We're still entirely in Softimage.
Our plan is still to move gradually over to Maya, but the lighting stage
would remain in Softimage unless AD delivers better tools for this.
XSI's pass system, rendering flexibility, and our commitment to using
Redshift would probably keep us in Soft for our lighting stages, which
Alembic readily allows. Maya just blows chunks in the rendering area,
not to mention the funky render layer system.
Plus, I haven't finished writing our new SGTK apps, so I kinda need to
get those done before we can really jump ship...
I say: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Cracks me up too, because
these are areas that AD hasn't touched in many years. Soft is running
circles around the other guys in several key areas, and it's doing it
with years-old code.
I really like Modo, and I continue to actively test and provide feedback
for The Foundry, but at Magnetic we couldn't do our animations in it
just yet. Houdini is not a lighting option for us, as we're committed to
Redshift at this point.
-Tim C.
On 8/19/2015 9:39 AM, Francois Lord wrote:
Hi Andy.
Did you move to Mantra, or stayed with Arnold?
Softimage crashing too often in lookdev is the #1 reason why I'm
actively looking elsewhere.
On 19-Aug-15 10:35, Andy Goehler wrote:
We at Fiftyeight moved on from Softimage to Houdini for scene
assembly and rendering. While Houdini’s offerings may not be the
designed/perfect pass system currently, we’ve managed to adjust to a
level of comfort. Shading and lighting productivity has gone way up.
Houdini has proven to be very stable during shading and lighting,
contrary to my frustration with Soft crashing unacceptably often.
We were not looking for the best solution currently available either,
we were looking for a platform to build upon. And are very happy with
Side Effects as a software vendor. Licensing, Bugs reports and fixes,
feature requests and implementation and daily builds make us a
satisfied customer.
Andy
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