Softimage 2015 Last Release Announcement

#41

If Autodesk said this to Vlado

I can only repeat here what I said on the V-Ray forum - I remember when Autodesk bought Softimage and we were telling people that we were hesitant to develop V-Ray for it because we were not sure what Autodesk would do with it. Back then we were Reprimanded For Spreading Rumors and Autodesk assured us that Softimage will continue to be developed; eventually we decided to move forward.
which is one of the best plugins for AD crap, why do you think you can trust them?

#42

Speaking about art done with Softimage, I have to give example works by Glassworks.
http://www.glassworks.co.uk/showreel
http://www.glassworks.co.uk/news/look-behind-scenes-tetley-%E2%80%9Cinvasion%E2%80%9D
Their commercials never fail to thrill with quality, idea and art.

Imagine the outrage of the art world if one of the biggest art paint company decides not to make any more, for example, red paint.
Statement would be “We sell much much more black and white colors, and making red color just doesn’t work for us anymore”.
Or piano companies decide only to make white keys.
“We make much more money by selling white keys. If you want to play piano in the future, learn to play only white keys…”

My suggestion to the AD is to make Softimage open source, with NDA agreements, which would cost XY% percentage as normal license would.
Let the community continue develop software if you can not.

As maya user, and I’ve seen TDI and Wavefront software die, soon to be replaced by maya.
Once the software was finally better, we did made a switch.
With present pace of development for maya, and in case of Softimage that might be in about 10 years or so…
I would say that Softimage has best potential and best workflow, so I’m really puzzled by this decision.
But as with Shake, once shake was dead new, better software came to replace it.
Houdini, Blender, Modo, Cinema 4D or someone new, who knows?
Switching the knowledge from one software to another is NOT EASY. Years of experience in working with one package can not be replaced.
Money people can not understand this, since for them it’s all the same…
Do you now trust the AD in anything they say ?
Would you support them in the future after this move ?
I guess big studios will give answer to that, and they are the only relevant to money people…

Als

#43

MauricioPC, you are right :rolleyes:
I’m not expert, maybe I wrong, but I think that there might be room for a lawsuit against Autodesk for disclosure of false information to manipulate the market. False statements, indeed, to have earned by selling license of XSI, while users have lost money (they have to rearrange their work, pipeline, delete plug for XSI), and waste time. Or, for example, they wouldn’t have bought XSI and purchased another software.
How can you say to a plug-in developer these words, how can Chris say, one year and half ago (not ten years!) , “THE RUMOR THAT THE EOL OF SOFTIMAGE and 3DS MAX IS UPON US IS TOTALY FALSE” , when you know that XSI is on the end of the life! How is it possible? This is why I’m shocked. XSI it’s not a Windows 7 Gadget!
Maybe I’m shocked because I didn’t know, as 3ds user, that unofficially XSI was on EOL. But this is another story.
AD resemble more and more to Italian politicians. Only interested in the money, the chair and not the citizens welfare ! :rolleyes:

#44

The tool set in Houdini for animation is scary due to the lack of videos on rigging and Animation workflow . I am sure though the team at SideFX wont be missing the opportunity to hoover up all those xsi users.

b

#45

The worst part is there is no real option for Softimage users (as myself) to choose another package besides Max or Maya … there is no other complete software/option …
Modo is great for modeling, but not for animation … the same for Hodini, no character animation … C4D, the same … so we have no option and AD knows that … That’s why they think they can whoever they want to …

#46

Character animation tools are all there with ready to use character rigs and such, it’s just that it’s a very unique environment character animators are not used to. (And maybe the absence of highlevel stuff like HIK/motionbuilder/CAT/characterstudio ) I hope SESI takes on that area and comes up with more digitalassets or totally new leapfrogging tech for character animators.

#47

Just to play devils advocate, isn’t that just what AD are doing too? I understand that long term users of SI will be upset, of course that’s natural. But to those who say ‘well AD only care about the money’ I kind of feel like saying - eh, well what do you expect ? they are running a business, not a charitable organization, so of course their decisions are going to be driven by their bottom line. Anyone who doesn’t think that the other companies don’t operate the same way are being naive really. If the Foundry realized they were losing money on Modo (to pick a random example) don’t you think they would drop it too?

Cheers,
Brian

#48

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r77WyKNsIk

          [b]Hitler finds out Softimage is killed by Autodesk.[/b]


                                               

        What a PR disaster for AD 


b
#49

Horganovski, SI isn’t a Winrar program! Come-on…
You know very well how many people, around the World, live and gain money with SI.
Aren’t you able to release a new version? Ok, perfect. Make the code open source, or, I don’t know sell to a different company! This AD behavior isn’t correct!!

#50

How realistic for them to stop developing 3ds max?

#51

Ex-ILM artist Steve Spaz Williams talks about how Softimage was used on Jurassic Park here:

http://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/remembering-softimage/

#52

No matter how you spin it M. Patel, we all know Softimage was a better product. Autodesk got scared, bought it, hid it deep deep within its web site, did not promote it and then killed it. That was your intention since day 1. Do yourself a favor, do not waist your time and your PR staffs’ time trying to convince us otherwise.

#53

who is to say it was losing money, if so, then that is the way Autodesk wanted it, as they were NOT promoting it all. Just because it was sold (by avid( also does not mean it was losing money, remember Maya was sold at least once before Autodesk picked it up, and it had quite a lot of users then as well. How many seats does Softimage have, I am not sure, but is it on par with Modo, Lightwave, or C4D maybe, they are not shutting down.

I think many believe that this was the idea from the beginning of the acquisition, own the property get rid of the competition, convert a percentage of the users, and get this, not you nor anyone here will benefit from autodesk owning most of the players in game. I have my doubts that max and maya users will benefit from money save from Soft being buried, however the amount of money that will need to be spent in buying new software (if not autodesk) and training, converting assets, etc, is immeasurable.

#54

Some options:

[ol]
[li]Keep using Softimage for the foreseeable future, until something suitable comes along.[/li][li]Give more money to Autodesk for another product, rewarding them for this.[/li][li]Adopt some other vendor’s product, which would be susceptible to the same fate.[/li][li]Apply all the pressure you possibly can on Autodesk to sell Softimage to another group.[/li][li]Take a long perspective about the viability of proprietary, commercial 3D software and look at options to use some of your energy and money to grow open-source alternatives that can NEVER again be pulled out from under you. All are long-term options:[/li][ul]
[li]You can pool your money and apply it to an existing project like Blender to try to sway and speed up development in the direction you would like to see.[/li][li]You can pool your money and/or apply pressure to Autodesk to pry the Softimage code to open-source it (this is how Blender became open-source, by the way).[/li][li]You can fork or start your own open-source project from scratch to replace the functionality of Softimage.[/li][/ul]
[li]A combination of several of the above items, depending on your current needs and your long-term strategy.[/li][/ol]

#55

I don’t know for sure (I guess no one outside the AD boardroom really does) but I can’t buy the idea that AD ‘wanted it that way’. Why would any company deliberately sabotage one of their own products. Seems a bit ‘conspiracy-theory’ to me, sorry.

Cheers,
Brian

#56

Same reason they bought it in the first place, to remove the main competitor of Maya. If you think AD marketed softimage to the fullest extent I don’t know what to tell you. Ever since they bought it, the updates were incredibly lackluster and the app left to die. You couldn’t even find it in the front page of AD, whereas Max and Maya were always prominently displayed.

#57

what surprises me is how passive the Softimage forum on the Area is at the moment. I would have thought it would be a hot bed of rants.

jhv

#58

Softimage/xsi was very capable product but with a very small userbase by all accounts compared to either maya or 3dsmax…

…it was the main threat to maya, in the acquisition Autodesk also gained C.A.T and put that into 3dsmax as soon as possible to boost it’s character animation capabilities ‘out of the box’

I think we can probably say with some amount of certainty that the number of seats didn’t grow very well at all for softimage under the autodesk ownership. Autodesk is a business it looks for growth areas and cuts loss making areas when it can.

a pure guess based off the ‘likes’ on the relevant facebook specific pages is that softimage probably has a similar number of seats to that of mudbox at best, which is about 1/5 the amount of maya likes… this gives you a base to look at that softimage wasn’t growing or even rubbing shoulders with maya seat counts.

autodesk moved their softimage devs a couple of years ago over to maya and niaad (spelling?) so the writing was on the wall back then…anyone gob smacked today hasn’t been keeping up with events. Autodsk put in a new small team to bug fix softimage in the meantime…i’m guessing that they told who they could studio wise that softimage is going…and just by that action of the new small dev team arriving that should have said all that needed to be said about softimage’s future for any 3rd party developer and studios currently running softimage as their prime 3d app.

now…what to do?

colleges teach maya
digital tutors main stay is maya and zbrush
even ebooks are mainly maya now.

it’s maya or nothing i guess for many artists

#59

Fair enough, but how many people base their choice of CG app on what they find on the website of the company who make it? For me the reason I bought my first app (C4D) was that I read in magazines and reviews online that it was the easiest one to learn for a beginner. I based my 2nd purchase (Maya) largely on the fact that in every animation tutorial I watched the teacher was using Maya. I’m pretty sure the only time I looked at the Maxon or AD sites was to check the prices.

I guess the forums here are a microcosm too, I checked earlier on the App specific forums and you can see pretty clearly how things break down - Maya forum had about 120 viewers, Max about 70, C4D about 45, and Softimage had 8. Maybe there’s a great forum for SI elsewhere (like there is for ZBrush for example) but you have to think that maybe the fact that there are very few users here is a part of the bigger picture.

Cheers,
Brian

#60

Due to the extreme lack of support from Autodesk Area with regards to Softimage over the years, most all of us are on these sites…

www.si-community.com
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/xsi_list

and we also pop up on here.