Softimage 2010

#121

If you can’t beat 'em, buy 'em. Great strategy.

#122

For Autodesk yes.

For users no.

#123

Yeah I’ve been following the development of the compounds over at xsiBase. I can get to a certain point, then the wall is hit hard.

Its definitely better than the native solution, in terms of quality, but the smart people that write the compounds don’t have time or desire to babysit those of us who don’t think with that side of the brain.

I might figure out how to use it by accident someday, if I drink a fifth of vodka, cover my eyes, and randomly plug nodes in.

#124

thats what I meant…

#125

IRT ediris and Kabab

I don’t disagree, but that wasn’t even my point.

My point was, Avid was going broke. They said, hey, lets juice up Softimage to raise it’s selling value as high as we can, and then get rid of it before we loose any more money. So that brought us ICE and it brought us Autodesk.

As far as “why” AD bought it, of course, just buy the competition, it’s a far better business strategy than going to war in most cases. However, Autodesk, whether they will or won’t follow through, is in one of the best spots to continue Softimage development.

As far as your need for more competition? I’m right there with you. I was not initially pleased that Avid had to sell Softimage, let alone sell it to the biggest monopoly going. However, if things continue on coarse, your competition is going to come from Blender and or other open source projects. Open Source in general is getting much stronger, the entire SDK’s are available for any studio or individual programmer to tool with and the tools as they are today are quite remarkable and have come a long long way in a very short amount of time. I’d keep a serious eye on the development of that software as I am guessing it will quite likely end up being Autodesk’s main source of competition in the near future.

With that said however, I think as long as Autodesk continues to implement new and refined tools and enhancements to all 3 of it’s current product islands, and makes efforts to build solid bridges between the 3 then that is indeed the best case scenario Softimage users could actually have hoped for given the fact that Avid financially couldn’t sustain Softimage profitably any more. Is it ideal overall to have all 3 major platforms under one roof? No certainly not, but when you look back and remember things like how badly Alias was at developing Maya after say version 3.5 and 4.0 then it’s not hard to see why even through some minor end user complaints Autodesk is succeeding. Like I said, so long as AD continues to develop all 3 platforms and continues to make bridges between the 3 with more robust enhancements to things like Crosswalk, and potentially investigates something like Switch Licensing for studios to accommodate artists on regardless of their chosen platform, then if that happens individual artists are in fact in quite good and capable hands. We’ll leave that as yet to be seen, but I am hopeful things are going on the right track, if not certain of it.

#126

new features video, http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13571400

#127

The perfect 3d app would be something in which ICE was absolute. Every command would be an ice operator. If you wanted you could make a new tool for any aspect of the application or modify an existing one. It would support ALL renderers and ALL plugins. One would have to carefully avoid the pitfall of giving all this power to the user but somehow not giving away your secrets to your competitors.

I think the developments to the underlying core of ICE (the upgrade to the ICE SDK interface (however its been done)) says that “the users should make what they need”. Therefore, while we’ll see all parts of XSI exposed to ICE in time, I wouldn’t expect any more major “specific” features anytime soon.

And herein lies ICEs biggest flaw: while it says its for artists to avoid scripting, it is in fact (right now) just visual scripting. You still need to know what you’d need to know if you were going to program it you just don’t have the drawbacks of programming (typing, compiling, testing, etc). For basics things, its amazing. But as your tasks grow more complex, right now, you need to know maths.

#128

Avid, a company that isn’t really anywhere close to broke, they trimmed their workforce globally and sold or ended products that weren’t core to their Video and Audio revenue. We have started on ICE three years before the Autodesk acquision, there is no link with it, and no need to invent conspiracy theories about it

#129

Luceric,

How has the transition been from Avid to Autodesk? Do you feel good about where you guys want to take Softimage? Any idea when we’ll see 2010 in our accounts? (Early September maybe)

By the way the video link on the site didn’t work for me:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/mnevideo/softimage_2010_new_features_video/softimage_2010_features_1300x860.html

It just opened up a still image…

#130

Sometimes in September, we’ve already started work on the next one. Everything is fine here.

I was caught by this as well. The first minute is a still image; turn on the audio and wait a little longer.

#131

So far my only real complaint with this release is not such a direct issue with current users as of new.

The features page still has at least one “no image available”, by all accounts siggraph was almost like SI was treated semi poorly in terms of stage presence and such, the feature list and extensive feature list should have been on the into page, but instead had to be teased out of SI developers on the forums, and then there are little things like a video with no intro screen/animation that appears to be a broken still.

Personally- I’m happy, and I’m not saying there needed to be “Luxology” spit shines everywhere, but things could have been prepared slightly better in terms of marketing IMHO.

In the end this also created a lot more speculation and conspiring too IMHO. I’m sure there are reasons for this internally that were beyond the control of most of the good peeps at SI, but on the outside it kind of looked disjointed and un-prepared.

#132

OK, peeps who haven’t need to watch the video, while seeing all the speed and work flow enhancements on paper is dry and not very stimulating to the senses, the video really drives it home and shows what a big deal it is and should be. Watch IT!

There are so many times I’ve had to delete objects and had SI hang while “working” for so long that I just closed it with task manager, lost 5min of work, but figured that starting over was better than waiting 10 or more minutes for it to get done. The speed ups are going to help with these issues so much!

Anyone else have undos that to 5min or more before?!

The new search and select is also buku amazing and will really help for when scenes are even moderately complex. I was stoked to hear about it, but there are apparently more features to it than I thought there would be. Can we put tags in objects etc. and have it read and search them- or the notes in an ICE tree? Regardless that’s very cool.

It’s funny- I had just learned to live with so many of these performance issues for so long that I almost forgot how half of them were issues. These really were some old complaints- many went back long before I stared even using XSI (4.x).

The scene debugger too is going to be a lot more interesting to use than I thought. Looking forward to the new version!

BTW- what was the test machine in the video?

#133 
Sorry, I know you actually worked for Avid and currently work for Autodesk, but what you say makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  

If Softimage was profitable for Avid, they wouldn't have sold it to one of their main competitors in the video market (Autodesk Flint, Flame, Inferno, etc.) just to focus more on video.  That is quite simply an absurd notion that is not even remotely believable.

I also know for a fact Avid had designs to sell before 7.0 was even released to the market, so please don't be rude in saying that I'm inventing conspiracy theories.
#134

Can we let some of this go? Look I really am not a big fan of the “big AD”, but this is water under the bridge. He said she said they said to infinity until the room spins and I loose my lunch. The horse is down, it’s dead, it can’t be revived.

Besides- from what I know 99% of the employees at Softimage didn’t have a clue what was going on behind closed doors- all the way up until the day of the sales announcement. So why brow beat these guys?

Well regardless of what ever “spin” is around, the videos speak for themselves and I am happy to see this release be about bug squashing, performance enhancement and refinement- several things not very common anymore with applications.

#135

Accusations of “Inventing Conspiracy Theories” and “Brow Beating”… While I sincerely appreciate the inadvertent personal flamebaiting and am actually game for some good old fashion internet sparring I really don’t feel this is the best place for it. Have a good night guys.

#136

Ditto Can’t wait to get my hands on this. To be honest I think the feature that I’m most looking forward to is the shift-delete. I have been saying it was needed in all applications for years. I have always loathed deleting a few thousand verts at once and the computers sitting there for 20-30 seconds. There have been time Where I was thinking man I think this thing renders faster than it deletes geometry. this is ridiculous. it shouldn’t be like this.

Well… that and Face Robot of course. But I would really like some new features on the next go around but this is a most excellent release. Next release I want the ICE Kinematics and Voxel rendering for ICE kinda like Fume FX would be pretty awesome. I think that is the one spot SI has the most room for improvement.

Except for the licensing fiasco that was 7.5 I think Autodesk has done a good job thus far.

#137

That’s a good question and the answer is Avid does not consider Autodesk to be a competitor. Avid’s main revenue generator is Audio (Digidesign) and broadcast (Media Compositor and Pinnacle), which together made up the majority of their 900 million $ revenue. Softimage was profitable, but not a significant contributor to those huge numbers, and we were going to focus even more on games which isn’t related at all to Avid’s market. Avid has no interest in Autodesk’s unix effects system market; Avid’s goal was to find a suitor that would be acceptable for the user base as part of their restructuring in 2008, during which they also layed off 15% worldwide and consolidated several products. The new Avid CEO basically shed everything that isn’t related to the core broadcast business, so they don’t have to answer to share holders “why are you investing in this or that if 100s of millions are in that other market?” The new management is purely pragmatic, by-the-number, do one thing only and do it well, and that’s how we were bound to get sold during 2008. They also sold part of Pinnacle that were nice, but not strategically important for the broadcast market.

 I also know for a fact Avid had designs to sell before 7.0 was even released to the 
                 market, so please don't be rude in saying that I'm inventing conspiracy theories.

We did not work on a new architecture in Softimage to make the company more ‘sellable’, that’s the consipiracy theory I had understood from the previous post.

#138

it’s like OS X’s Spolight, but for objects in the scene. It searches everything that’s renable, and that includes 3D objects and properties. I can’t recall if it searches keywords. It doesn’t search inside ICE trees though (most of the nodes are not renamable and there isn’t interesting to do with selecting operators globally right now)

#139

Your basically just re-phrasing the conversation with euphemisms. Avid at some point deemed the Softimage division as a financial liability, made the nessicary preperations to sell it and did sell it. And they sold the entire division at a remarkably low price to Autodesk, who definately is the competition.

Added:

Avid has been operating at a loss for 4 years now (negative net income after expenses on both a quarterly and yearly basis since 2005) and it continues to do so to this day.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AVID&fstype=ii

(click the “Annual Data” button in the above link to see the last few years of operation)

Added: As per Autodesk Softimage 2010 I concur, the new search feature is indeed awesome, and just as impressive are the updates to the layer editor.

#140

While I agree with you that it is not pleasant to be told you are “inventing conspiracy theories”, you did state: “My point was, Avid was going broke. They said, hey, lets juice up Softimage to raise it’s selling value as high as we can, and then get rid of it before we loose any more money. So that brought us ICE and it brought us Autodesk.”

You have to admit that the ICE issue is just a theory" and it also implies that ICE was nothing more than a means to make Softimage more valuable. Doesn’t this trivialize the effort put into ICE? Couldn’t this be considered insulting to those that developed ICE?

I know you meant nothing by it, but perhaps you can at least give luceric the benefit of the doubt and assume he did not intentionally mean to insult you either.

Respectfully,
Ohmanoggin