and Maya all saying that they have an answer to the question what will be your next platform at least you have a group of people listening. The DS guys were given a coupon for Digital Fusion. Another analogy is Shake. When Shake was EOLed, Nuke was not ready for prime time. Digital Fusion, Toxik, and even After Effects all went after the Shake user base and in the end the compositors arguably have a better industry standard than Shake in Nuke. You have some great threads going here and he who listens will get your business. You have a Softimage forum on Houdini and I would push to get one on the Foundry's community and repost the threads from here that are starting to gel into concrete things people need to do. cv/ ________________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of p...@bustykelp.com [p...@bustykelp.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:55 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: An Open Letter to Carl Bass "What we can do is listen to how this has impacted you and be responsible for helping you get back to a place where each of you are back to creating 3D art without thinking about the platform you use. " And what if your "Creating 3D art" relies on the unique abilities that ICE affords you? To be able to control everything programatically down to its fundemental component parts? There seems to be an assumption that skills can just be swapped over to Maya, and this is probably true if your work doesn't deeply involve inventing tools with ICE. If you just model, put some bones in and add some blendshapes, animate and render, then I'm sure Maya will do fine. What about those of us who evolved way past that kind of workflow years ago? I'm not just "thinking about the platform I use". Its the ONLY platform that can actually do what I'm doing unless you include Houdini or Fabric, and neither of them are near the speed of iteration of ICE yet. Please could I request that you get a Maya guy to try making Maya equivalents of some ICE tools I could demonstrate.. I think the problem would soon become very clear and its not about personal preference. Its about being able to do this stuff at all. Paul
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