Softimage 2010

#141

Pssstt… Jettatore… Did you hear they faked the moon landings back in '69??? :rolleyes:

#142

Just a quick word of warning that I’d appreciate if people could stop babbling about past events out of context, and, once again, stick to the topic.
And if you don’t have a strong understanding of how software multinationals work and/or have participated in the last 4 years of history, and the three preceding the transition, don’t jump to conclusions.

Further posts on the subject will simply be binned in the interest of keeping the signal decent, and the noise off.

Cheers

#143

I will gladly give him the benefit of the doubt, and put this behind. And I also think that was the nicest display of grace I’ve ever seen from a Moderator, thank you Jaco.

To set the record straight and settle this.

I did [u]not[/u] intend to imply that ICE was initially and solely conceived as some sort of acquisition gimmick and I certainly in no way intended to diminish the relevance or the motivations behind ICE.  I never said that and it was not meant to be read in that way.

Eric if you really thought I was trying to dismiss the work you and your staff did on ICE that could not be any farther from the truth and I'm sorry you got that impression.  Really, my thoughts were with the people who make the decisions to sell, the axing of Foundation just prior to Softimage trading hands and the fact that Avid has been bleeding money for years.  "That gave us ICE and Autodesk" -was not meant to be negative in any way.

I hope that completely clears things up and I appreciate the opportunity to be heard.  Thanks.
#144

Softimage needed investment to remain competitive, which would mean it will be not giving profit in near-medium term to Avid.
If this would have been in high time maybe it wouldn’t have bothered Avid, but Avid was going down fast because suffered from SGIiites for a long time, being cut to pieces by advances in hardware. So they could not invest in Softimage and Softimage without investment had a bleak futur.

#145

Softimage was doing great up to V6.5, after that their new policies and focus on games was taking it’s toll on the built up momentum; no more foundation, higher prices with the ess/adv merge, no v-ray hooks, no renderman hooks, license issues, limited Mental Ray licenses for Foundation and Ess, ect…

#146

Guys it’s really far fetched saying that they made ICE just to sell off XSI…

What happens in the boardroom and what happens in the R&D division are worlds apart! Particularly when it comes to things like acquisitions, i’m not sure if anyone here has been a part of an acquisition but its all very hush hush only the people that need to know will know its happening, so most managers/R&D/Sales and Marketing people won’t have a clue till its publicly announced.

#147

What do you mean? There’s been an open source PRMan exporter since maybe 5.11 or earlier and a fully integrated commercial PRMan compliant renderer since maybe 6.5. That there’s no V-ray renderer is entirely up to the developers of that plug-in. The API is there for them to use. Foundation and Essentials shipped with as many Mental Ray licenses as the most expensive version of Maya.

#148

Actually I believe 7 was the highest and fastest selling release they ever had by a long margin.
It was also a much more strong film/commercial and less game oriented release than before.

As for the “hooks” when I was in RSP we FLOSSed a full renderman bridge that was good enough to get three movies done with, that was 4.2 times, and it was maintained actively until 6 or 6.5
3Delight has had an excellently integrated plugin (which acts as a ribgen too for the studio version so will render in PRMan too) since 6 I believe.
Licensing issues I’m not sure about, as in I don’t really know what you intend with it, as the license server changed over with 7.5 under AD and only for win, 2010 I believe will use ADLM on both nix and win. Maybe you mean something else.

Vray hooks I don’t really see as a problem, or even anything Soft could have done something about (since they DID do a lot about opening up XSI between 5 and 6 for external engines).

I’m not entirely sure what to make of your post (absolutely no offense meant), it seems it’s confusing things around a fair bit, particularly timeline wise.

#149

“so most managers/R&D/Sales and Marketing people won’t have a clue till its publicly announced.”

I can attest to that! :slight_smile:

As for PRMan, Doug Creel was part of our 3d Love Launch Tour for version 5, at the San Fran stop, back in October 2005.

I don’t have any data to back this up other than memory, but XSI 7 was selling briskly post SIGGRAPH last year. In the five versions of XSI that i was part of launching, nothing came close to the momentum behind XSI 7.

I heard a great quote from a customer the other day about 2010 (to paraphrase) that I think is worth sharing, “The performance gains in 2010 compared to XSI 7 make it feel like I am booting up a new computer.”

I thought that was pretty cool!

cheers-

jen

#150

I accept we all see things from different points of view. We all have different requirements, some of us just use the software and don’t care about the costs. Some only care about the costs but don’t use it, ect…

PRMan should have been there from version 1, that may have helped to keep it in the studios. Sure anything can be done with custom programming.

V-Ray, well as a company you have to work with others to encourage development for your product and your customers.

I have been a Softimage customer since V4 so hopefully I meet your comment requirements.

#151

I would have been cool to have RenderMan support from the start, and it was talked about at various times, however, the story of the product was providing a user interface on Mental Ray. Renderman was used only by a few large film houses and generally they were only using Softimage for the animation part of the pipeline. The lighting and shading was done in custom tools, not in the generalist application. Renderman was 5000$ per license, and the bet was that ray tracing and global illusion was the future, and Mental Ray was in the best position to provide that, at a much cheaper price and with a much more advanced multithreaded/multimachine architecture design. Maya didn’t do RenderMan support either, it’s a separate product by Pixar itself. 3Delight has really helped democratized RenderMan since those days (although there used to be BMRT) and we developed and debugged the rendering hooks with feedback from Aghiles from 3Delight.

#152

Again software developers actively try and destroy the “cg coffee break” as we know it.

Way to go.

#153

“The performance gains in 2010 compared to XSI 7 make it feel like I am booting up a new computer.”

I’m all for that :-))

Bring it on!

J

#154

“…Renderman was 5000$ per license.”

In those days wasn’t that 5000$ / license / Thread? :eek:

P.S. I wasn’t trying to correct you. I was trying to add to your point.

Ohmanoggin

#155

right… and RenderMan wasn’t multithreaded up until about 3-4 years ago. So to make use those two CPUs for rendering, you’d be buying two licenses and render two different frames at the same time. Mental Ray was 1,200$ per license if I recall

#156

At the same time wasn’t Softimage|3D and XSI some where in the $8,000 to $15,000 range?

#157

so while maya 2010 is out already where is soft?

#158

on its way. We’re anticapating avaliability in September 2009

#159

Mid september

#160

Thanks for info, very kind of you.

And while we’re at it: When are you guys porting it to OS-X?

Sorry i had to :wink: but one may dream.