That article was a very interesting read. IMO (and I stress that is my opinion only): the one big challenge in the entertainment industry is the constant need to be creative which means that as soon as you have perfected your formula 1 race car, someone now wants it to fly to the moon, or to dive into the Marianas trench or do the Paris-Dakar or do something else it the designers never imagined doing in the first place - whereas in racing, any given track is a pretty fixed entity and the skill is indeed about optimization. This is also where M&E differs from many other production processes such as manufacturing. While it is feasible these days to program robots to build cars it is not even remotely possible to do the same thing for VFX. I also agree that usability is THE big barrier in 3D. My wife is a jewellery designer and metalsmith who just started her first foray into Rhino and is not enjoying it (in her craft it is the industry standard). I have not had to replace any monitors yet but I soon might be :).
We often discuss this problem here. The Mudbox team went all out to focus on usability but there is this unfortunate damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't problem in our industry. Everyone wants more in the product and they are all doing different things, have different pipelines, different ways of working before you know it you have several ways of doing the same thing. And deep down people want more features - it is the only thing they really want to pay for. While everyone will argue that stability and usability are important they don't want to pay for it (and these things are complex and costly to solve). 3ds Max 2015 focused heavily on these aspects - making five clicks two, cleaning up key problem areas of UI such as the scene navigator and we took a beating for it. And we know we have to do this for Maya too. The usability 'issue' is a very, very real one for all 3D applications and one that I don't think anyone has figured out a perfect solution for yet. The curve the author describes is pretty accurate. The problem is that you cannot easily keep things at that optimal point. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 2:25 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: A Good Read! Here is a better race related analogy You are a race car driver, you've spent a career diligently homing your skills and natural talent, you know instinctively how to calculate angles, torque, speed, drifting, terrain, weather, pressure you can read other drivers movements and anticipate their decisions. When you go down into the pit, you don't get out of the car to see what is wrong, to remove the wheels or refuel, these are not your main priority, you just want to get back out there. There is a dedicated team there that take care of these thing, that is their job to make sure you and your machine can function as one and perform at your best. It's about enabling an individual's, and giving them peace of mind. Imagine you are that same race car driver, only instead of focusing on the important things (toque angles speed overtaking) half your brain is taken up by "will it crash will it crash?, will it crash?, should i head down to the pit? are the wheels overheating?, what is making that sound? will it crash, WILL IT CRASH?" If you can't trust your car to perform, how can you trust yourself. Now i know that we live in an imperfect world, and that in this industry artists are often obliged to get down on all fours and look under the hood. However this should not be viewed as a fatality, but an incentive, to build the most reliable and program with the most fluid interface that allows your users to reach that special place that 1:1 ratio where there is no more keyboard or stylus there's just you and the data, and you doing what you where made to do, unimpeded free. This quality this lucidity, to my mind is more precious then all the bullshit and bells trotted out each release.
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