A Softimage message

[Jason Brynford-Jones]

I thought the last time I wrote something like this, would be the last time.

I am beginning to sound like a broken record; a record no-one obviously likes listening to. So perhaps this really is the last time I will play this message as it seems to make no difference.

Marketing
It seems now the Softimage community is only focusing on Autodesk's marketing as the barometer for Soft's future. Not "no marketing" but "less marketing" than 3ds Max and Maya. Or that the new Max and Maya products WITH Softimage means no more Softimage? This does not make sense.

New Max and Maya Suites
>From all our interviews Max and Maya customers want Softimage (not just ICE, but ICE is often a big reason) in their toolsets. At an affordable price, that interops well. OK let's give it to them, in the way they want it.

There are many more Max and Maya customers than Softimage. Having product suites branded with the name 3ds Max or Maya are obviously targeted at selling to them. This represents a massive potential for Softimage. You might not agree with the naming, but you can't argue the logic.

Softimage as a standalone product is of course continuing as before (with some very exciting stuff in the works) and having the standalone product available to all Max and Maya users is a huge endorsement of Softimage and commitment by Autodesk..

Development
Since the acquisition there has been repeated fear-mongering about Soft's future. Even though in that time, we have had two major releases (3 in the last two years) and one minor (check what others have done in this time) and of course there is more to come.

Even though we have exceeded revenue expectations, even though we are expanding our development. Even though fundamentally NOTHING HAS CHANGED, people choose to focus simply on a lack of marketing and not Autodesk Softimage's track record.

We still manage our own roadmap, with the exception of working well with other Autodesk apps. Something everyone has asked for repeatedly, especially ICE interop.

Our philosophy will continue around ICE as the architecture on which to build - that includes one day moving into modeling. We have not abandoned other parts of the Software (see the list at the end of this mail) far from it - we have a very well defined focus and future.

Final thoughts - for this is the last time I will do this.

If you take one thing away from this mail, it is this.

The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click

It really is...

Chinny

PS: Lest you forget....

Feature bullet lists since acquisition:

7.5

Animation
A new "Center" Shape Type option for Bounding Volume Constraint
New workflow for the FCurve editor: Selecting tangents will deselect keys and vice-versa

Data Management
Added a new preference: DataManagement/Bake scene properties on model export.
New Preference to ignore scntoc at load time

Reference Models
Assign objects in the scene or another model to a material in a referenced model's library

Modeling
A new single "MoveProportional" operator replacing the combination "MoveComponent" with nested "Proportional"
Proportional Modeling that does not break Symmetry

Rendering
Integration of mental ray 3.7+
Improvements to BSP for faster render times
Custom Workgroup shaders now support separate categories in the Rendertree
New Final Gathering option - "Enable Multiple Refinement Passes"
New mental ray "Motion-Based Displacement Quality" optimization option
SSS shader now supports light lists (include/exlude)
Gamma Correction is now supported in Alpha Channel
mental ray assemblies ("Stand-Ins") now support mi_point_to_object
Color Correction respects the alpha channel when applied on rendered output

Simulation
Updated version of Syflex, which is now multi-threaded
ICE: Get Texture Map from a position array is now supported
ICE: Adding objects to group in a model is now fully supported
ICE: Version history context menu now supports Private compounds

SDK and Scripting
New Undo/Redo callbacks for custom C++ commands
Curve.InsertKeyAtFrame - New method for inserting a keyframe without altering the curve profile
C++: New ASCII support to CString
New Animation Editor attributes accessible via SDK commands View.Get/SetAttributeValue
+ TrackSelection (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ DecomposeBranchSel (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ LocalPropsOnly (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ LockedParams (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ FlattenState (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ ColorCoding (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ ParameterValues (Animation Editor, Explorer)
+ ScriptNames (Animation Editor)
+ ParameterSort (Animation Editor)
+ DrivingAction (Animation Editor)
+ AnimatedParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
+ KeyableParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
+ FilterPreset (Animation Editor)
+ TaggedParameters (Animation Editor)
+ ActivationParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
+ MarkedParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
+ SnapToGrid (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
+ SnapToFrame (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
+ SnapSlopes (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
+ AutoSnapToFrames (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor, DopeSheet)
Main menubar menus and custom sub-menus will no longer show [u] and [w] icons
New Plugin Manager Preference for scanning and loading sub-folder plugins
Added CRef and CString >, < operators

Texturing
Unfold3D unfolding technology is now integrated cross platform in XSI
New Checkerboard clip type in the Texture Editor

UI
New preference in the Dopesheet for the default tool - Select Tool or Region Tool
Restored the resolution of relative paths in the User / Workgroups / Factory directories
Added support for re-order of script button in the custom toolbar
New Netview home page (with Preference to show at startup)
New option to delete unconnected nodes in the Render Tree

Crosswalk v.3.2
dotXSI/COLLADA Action source plotting
FBX support on Linux
FBX UI revamp
FBX new option "Export Selection Only"
FBX stabilization
COLLADA camera export improvement
COLLADA Huge scene data handling (improved import/export memory usage)
dotXSI/COLLADA stabilization

2010

Scalability and Performance

Many core algorithms have been optimized

Load and Save
Loading or saving large scenes and importing complex character models have been improved allowing greater productivity.

Selection
Selecting large numbers (thousands) of objects or components is now almost instantaneous.
Selection Filter switching has also been improved

Delete and Fast Delete
Huge improvements have been made to speed up the deletion of thousands of objects.
In addition, an even faster delete (Shift+Delete) will be introduced, which is the same delete expect there is no undo. A progress bar will now appear when Delete detects a small delay.

Undo/Redo
Great efforts have been made to improve this performance

Freeze
Greatly improved

Envelopes
Interaction and Playback has been greatly improved especially in shaded mode

Reference Models
Overall Reference Model performance has been vastly improved. With operations now only 1-2 times slower than regular models. (a 5000% improvement)
Loading scenes with many Ref Models has been increased by a factor of 2. Performance for the Delta operation has seen an improvement factor of 4-5. Offloading Ref-Models a factor of six improvement.

Duplication
Duplication has been significantly improved, especially when dealing with many objects

Animation
The Remove Animation command in now 70% faster

Function Curve Editor
The F-Curve Editor is now considerably faster than ever before - especially when dealing with large numbers of curves or large numbers of keys.

Hide\UnHide
Another common scenario has been addressed to reducing the impact on the artist's workflow

Interaction
Opening property pages which display many objects' properties has been highly optimized.
Switching between transform tools and changing marked parameters now benefits from greater performance

Performance Tools

Scene Debugger
This view is a window onto the scene's performance and memory usage.

Complexity Management

Scene Search View
Dedicated view to search for scene objects and more
To help narrow down any search additional filters can be added, such as searching for only objects of the type bones or nulls.

Search Box
In the main UI there is a search box where you type in full or partial letters\numbers. It will show you the results in a drop-down window, which you can tear off.

Material Manager Favorites Tab
Users can add their favorite materials to this tab, as a way of accessing them quickly when doing repeated tasks.

Scene management
Layer Groups. Multiple layers can be placed in a group in the Scene Layers View,

ICE Tree

Visual Performance Monitor
The ICE graph can now display which nodes are taking the greatest time to evaluate, 50% or more in Red

ICE

ICE Custom Node Creation in C++.

Geometry Accessors
Custom Nodes can now query more attributes found on objects, such as edge lengths.

Multi-Phase execution
TDs can now control which ports (or parts of a node) get executed in which order.

Local Attributes
Each ICE graph can now store local attributes

Modeling

User Normal Editing
New controls for characters

Tweak Normal Tool
Manipulator for precise normal control, including working in symmetry mode

Tweak Normal Preferences
A set of preferences for control over bleeding, distance thresholds as well as the Tweak Normal Tool's precision.

Turn Edge
A quick tool to reorient an edge, or collection of edges

Weight Painting
The Lattice Operator's amplitude now support weightmaps

Paint Weights toolbar standardization
The Paint Weights Panel embedded in layouts now supports narrow width

Animation

Autokey Camera
Each scene camera has an AutoKey option. Whenever the camera is manipulated using the viewport navigation tools, it will automatically keyframe the changed parameters

Performance: Removing Animation
Using the remove animation command has seen a 70% speed improvement when the objects have many animation curves.

Function Curve Editor Performance
Performance improvements span multiple areas

Selection
Selecting curves, keys and tangents has seen dramatic improvements

Drawing of Tangents
Each key can show tangental controls adding even more detail to be displayed.

Memory management
The amount of memory this takes has been reduced to its minimum. Also the memory usage has been improved when changing the selection.

Curve Processing
Smooth, Fit and Resample with many curves will now see better performance

Open/Close
When the Function Curve Editor is opened, all the many curves and keys and objects are populating the view. This one time operation is now much faster. The same for closing the view.

SDK

ICE Custom Nodes
Geometry Accessors
The Softimage SDK exposes access to geometry and sub-components.

ICE Multi-Phase execution
The Softimage SDK exposes the execution of ports in Custom Nodes.

ICE Local Attributes
Each ICE graph can now store local attributes

Play Control Event
When animation playback is started or stopped, the user can be notified of this event (or occurrence)

Scripting

Scintilla Text Editing
Softimage has many text editors (Script Editor, Shader Editor, Text Widget, Scripted Operator Editor and Expression Editor ) now use Scintilla features:
Folding
Folding collapses functions (groups of text)
Syntax Highlighting
Reserved words such as Function if true are highlighted in different colors
Standardized Search tools
Each editor will now use the same text search tools
Separate Text Editing Preferences
Each editor will now use the same preferences

UI

Bone shading
now have an option to be shaded in the viewport

Hide on Playback
A new visibility option will hide an object temporarily while the animation is playing back which will help performance.

Removed legacy particles
Simulation Module updated
All entries to create legacy particles has been removed
Functionality still there to maintain back-comp

2011

General
Icon to Maximize Floating Windows
Extra-wide icon to close PPGs and Views
New Views
* Shader Code Editor
* Shader Version Manager
* Cache Manager
* Lip Sync

Camera and Viewports
Viewport object transparency
* Object>Display>XRay Surface Display Opacity slider
* Change the viewport opacity of geometry using a slider
* Display Options>XRay Display Type>Transparent
* Viewport visibility menu>XRay Surfaces
* Does not draw any object which has XRay display opacity set to less than 1.0

New buttons in Camera PPG to keyframe camera

Camera frustrum display
* Camera clipping planes values now sliders

Viewport Slate
* Text or tokens can be used to display scene information

New menu toggle for X-Ray (display option)

Modeling
Updated Booleans
* Booleans are now faster and more stable

Polygon Mesh Internal Edges
* Symmetrize Polygons now mirrors the internals edges.
* Invert Polygons no longer flips internal edges.

New implicit bone primitive
* Useful for ICE kinematics

Texturing
Update to UV unfolding
* New option to unfold islands generated by the unfold operator
* Symmetry - if the geometry and cutlines are symmetrical so will be the unfold
* New PPG option to update the Unfold without packing as well

Multiple UVs in the Texture Editor
* control+click to set the UV editable/non-editable

Copy/Paste UV Improvements
* Edit > Paste UVs
* Edit > Paste Special > Using Source UVs Indices
* Edit > Paste Special > Using Target UVs Indices

RenderMap/Ultimapper now use Pass Renderer (including 3rd party)

Automatic Tangents and Binormals
* Softimage can automatically create tangents and binormals on-the-fly for OpenGL and DirectX RTS display modes

Animation
Function Curve Editor & Dopesheet & Mixer
* Highlight playback range in background

Preference for Collapsing Animation Layers
* Preserve Animation or Preserve Tangent Handles

Preference for scanning for old plug-ins in fcurve editor

Get>Property>Static Kinestate
* Used for reference (neutral) poses

Face Robot
Automatic Lip syncing
* A new workflow for creating phonemes (and visemes)
* A new lip sync tab for Stage 5>Act
* Viseme Setup
* Support for English and Japanese phonemes
* Lip Sync Creation options
* Use AIFF, AVI, Quicktime or WAV
* Add text
* Automatically creates animation
* The new views can display the Phonemes and weight curves

Simulation
Update PhysX library to version 2.83
* NOTE: Due to a change in the PhysX library, actual shape collision results will be different in 2011
* Support for CUDA acceleration for PhysX Rigid Body Dynamics (including ICE)

ICE
Springs and damper attributes for ICE rigid bodies

ICE Kinematics
* ICE can now drive the Global kinematic property
* The rigs' relationships can be expressed in a graph contained on a separate object (like a null)
* You can use the simulate ICE tree to easily do secondary dynamics
* ICE Kinematics and traditional Kinematics can live side by side

ICE Tree
* User Tools>Replace model name with this_model
* Preference for disabling cycle checking when connecting nodes in ICE tree

ICE Compounds and Nodes
* Includes much of Phil's ICE Pack
* Around 130 new compounds and nodes

Scripting and SDK
Python now installed with Softimage

Script Editor now support tabs
* MMB or control+W to close tab
* RMB on tab to open containing folder
* New file options including "save all tabs"

Scripting Preferences
* Show spaces instead of Tabs
* Use Python installed with Softimage (Windows only)

Custom Dynamic Shader creation

RenderMap exposed to Custom Renderers

Shaders
* Shader Plugin API
* Shader Parser Plugin API
* RT Shader Wizard (HLSL and CGFX)

ImportFromSI3D Command No Longer Supported

Many Object Model Changes

many C++ API Changes

Data Management
New Tokens
* [Camera] [CameraAspect] [CameraFormat] [CameraProjection] [CameraType] [Model] [Object] [Version] [CameraDisplayInfo]
* New Tokens and Templates page in documentation

Cache Manager
* View>Animation>Cache Manager, Animate>Plot>Cache Manager, Simulate>ICE>Edit>Cache Manager
* UI Simplification
* Cache Manager hosts Read, Write and Simulation caches
* New Cache lists
* to read and write multiple objects at the same time (cache list or add one by one)
* Automatically scans the selection for available attributes to cache (listbox)
* Tokens are saved with the scene not copied from the template preference
* Simulation tab list all cache file node in read mode
* Animation read tab lists all source caches with their corresponding object

Caching Improvements
* Multiple objects can be cached at at time (in the same path)
* Default template Preferences are used at scene creation, but can be overridden per caching session
* Consistent paths and file name tokens for all types of caching
* Current output path for caching is now visible
* Universal tokens supported (see Tokens and Templates [Data Management])
* Version token supported
* No frame padding in the cache File Name mean the frame padding setting from Scene Render options is no longer used.
* ICE particle ID attribute can be cached
* Setting the new XSI_CACHE_ASCII environment variable lets you save the .icecache file sequence in ASCII.

Rendering
Shader Authoring
* All shaders available in Softimage 2011 now use the new Dynamic Shader architecture
* No longer have to load *.cgfx or *.fx files into hard-coded CgFX or DXFX shader nodes.
* Files are read directly by the Softimage CgFX or HLSL parsers
* Shader Versioning
* Shader Version Manager
* Versioning of shader compounds supported
* Option to make shader compounds uneditable
* Shader Editor
* Shader Wizard
* New Shader Events
* OnCreateShaderDef
* OnCreateShader
* OnConnectShader
* OnDisonnectShader
* New Shader Port Types to match ICE types.
* New Array Port Type.
* Improved Gradient Port Type.
* Shader Tree XML Export .xsishadertree
* New CGFX Parser
* New HLSL Parser
* New SPDL Parser
* New .mi Parser
* New generic .xsishaderdef Parser

Shaders
* Around 35 new utility shaders
* Around 170 mental ray shaders

General
* Common mental ray
* Softimage, Maya and Max now share the same version of mental ray
* mental ray 2011 (3_8_1_13) integration
* Faster and more stable
* Stand-ins for rendering animated ICE particle instances
* Improved setup for Physical Sky and Sun shaders
* RMB Material commands available in render tree material node
* Render Pass Partitions now support Stand-ins.

Lighting
* Support IES light Profiles
* Use mia_photmetric_light in the light's render tree
* New flatlight
* Flat Light Mode on+Area Light(User)
* Additional Area Lights Parameters
* Use Geometry a light source (Area Light>Geometry>Object)
* Area light>Geometry>User
* Low Samples options
* Raytraced Soft Shadows
* New light parameter controls softness and samples
* New Light shape attenuation options
* Barn Door effect
* Light lists
* Local Ambient Lighting Property
* Get > Property > Ambient Lighting

Render Tree
* Connect shaders to the camera node and pass node directly in the render tree (dynamic input ports)
* New shader families and new node color coding
* Shader nodes support new data types for their input and output ports: 2D vector, 4D vector, 3x3 matrix, 4x4 matrix, quaternion, reference, string, and custom

Render Slate
* Show scene information (using tokens) in renders and render region
* Layout and color options
* Pass options control render, region and preview

Multi-Camera Rendering
* Specify a "group" of cameras to be rendered per pass

LUTs
* Softimage now supports Autodesk LUSTRE .3dl 3D LUT files
* New LUT Preconditioning options control linear to logarithmic conversions

Crosswalk
Version 5.0
* Crosswalk 5 supports 3ds Max 2011, Maya 2011, and Softimage 2011
FBX 2011
* New FBX scene scaling import and export options
* New FBX batch processing commands to support the scaling options

[Eric Lampi]

Thanks Chinny.

I am sure it's been said already, but the fact that Maya and Max studios will
have access to a license of Soft is a very very good thing for users.
Especially freelancers.

I'm working in more and more studios that are opting to combine Maya and Soft on
the same projects, so I don't see this as a bad thing at all. On that note, I
look forward to some advancements in making that process much easier.

Eric

Freelance 3-D Animator, F/X Artist

[Jules Stevenson]

Thanks Chinny,

Broken record or not, it's still much appreciated to get some
confirmation on the active development of the product.

Jules

[Jordi Bares]

Thanks so much for the mail, may be repeating yourself but this is something we all value a lot.

Please take this as a very cohesive community trying to get an insight of what our future will be, I am sure you all at Autodesk understand we want our investment to be relevant and our favourite toolset to carry on being developed at least at the same pace you guys at Softiamge were producing before.

Said that, we are skeptic too as different signals from AD indeed say something different from the discourse that is official so we are more nervous than usual, true.

Example

It is simple for me to be nervous of AD not celebrating Softimage 20 aniversary but doing so for Max.

It is simple for me to be nervous of AD when I see the Siggraph 2010 program

It is simple for me to be very nervous when their own website does not show Softimage in their main pages

It is simple for me to be nervous when the marketing blurb promotes Softimage in a way I understand could be misleading, a plugin? therefore no value?

And more...

So again, this is a slightly similar feeling from the one I have when the weather man is saying it won't be raining today and I am in the middle of the rain, wet and without umbrella.

I am sure you all at AD have the best intentions but I want to make sure you understand why the Softimage community is getting nervous.

my 2 cents

jb

On 27 Jul 2010, at 16:13, Jason Brynford-Jones wrote:

I thought the last time I wrote something like this, would be the last time.

 

I am beginning to sound like a broken record; a record no-one obviously likes listening to.  So perhaps this really is the last time I will play this message as it seems to make no difference.

 

 

Marketing

It seems now the Softimage community is only focusing on Autodesk’s marketing as the barometer for Soft’s future.  Not “no marketing” but “less marketing” than 3ds Max and Maya.  Or that the new Max and Maya products WITH Softimage means no more Softimage?  This does not make sense.

 

New Max and Maya Suites

From all our interviews Max and Maya customers want Softimage (not just ICE, but ICE is often a big reason) in their toolsets.  At an affordable price, that interops well.  OK let’s give it to them, in the way they want it.

 

There are many more Max and Maya customers than Softimage.  Having product suites branded with the name 3ds Max or Maya are obviously targeted at selling to them.  This represents a massive potential for Softimage.  You might not agree with the naming, but you can’t argue the logic.

 

Softimage as a standalone product is of course continuing as before (with some very exciting stuff in the works) and having the standalone product available to all Max and Maya users is a huge endorsement of Softimage and commitment by Autodesk..

 

Development

Since the acquisition there has been repeated fear-mongering about Soft’s future.  Even though in that time, we have had two major releases (3 in the last two years) and one minor (check what others have done in this time) and of course there is more to come. 

 

Even though we have exceeded revenue expectations, even though we are expanding our development.  Even though fundamentally NOTHING HAS CHANGED, people choose to focus simply on a lack of marketing and not Autodesk Softimage’s track record.

 

We still manage our own roadmap, with the exception of working well with other Autodesk apps.  Something everyone has asked for repeatedly, especially ICE interop.  

 

Our philosophy will continue around ICE as the architecture on which to build – that includes one day moving into modeling.  We have not abandoned other parts of the Software (see the list at the end of this mail) far from it - we have a very well defined focus and future.

 

Final thoughts – for this is the last time I will do this.

 

If you take one thing away from this mail, it is this.

 

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

 

It really is…

 

Chinny

 

 

PS: Lest you forget….

The F-Curve Editor is now considerably faster than ever before – especially when dealing with large numbers of curves or large numbers of keys.

[Frank Lenhard]

thanks Chinny

ciao
franky

> It really is...

> Chinny

> PS: Lest you forget....

> 7.5

> 2010

> Scalability and Performance

> Freeze
> Greatly improved

> Performance Tools

> Complexity Management

> ICE Tree

> ICE

> Modeling

> Animation

> SDK

> Scripting

> UI

> 2011

> Custom Dynamic Shader creation

> Many Object Model Changes

> many C++ API Changes

____________
Virus checked by G Data AntiVirus
Version: AVA 21.1684 dated 27.07.2010
Virus news: www.antiviruslab.com

[Williams, Wayne]

As a Softimage user from XSI v3 on I can say I have never regretted the time I’ve invested in learning it. There were times I had to learn other apps to get jobs (maya/max) but that’s the nature of the beast. Sink or Swim.

 

I’m very excited about the outlook for Softimage, especially with it being bundled with max/maya. How many more people/studios will now have a license of Softimage to learn with?! There really doesn’t seem to be any reason for alarm, but more for rejoicing. Autodesk didn’t kill Soft. Development has continued at a steady pace as they said it would. Lagoa was all over the internet just a week ago and now we find out we’ll be able to get our hands on it! Be happy guys! I know I’ve been a bit put off by the seemingly skewed marketing but honestly, this really looks like a good decision on Autodesk’s part.

 

Thanks for the detailed response yet again Chinny. I think it’s helped ease the hands on many a kittens neck.

 

-wayne

[Tim Marinov]

Thanks a lot Chinny! This is what we needed to hear!

[Greg Punchatz]

"It is simple for me to be nervous of AD not celebrating Softimage 20 aniversary but doing so for Max."

I think you have been misinformed , I have a 20th anniversary shirt from a few years ago, pre Autodesk.

---

Greg Punchatz

Sr. Creative Director
Janimation
214.823.7760
www.janimation.com

[Juhani Karlsson]

Hehe, internet masspanic is sometimes quite tricky. : ) Theres some awesome stuff happenin in softimage front. I would say its really creating some buzz in the industry.
This is the moment when we should be marketing SI as an artists. Its a fact that SI userbase is quite small and oldschool, thats why it wont come up, because theres no 17 yo kids shouting for it in deviantart.
Now for first time in long time lagoa really got some views and thats the type hype Softimage should ride. Everybody hates hype, but its the way to collect some intrest.

2010/7/27 Tim Marinov <tim.m...@gmail.com>

[Jeff McFall]

thank you very much, I appreciate your taking the time to give this response.

 

Sorry it needs repeating but there seems to be a need for it to keep us sensitive types from getting too frazzled.

Perception in the absence of stimulus can lead to all sorts of unwarranted conclusions.

 

Jeff

 

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Jason Brynford-Jones
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:13 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: A Softimage message

 

I thought the last time I wrote something like this, would be the last time.

 

I am beginning to sound like a broken record; a record no-one obviously likes listening to.  So perhaps this really is the last time I will play this message as it seems to make no difference.

 

 

Marketing

It seems now the Softimage community is only focusing on Autodesk’s marketing as the barometer for Soft’s future.  Not “no marketing” but “less marketing” than 3ds Max and Maya.  Or that the new Max and Maya products WITH Softimage means no more Softimage?  This does not make sense.

 

New Max and Maya Suites

From all our interviews Max and Maya customers want Softimage (not just ICE, but ICE is often a big reason) in their toolsets.  At an affordable price, that interops well.  OK let’s give it to them, in the way they want it.

 

There are many more Max and Maya customers than Softimage.  Having product suites branded with the name 3ds Max or Maya are obviously targeted at selling to them.  This represents a massive potential for Softimage.  You might not agree with the naming, but you can’t argue the logic.

 

Softimage as a standalone product is of course continuing as before (with some very exciting stuff in the works) and having the standalone product available to all Max and Maya users is a huge endorsement of Softimage and commitment by Autodesk..

 

Development

Since the acquisition there has been repeated fear-mongering about Soft’s future.  Even though in that time, we have had two major releases (3 in the last two years) and one minor (check what others have done in this time) and of course there is more to come. 

 

Even though we have exceeded revenue expectations, even though we are expanding our development.  Even though fundamentally NOTHING HAS CHANGED, people choose to focus simply on a lack of marketing and not Autodesk Softimage’s track record.

 

We still manage our own roadmap, with the exception of working well with other Autodesk apps.  Something everyone has asked for repeatedly, especially ICE interop.  

 

Our philosophy will continue around ICE as the architecture on which to build – that includes one day moving into modeling.  We have not abandoned other parts of the Software (see the list at the end of this mail) far from it - we have a very well defined focus and future.

 

Final thoughts – for this is the last time I will do this.

 

If you take one thing away from this mail, it is this.

 

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

The future of Softimage is bright… click

 

It really is…

 

Chinny

 

 

PS: Lest you forget….

 

Feature bullet lists since acquisition:

The F-Curve Editor is now considerably faster than ever before – especially when dealing with large numbers of curves or large numbers of keys.

[Steven Caron]

ya, that was boston siggraph! they did this presentation at the UG meeting going back 20 years. showing softimage 3d and showing greg in some punk rock/glam photo, and a baby picture of me when i was.. 4years old i think.

s

[Takayuki Watanabe]

Thank's Chinny for the mail.
I bet every softimage user is nervous hearing Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suite Premium, or Autodesk 3ds Max ....
but we can't blame anybody because how it appealed in front of us was how it is. (name branding = plugin?)

It's so nice to having this kind of mail clearing things up.

 

---

Get the new Internet Explorer 8 optimized for Yahoo! JAPAN

[Raffaele Fragapane]

I don't know why everybody keeps going on about the 20th anniversary, especially considering that it was in 2006 :)
Quarter of a century should be March(?) next year though.

Probably they mean the 10th anniversary of the XSI launch, that was actually not long ago.
I haven't seen AD celebrating the maya anniversaries either though, only max because it was born and bred there, so not particularly fussed.

[Jeremie Passerin]

Will there be any announcement about the Softimage development during Siggraph ? or any time soon ?

[miquel campos]

More questions :)

About Lagoa, will be available separately like a  softimage plug-in? or you should have maintenance contract to get access ?

Thanks

2010/7/28 Jeremie Passerin <gere...@gmail.com>

[John Pierre van der linden]

Personally I as mad as hell.

Not over the marketing, that's a strategy that they want and decided on given numbers etc then that's their choice. Fair enough.
I'm as mad as hell over the 2 steps forwards one step back in development. Like particle volume working in 2010 but broken in 2011 (as seen on here).
That is MUCH more of a concern, that is MUCH more of a product and production killer, than any kind of marketing foobars.
That is what should be resolved, and NOT expect users to wait around for another year for it to get resolved.

my 2c

JP

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

It's a little frustrating, but right now at Autodesk is only
announcing the new Premium Suite.
In the future, they'll be Softimage announcements, but afaik that's
its for this month. Has to do with financial quarters and all
again...

[kim aldis]

I'm sorry but that's the name of the game. Unless you've found software that doesn't break. If you have, please let me know because I've been doing this for 30 years and it eludes me.

[Stephen Davidson]

AMEN! been there... bought the t-shirt.

just look at Adobe Creative Suites...

I'll say no more :)

Best regards,

Stephen P. Davidson
3D Animation Magic
7586 Pinewalk Drive South
Margate, FL 33063
(954) 552-7956

My website is GREEN! Make your website green, as well!
Please click, below, for more info.

[John Pierre van der linden]

Tell that to the person who gets the creative suite and for the first time runs softimage. Only to find it does not render the particle volumes correctly. (Or are you supposed to render them now in Maya? )

How do you think they will feel about Softimage?

Only for someone to add insult to injury ....oh ...it used to work in the old version. But you cant save to prev versions. Sorry.

Box ---- into the bin. Forget all those marketing plans.



my 3c
jp

[Stephen Blair]

You can workaround that by going in the ICE Tree and doing something to "dirty" the tree (eg plug in a new node).

Or you could try this workaround:
In the explorer under Point Cloud click on Particle display
Change the display from Automatic to something else and then back to Automatic
The render now shows the proper volume cloud

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of John Pierre van der linden
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 2:49 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

Tell that to the person who gets the creative suite and for the first time runs softimage. Only to find it does not render the particle volumes correctly. (Or are you supposed to render them now in Maya? )

How do you think they will feel about Softimage?

Only for someone to add insult to injury ....oh ...it used to work in the old version. But you cant save to prev versions. Sorry.

Box ---- into the bin. Forget all those marketing plans.

my 3c
jp

[kim aldis]

Or you could drop a note to this forum and ask how other people work around this kind of thing. As you can see from Stephen's response, it usually works.

Once again, this is part of life in CGI. It happens in Maya, it happens in Houdini, it happens in Max, it happens everywhere. We demand state of the art. bleeding edge from the people who build the software we use. Most of the time we get state of the art and a lot of the stuff we get to use is nothing short of amazing. But there's a price to pay, and this is it. The guys who are good with this software appreciate that and their skill and talent is making it do extraordinary things regardless of what's thrown in their faces.

>
>
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of John Pierre van der linden
> Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 2:49 PM
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: A Softimage message
>
> Tell that to the person who gets the creative suite and for the first time runs softimage. Only to find it does not render the particle volumes correctly. (Or are you supposed to render them now in Maya? )
>
> How do you think they will feel about Softimage?
>
> Only for someone to add insult to injury ....oh ...it used to work in the old version. But you cant save to prev versions. Sorry.
>
> Box ---- into the bin. Forget all those marketing plans.
>
>
>
> my 3c
> jp
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 5:22 PM, kim aldis <k...@kim-aldis.co.uk<mailto:k...@kim-aldis.co.uk>> wrote:
> I'm sorry but that's the name of the game. Unless you've found software that doesn't break. If you have, please let me know because I've been doing this for 30 years and it eludes me.
>
>
> On 28 Jul 2010, at 13:07, John Pierre van der linden wrote:
>
>> Personally I as mad as hell.
>>
>> Not over the marketing, that's a strategy that they want and decided on given numbers etc then that's their choice. Fair enough.
>> I'm as mad as hell over the 2 steps forwards one step back in development. Like particle volume working in 2010 but broken in 2011 (as seen on here).
>> That is MUCH more of a concern, that is MUCH more of a product and production killer, than any kind of marketing foobars.
>> That is what should be resolved, and NOT expect users to wait around for another year for it to get resolved.
>>
>
>

> <winmail.dat>

[Tim Leydecker]

Hi folks,

been enjoying my holidays, lost track of what�s the lastest
XP64//XSI version and hotfix or update build?

I find it a bit difficult to keep on track, even thought I am
on support for both Maya and XSI, whenever there�s new patches
or new builds, I have to find out myself instead of getting
a heads up by e-mail, informing me about the effort put in by support...

Cheers

tim

P.S: 6 weeks of recreational log-off are a long time, I know.
Seems every damn app I ever bought has been updated ...

[Stephen Blair]

http://autodesk.com/softimage2011-sp1

[Tim Leydecker]

Gracias, Steve!

You guys do great work. I�ve had alot more work
(e.g. paid work, not more effort) since starting
to use Softimage/XSI in addition to sticking w/Maya.

Cheers

tim

[John Pierre van der linden]

Its all about OOBE Kim.

This is referred to by industrial and product designers as the OOBE or the Out Of Box Experience.

Every year millions of products are returned by consumers. In reality only 5% have flaws; 27% are returned because purchasers changed their minds, while a massive 68% of returns are because users think that the product does not work - or at least not the way they expected it to. The cost of poor out of box experience is USD13.8 billion per year in the US alone.

A smooth OOBE creates a lasting impression with your customers and strengthens your brand perception.

The out-of-box experience affects one of the potentially most difficult and stressful interactions a user will have with the product, when the least is known about the product’s capabilities and interaction style. It can also be one of the most likely points at which a user will call customer support, so that improvements in this experience may result in significant cost savings in customer support and reduction in customer complaints.

In relation to the question I mention having example scene files that don't render is a classical example of bad OOBE. Unless Autodesk include comp slip explaining that this list exists, which many first time and long time users will not know.

As stated I personally don't have any problem with their marketing to trying to leverage the existing customer base, that clearly is a simple and effective first option. Not to realize the experience these first time users will get is a classic mistake - made by many companies. This has the potential as i stated to relegate softimage as a product that a) gives problems b) does not work or c) was poorly implemented.

As for a solution, I can see no good reason why there is not a suite of scripts, since softimage has this capability, to run each of those in the suite against any new version, and check the output, be it in the form of a log and or a rendered image. That's good software management practice and good business practice too .

JP

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

Actually, Softimage every day goes goes through 18 hours of automated
testing on a farm of computers, the product is in beta testing
year-around at hundreds of beta sites, we've asked everyone their
production show stoppers and produced a service pack for 2011 this is
the first time that I hear anyone saying that the product doesn't work
out of the box. It's not like we upload this on the web without
testing. There seems to be a genuine refresh problem with the particle
cloud shader, however looks like this was discussed on this list only
4 weeks ago, two weeks after we had time to make a service pack. I'm
baffled as to what we could have done better, given that the product
has been in beta since November 2009, but I'll be discussing with QA.
The problem was only reported through support about three weeks ago.
We are investigating it.

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 3:21 AM, John Pierre van der linden
<jpvdl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Its all about OOBE Kim.
>
> This is referred to by industrial and product designers as the OOBE or the
> Out Of Box Experience.
>
> Every year millions of products are returned by consumers. In reality only
> 5% have flaws; 27% are returned because purchasers changed their minds,
> while a massive 68% of returns are because users think that the product does
> not work - or at least not the way they expected it to. The cost of poor out
> of box experience is USD13.8 billion per year in the US alone.
>
> A smooth OOBE creates a lasting impression with your customers and
> strengthens your brand perception.
>
> The out-of-box experience affects one of the potentially most difficult and
> stressful interactions a user will have with the product, when the least is

> known about the product�s capabilities and interaction style. It can also be

[Christopher Tedin]

Soft 2011 64 bit sp1, as far as I know.

[Andy Moorer]

Thanks Chin. But I have to tell you I would have preferred to have heard you say all this during siggraph, at the autodesk booth, daily.

Speaking directly to XSI users is great. But producers don't read the XSI list. Every XSI job starts with a battle to get clients to understand why using "nonstandard" software is worth the "risk."

Every attempt to maintain or build an XSI pipeline faces a similar battle.

And every job with XSI depends on finding enough artists well versed in XSI, which in itself is a huge difficulty.

And all of that is dependent on Autodesk's marketing.

The future of XSI isn't bright if those of us who want to use it can't get the people with money to ok our using it... something I've seen happen on an entire series of feature film projects and prospective new studios.

It isn't that we don't appreciate what is being done to improve and extend XSI... try hearing us when we say that we need this package to be highly visible as badly as we need any other improvement to the software. 

I spend more of my time in production in Maya than XSI these days, but not out of choice. I won't have a choice, however, if you guys don't get XSI in the 'public' eye.

[Arvid Björn]

First thing I saw when I walked into the exhibition floor was Lagoa on
a huge Autodesk screen, that made me a little tingly at least ;) The
Moondust user group from 07 was great, but maybe hard to top still in
terms of the reveal effect, however I think user groups are important
in a group-hug sort of way, and especially good for Soft if it was a
3-part show with Softimage sandwiched between Max and Maya demos.
Autodesk is in the position to project the feel of equal importance
between the three apps, even if they had to lie - which they don't
have to - it seems to make sense to present their acquisition of Soft
as a big step forward for all of Autodesk users, and especially to
make sure no one sees it as the usual buy-and-bury-strategy.
Since Soft is largely a better app anyway, the only problem it may
have is low visibility. The Lagoa demo did a great job at putting a
spot light on Soft this year, so cheers Thiago and everyone at the
booth. :)

Would've loved to see an Arnold demo in Soft somewhere though, just
for visibility. Sony made some nice bumps for Arnold in their Alice in
Wonderland-talk as well.

--
lead 3d artist | stockholm.postproduction | www.stopp.se

[Steven Caron]

"... Sony made some nice bumps for Arnold in their Alice in
Wonderland-talk as well."

they sure did, all of our lighting guys saw this and are begging for a max plugin. too bad it doesn't exist yet ;)

s

2010/8/1 Arvid Björn <arvid...@gmail.com>

[Sandy Sutherland]

So - use it from Softimage instead - ;-)

S.

[Steven Caron]

if it was only that easy :(

sorry for the OT

s

[Szabolcs Mátéfy]

The marketing of Softimage is a big issue. Maybe that type of marketing could work, but deleting the customer stories, and hiding any footprint softimage made is a big mistake. Just for example, I wanted to show how Kojima Studios made facial animation with Softimage to my bosses here at Crytek (typical Max house), but I couldn't find the article. If I haven't found the YouTube videos of a visit in Square's HQ, I wouldn't know that the in game stuff was created with Softimage? Is there any publicity? No, as far as I know...

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Arvid Bj�rn
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 8:33 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

First thing I saw when I walked into the exhibition floor was Lagoa on
a huge Autodesk screen, that made me a little tingly at least ;) The
Moondust user group from 07 was great, but maybe hard to top still in
terms of the reveal effect, however I think user groups are important
in a group-hug sort of way, and especially good for Soft if it was a
3-part show with Softimage sandwiched between Max and Maya demos.
Autodesk is in the position to project the feel of equal importance
between the three apps, even if they had to lie - which they don't
have to - it seems to make sense to present their acquisition of Soft
as a big step forward for all of Autodesk users, and especially to
make sure no one sees it as the usual buy-and-bury-strategy.
Since Soft is largely a better app anyway, the only problem it may
have is low visibility. The Lagoa demo did a great job at putting a
spot light on Soft this year, so cheers Thiago and everyone at the
booth. :)

Would've loved to see an Arnold demo in Soft somewhere though, just
for visibility. Sony made some nice bumps for Arnold in their Alice in
Wonderland-talk as well.

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Andy Moorer <andym...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Chin. But I have to tell you I would have�preferred�to have heard you

> say all this during siggraph, at the autodesk booth, daily.
> Speaking directly to XSI users is great. But producers don't read the XSI
> list. Every XSI job starts with a battle to get clients to understand why
> using "nonstandard" software is worth the "risk."
> Every attempt to maintain or build an XSI pipeline faces a similar battle.
> And every job with XSI depends on finding enough artists well versed in XSI,
> which in itself is a huge difficulty.

> And all of that is�dependent�on Autodesk's marketing.

[Leo Quensel]

FYI - Marcos Fajardo will be presenting Arnold at the German user
meeting "Softimage|�ber Tage" on
24/09/2010 in Siegen, Germany. Usually the presentations are filmed, so
maybe there will be something to see if
he gives permission.

[Ed Manning]

Thanks, Chinny. 

Your post was a good reminder of what you've been able to do under adverse circumstances, and what Autodesk is doing to help SI's recovery from those circumstances.

However, lack of marketing support and visibility for SI is a critical error.  I'm sure AD, at some level, is aware of the need for coordination between marketing and development. Awareness without action is pretty useless though.  It's not just hurt feelings on the part of everyone who has committed years or decades (!) to learning and using SI in production -- it is acute anxiety that our enormous investment, sometimes in the face of enormous business-side opposition, may be for naught.  Without taking steps to bolster the confidence of SI's user core, AD will find it far more difficult to expand SI's market reach.  By failing to acknowledge SI users, and failing to make them feel part of a viable enterprise, AD sacrifices virtually the entire, crucially important social component of marketing.

Additionally, I would argue that it is irrelevant to assert that AD's marketing strategy is "correct" even if it is optimizing sales and profitability across the board, when there are so many paying customers feeling uncertain or unhappy.  Part of customer service is maintaining the happiness of your customers in the context of your relationship with them.  If they are unhappy, for good reasons or not, it is up to the vendor to attend to them. 

Best,

Ed

[John Pierre van der linden]

Luc thank for your comments, I am glad you're investigating it.

Because I think readers may think I bashing you, actually I'm am not. I am actually wanting the addition of the product in the creation suite to be successful. That's not all altruistic I can assure you. That's me understanding the greater the success of this marketing and the oobe, means a better future for softimage more plugins and continued development. And a future in which I don't have to learn or re-train myself on another package, which means a better roi for me.

> known about the product’s capabilities and interaction style. It can also be

[Maurice Patel]

Hi Ed,

First thanks for expressing your concern. I understand your point and want to explain a bit of what goes on "behind the scenes"

Marketing here is a complex task and the trick is to find the right organizational fit when it comes to both marketing and sales. If we don't marketing becomes costly and unsustainable effecting product profitability. And the last thing you want in any organization is for your product to be consistently unprofitable. You can very quickly pour all your product revenues (and more) in building websites, buying SEO and running ad campaigns to drive traffic to the site without generating a dollar of additional revenue or acquiring new customers. The reality is that people rarely switch products and pipelines, nor would it be in our interest to spend money promoting that. Our most effective way to increase adoption is to seed education (something we are very focused on) and to get the software in many more people hands through Suites. At the same time Softimage as a product gets the same investment (actually it gets a bit more as we do favor it) as other products in its revenue tier.

I know our Marketing is not perfect but it is optimized and it is effective, even if our website is not particularly inspirational. We need Softimage to be embraced by the organization (Sales, Channel partners etc) and that means adopting Autodesk deployment processes. For example localization processes. If we are not inside the system Softimage risks being overlooked entirely. We used to have long and passionate discussions on this exact same topic when we integrated the Discreet brand and site into Autodesk - and that was a far bigger business than Softimage. We lost a part of our original identity , we became less visible but we became more integrated and since then we say both our business and users grow. This identical discussion occurred when we integrated Alias. Maya became a product page rather than a website and there was a lot of concern about exactly the points you make below but in the end it turned out to be in Maya's interest - sales grew and the product became more profitable. I can't predict the future but the path we are on is (IMO) the most optimal one to ensure Softimage's future commercial success and growth.

Can we keep our customers happy? Well that depends and there is no simple formula for that. We try on several fronts but we also choose our battles - Obviously our first priority is product. After all users spend (I hope :)) massively more time dealing with that than with our website and Marketing materials. Also we know we cannot win the battle of "Autodesk is a large organization and I hate to do business with large organizations" (not your opinion below but expressed elsewhere) - our best strategy to deal with that is to prove over time that we are nurturing Softimage and making it successful and that large organizations can do good things too. We do not fail to acknowledge our users- we are well aware of your concerns- and we try to tune the organization to best serve your needs while maintaining a viable ongoing business.

maurice

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ed Manning
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 10:47 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com; Jason Brynford-Jones
Cc: Mark...@autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

[Eric Thivierge]

Hi Maurice,

Thanks for the explanation. The initiatives including Softimage into
the Edu suites is a good way to get it more visibility to more
students. That is great, but what else other than just putting it in
the package is being done to promote it? If a student uses Maya and in
the new suite they see a new product they may check it out once or
twice. However how would they know about the strengths of the product
without being able to find that info? Is there any work being done to
create demo vids of what the product can do better than some of the
other packages? Any events at some of the top tier schools being
scheduled? The simple availability of the software to students won't
necessarily equal more users or adopters. Most students and other
professionals I talk to have no idea what Softimage is. This for me as
a Softimage user, is a huge problem. People need to get informed about
what the product is. This is in my eyes part of education, not just of
students, but of other AD product users as well.

I like that there are initiatives to get Softimage in more studios and
in more educational institutions and am glad there is movement on this
front. I just want to make sure that the information is distributed to
the masses in the education and professional sectors simultaneously.

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 12:23 PM, Maurice Patel
<mauric...@autodesk.com> wrote:
> Hi Ed,
>
> First thanks for expressing your concern. I understand your point and want to explain a bit of what goes on "behind the scenes"
>

> Marketing here is a complex task and the trick is to find the right organizational fit when it comes to both marketing and sales. If we don't marketing becomes costly and unsustainable effecting product profitability. And the last thing you want in any organization is for your product to be consistently unprofitable. You can very quickly pour all your product revenues (and more) in building websites, buying SEO and running ad campaigns to drive traffic to the site without generating a dollar of additional revenue or acquiring new customers. The reality is that people rarely switch products and pipelines, nor would it be in our interest to spend money promoting that. Our most effective way to increase adoption is to seed education (something we are very focused on) and to get the software in many more �people hands through Suites. At the same time Softimage as a product gets the same investment (actually it gets a bit more as we do favor it) as other products in its revenue!
tier.
>
> I know our Marketing is not perfect but it is optimized and it is effective, even if our website is not particularly inspirational. We need Softimage to be embraced by the organization (Sales, Channel partners etc) and that means adopting Autodesk deployment processes. For example localization processes. If we are not inside the system Softimage risks being �overlooked entirely. We used to have long and passionate discussions on this exact same topic when we integrated the Discreet brand and site into Autodesk - and that was a far bigger business than Softimage. We lost a part of our original identity , we became less visible but we became more integrated and since then we say both our business and users grow. This identical discussion occurred when we integrated Alias. Maya became a product page rather than a website and there was a lot of concern about exactly the points you make below but in the end it turned out to be in Maya's interest - sales grew and the product bec!

[Maurice Patel]

BTW : Chinny mentioned you might not know who I am

Sorry I was remiss in posting my info:

I'm Maurice Patel, Entertainment Industry Manager here at Autodesk where I am in charge Industry and Product Marketing.

maurice

[Maurice Patel]

Good point. We work on multiple fronts from developing instructor certification programs and curriculum to doing product videos. The best sites to get info are

www.autodesk.com/softimage - and if you have feedback on the content (not the design which is pretty much fixed) we always welcome constructive input.

One of our main sites is the AREA (we use this a lot for Max and Maya because of the limitations of .com) but that really works as a function of community participation and so our hope is we can grow a strong and vibrant community here so that it can become an invaluable resource centre.

We also work on a broad range of Marketing initiatives including internal education: Softimage Sales tools to messaging and positioning that can be used by sales resellers around the world.

maurice

[Andy Nicholas]

Thanks for the post Maurice. It's good to hear your point of view.

So I'm a little late to this discussion but I just wanted to make a couple
of other points that I think are worth mentioning.

I can understand Chinny's frustration at the spread of negative rumours
regarding the future of XSI. Particularly when it must be obvious to him
that the AD XSI team is investing a lot of time and effort into pushing
XSI forward. The point I want to make is that we as users are also
investing a lot of time and effort into XSI. We have to keep our skills
current with XSI and are essentially gambling our careers on the bet that
XSI is going to continued in the future. If we lose that bet, then the
consequences are that we have to relearn a heck of a lot, and our careers
will potentially take a hit. That can mean less money coming in.

>From my experience seeing this happen before, most artists can move their
workflows across and start to feel comfortable in somewhere around 6
months to a year (in a very general case). But the transition time is
arguably much worse for technical artists and TDs, where they have to
learn an entirely new SDK, and get familiar with *all* the workflows and
technical hiccups so that they can competently support and advise the art
team. In this case you're probably looking at about 3 years, maybe more,
of getting to know the new software. Thats not even mentioning that TDs
also have the added investment of all the code they've written; pipelines,
shaders, tools, etc. all potentially wasted work.

I think that's the reason that this list gets a bit jumpy. Particularly
since many of the more active posters are TDs and arguably have more to
lose. Fear mongering isn't a healthy thing to do either, and it should be
called out when seen, but it tends to happen where there's a lack of
information or feedback.

So the other thing that's worth mentioning is about our own responsibility
for marketing XSI. We as a user base are one of XSI's biggest assets and
best reasons for it's future success. Lagoa was created by one of us, not
a member of the AD team, but has had a much wider impact on the internet
than any AD press release could ever expect.

There are a lot of print and web based magazines out there who are always
on the lookout for new articles or tutorials, so why not start telling
them about the cool work that XSI let's us do? Let's not whinge about it,
let's start doing something ourselves. If your company has a PR manager or
department, go and have a chat with them and see what you can do. (One
bonus is that it raises your profile and your company's at the same time.)
While I agree that XSI's placement on the AD website isn't great and
doesn't send a positive message, it's nowhere near as important as the
general buzz in the trade press.

BTW, just want to say thanks to Matt Lind for organising the meet up at
Siggraph, it was great to get the opportunity to finally meet so many of
you guys. And you all seemed so positive?! Not at all the bitter and
twisted obsessives you pretend you are on here ;-)

Cheers
A

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

Hi Eric -

I have been following this thread (and others) for the last few days, and I wanted to comment on the Educational question you just posed.

As you know, I took on trying to manage Softimage's educational programs towards the end of 2007. It was a difficult task, as our EDU & Training teams had been decimated over the years, and most schools moved on to Maya and or stayed with 3ds max. Trying to get Softimage even noticed by the large art colleges and others proved to be daunting to say the least. I was told by some, "we cannot add another product to our purchasing system" to "guarantee that you can fill a class and we'll add it to our roster" to "no teacher, so Softimage" and the list goes on.

While we saw moderate success in parts some schools out there, overall, schools just weren't that interested in adding another vendor/class/tool, etc. It became the chicken and egg argument. "More students will create more users which will create more jobs which will demand more students, etc" but the reality is we started focusing on keeping the customers we had at Softimage in EDU rather than trying to get new ones, because adding new schools was proving to be impossible.

Now, I have to say, it's much easier to get attention for Softimage as a product as part of the Education Suite. While it's true that the majority of schools are focused on Maya and Max, because Autodesk did a much better job than Softimage did at focusing on the secondary (middle school and high school) markets that feed into these colleges, when we meet with schools and channel partner to present out products, we talk about all the solutions, including Softimage.

Having Soft as part of the certification program was huge, it took a long time, and thanks to long time users like Adam Sale, Craig Slagel and Carl Callewaert, we made it happen, and this is a good thing for our existing trainers, and hopefully the cross certification option will entice some Maya and 3ds max users to look into.

In my role, we have worked on customer stories at different school that mention Softimage as one of their products of choice, and we were very proud to have Perry Harovas present at our SIGGRAPH Education event, where he shared how Flashpoint uses Softimage and Maya in their pipeline. Perry also provided us with an excellent master class that is being hosted on the AREA. I also spent some time last week with USC, where we talked about doing some promotion with them about their Face Robot classes.

Education follows industry closely, and I think that Maurice made some excellent points on both the hopes for the product and reality of the situation.

But at the end of the day, I hope you can see that there are a lot of very passionate people at the company who care about all of our products, and that does include Softimage. A lot of us are the same ones that always cared, and you might be surprised to know how many Autodesk employees are Soft alumni.

Jen

Jennifer Goldfinch
Marketing Manager, Media & Entertainment 
Autodesk Education
(o) 514-954-7276
(m) 514-912-0387
jennifer....@autodesk.com

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 2:54 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Hi Maurice,

> Marketing here is a complex task and the trick is to find the right organizational fit when it comes to both marketing and sales. If we don't marketing becomes costly and unsustainable effecting product profitability. And the last thing you want in any organization is for your product to be consistently unprofitable. You can very quickly pour all your product revenues (and more) in building websites, buying SEO and running ad campaigns to drive traffic to the site without generating a dollar of additional revenue or acquiring new customers. The reality is that people rarely switch products and pipelines, nor would it be in our interest to spend money promoting that. Our most effective way to increase adoption is to seed education (something we are very focused on) and to get the software in many more  people hands through Suites. At the same time Softimage as a product gets the same investment (actually it gets a bit more as we do favor it) as other products in its revenue tier.
>
> I know our Marketing is not perfect but it is optimized and it is effective, even if our website is not particularly inspirational. We need Softimage to be embraced by the organization (Sales, Channel partners etc) and that means adopting Autodesk deployment processes. For example localization processes. If we are not inside the system Softimage risks being  overlooked entirely. We used to have long and passionate discussions on this exact same topic when we integrated the Discreet brand and site into Autodesk - and that was a far bigger business than Softimage. We lost a part of our original identity , we became less visible but we became more integrated and since then we say both our business and users grow. This identical discussion occurred when we integrated Alias. Maya became a product page rather than a website and there was a lot of concern about exactly the points you make below but in the end it turned out to be in Maya's interest - sales grew and the product became more profitable. I can't predict the future but the path we are on is (IMO) the most optimal one to ensure Softimage's future commercial success and growth.

[Ed Manning]

Thank-you, Maurice. 

I think all it would take is a little more outreach like this to allay people's fears and uncertainty.  I should add that I was already convinced that AD is trying to support SI the best way it can.

Ed

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

I agree with this 100 per cent..

"There are a lot of print and web based magazines out there who are always on the lookout for new articles or tutorials, so why not start telling them about the cool work that XSI let's us do? Let's not whinge about it, let's start doing something ourselves. If your company has a PR manager or department, go and have a chat with them and see what you can do. (One bonus is that it raises your profile and your company's at the same time.) While I agree that XSI's placement on the AD website isn't great and doesn't send a positive message, it's nowhere near as important as the general buzz in the trade press."

As some of you also know, I did PR/Client relations for Softimage when I first started back in 2003, and this is SO true. Some of you have expressed your dislike for the AREA, but tutorials and customer work posted there also speak volumes.

If anyone wants to connect their studios PR people to our Client Relations team, let me know, I would be more than happy to pass the contact info along, here's my email: jennifer....@autodesk.com

Jen

[Eric Thivierge]

Hey Jen,

I do know you're doing amazing work with the Edu side of things. I
hope it didn't come across as if I was saying nothing was being done.
I do think that AD is doing a good job getting all the products into
the Edu sector. I personally haven't seen / heard anything in terms of
getting Softimage recognized as a valid option for use in pipelines in
the Edu community though. It did, just, get bundled with the rest so
maybe I just need to give it some time to develop. Great work thus far
and am looking forward to further initiatives.

One area in the US that I think would benefit from some type of
Educational events for students / educators is the NY area. There are
a bunch of studios in NYC that use Soft but only a handful of schools
around there that teach it as the main tool or secondary tool. I know
it's expensive to put on the events and it's a lot of work but I feel
that students benefit from these events and they help them learn how
the tools (Maya, Max, Soft, etc) can be used, and used together to
create the best possible project. I know online is a big part of the
community now but there is something about actually going to an event
as a student and being able to talk to professionals that is just that
much more inspiring.

Just my 2 cents, again you're doing a great job just wanted to share
some thoughts about moving forward. :)

Later,

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com

>> Marketing here is a complex task and the trick is to find the right organizational fit when it comes to both marketing and sales. If we don't marketing becomes costly and unsustainable effecting product profitability. And the last thing you want in any organization is for your product to be consistently unprofitable. You can very quickly pour all your product revenues (and more) in building websites, buying SEO and running ad campaigns to drive traffic to the site without generating a dollar of additional revenue or acquiring new customers. The reality is that people rarely switch products and pipelines, nor would it be in our interest to spend money promoting that. Our most effective way to increase adoption is to seed education (something we are very focused on) and to get the software in many more 嚙緘eople hands through Suites. At the same time Softimage as a product gets the same investment (actually it gets a bit more as we do favor it) as other products in its revenu!
e tier.
>>
>> I know our Marketing is not perfect but it is optimized and it is effective, even if our website is not particularly inspirational. We need Softimage to be embraced by the organization (Sales, Channel partners etc) and that means adopting Autodesk deployment processes. For example localization processes. If we are not inside the system Softimage risks being 嚙緻verlooked entirely. We used to have long and passionate discussions on this exact same topic when we integrated the Discreet brand and site into Autodesk - and that was a far bigger business than Softimage. We lost a part of our original identity , we became less visible but we became more integrated and since then we say both our business and users grow. This identical discussion occurred when we integrated Alias. Maya became a product page rather than a website and there was a lot of concern about exactly the points you make below but in the end it turned out to be in Maya's interest - sales grew and the product be!

came more profitable. I can't predict the future but the path we are on is (IMO) the most optimal one to ensure Softimage's future commercial success and growth.
>>
>> Can we keep our customers happy? Well that depends and there is no simple formula for that. We try on several fronts but we also choose our battles - Obviously our first priority is product. After all users spend (I hope :)) massively more time dealing with that than with our website and Marketing materials. Also we know we cannot win the battle of "Autodesk is a large organization and I hate to do business with large organizations" (not your opinion below but expressed elsewhere) - our best strategy to deal with that is to prove over time that we are nurturing Softimage and making it successful and that large organizations can do good things too. We do not fail to acknowledge our users- we are well aware of your concerns- and we try to tune the organization to best serve your needs while maintaining a viable ongoing business.
>>
>> maurice
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ed Manning
>> Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 10:47 AM
>> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com; Jason Brynford-Jones
>> Cc: Mark...@autodesk.com
>> Subject: Re: A Softimage message
>>
>> Thanks, Chinny.
>>
>> Your post was a good reminder of what you've been able to do under adverse circumstances, and what Autodesk is doing to help SI's recovery from those circumstances.
>>

>> However, lack of marketing support and visibility for SI is a critical error. 嚙瘢'm sure AD, at some level, is aware of the need for coordination between marketing and development. Awareness without action is pretty useless though. 嚙瘢t's not just hurt feelings on the part of everyone who has committed years or decades (!) to learning and using SI in production -- it is acute anxiety that our enormous investment, sometimes in the face of enormous business-side opposition, may be for naught. 嚙磕ithout taking steps to bolster the confidence of SI's user core, AD will find it far more difficult to expand SI's market reach. 嚙畿y failing to acknowledge SI users, and failing to make them feel part of a viable enterprise, AD sacrifices virtually the entire, crucially important social component of marketing.
>>
>> Additionally, I would argue that it is irrelevant to assert that AD's marketing strategy is "correct" even if it is optimizing sales and profitability across the board, when there are so many paying customers feeling uncertain or unhappy. 嚙瞑art of customer service is maintaining the happiness of your customers in the context of your relationship with them. 嚙瘢f they are unhappy, for good reasons or not, it is up to the vendor to attend to them.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Ed
>>
>
>

[cte...@comcast.net]

Great to hear this information from a long-time Softimage and now Autodesk Educational embassador! I have been at the AI (Art Institutes) system for over 13 years now, and lobbied hard years ago to get a copy of Soft 3.8 in the school so that we could really experience the cutting edge of character animation. Since then, however, 3ds Max has steadily crept in and added features that really addressed the needs of our hiring community in the Chicago area, namely game companies. It is difficult to introduce new software, especially one that parallels the current installation. The learning curve is steep for our students using 3d software, and their own motivation to learn new software is very low. We encourage our students to use the tool "as a tool", rather than getting caught in the novelty of "better" systems. So, we teach the fundamentals with 3ds Max, which is such a complete toolset, it's hard to argue against anything it offers. That having been said, I find Softimage much more intuitive, and much better in almost every respect. However, for creating assets for games, 3ds Max has a lot of power, and a huge user base among our employers.

 

I think the best thing that Autodesk has going for it, is that they are willing to let the students use almost anything they offer, so they can load it on their laptops and use whatever they want. It is great for me as an instructor to show features from Max, Softimage, Mudbox, Motion Builder and even Maya, and let the students decide which tool is better for their own use. I have to admit, I show off Softimage quite a bit. ICE simply blows them away, but in the game design curriculum, it is of little use (currently) with their skill level. Perhaps I can give a demo in our Visual Effects/Motion Graphics department. I think they would appreciate the experience.

 

Perry Harovas and Flashpoint academy are a great facility, btw. I think we were both blown away, equally, with the new Lagoa simulation system. Once I get my hands on it (I'm a commercial subsciption license owner too) I'm really going to show off Softimage! Hopefully between Mr. Harovas and myself, we'll have the Chicagoland area covered! I'm really glad he is in the area to spread the word about Softimage and ICE.

 

Thanks again for the information, and anything I can do to help, I will certainly try.

 

Christopher Tedin

Instructor, Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg

 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennifer Goldfinch" <Jennifer....@autodesk.com>
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Sent: Monday, August 2, 2010 2:57:38 PM
Subject: RE: A Softimage message

[Szabolcs Mátéfy]

By the way, I am a certified Softimage instructor. Do I have to refresh that, or is it inherited by Autodesk?

 

About the website. Almost all customer stories were deleted, castrated (sorry) at least. It is hard to convince a management, that hey guys, that and that game (Resident Evil series, Metal Gear Solid series, Final Fantasy XIII), or film (Appleseed for example, Ghost in the Shell 2) was made with Softimage. They see no trace of it so they book them as they were made with Maya or Max. Not the artists are the ones to be convinced in most cases, but the management. Here in Crytek Budapest we use a mixed pipeline of XSI for modeling, and Max for animating, because many of the higher level dudes consider XSI as a funny interesting little app, not as a killer 3d solution. It is funny, that we had a debate recently with the Max artists here, they didn’t knew that Blur uses Softimage for animation and max for rendering and modeling.

 

Weekly customer stories, more industry tutorials, behind the scenes, etc would be really great help also.

 

Long live Softimage

[Ahmidou Lyazidi]

Yes all these have disappeared as well as the Japanese Softimage website these customers stories came from.
That's sad as even if I don't read Japanese language I was checking it time to time.
There was a lot of good customers stories and video tutorials in there.

Cheers
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist

2010/8/3 Szabolcs Mátéfy <szab...@crytek.com>

[Stefan Andersson]

+1 to everything you said Andy. I kind of wished I had said it :)

Unfortunately I'm in a country where Softimage is almost non-existent. And we are only a handful of brave souls that uses Softimage. I've had a long thinker over the summer as I have been trying to get Softimage into the pipeline of the last two companys that I worked for, and sadly I must say that I have lost the battle. We can't switch to Softimage because there just isn't a userbase out there for us. And trying to find a Softimage TD that is available.... almost an impossible task.

While I'm not "super TD" as yourself, I am in somewhat unfamiliar ground right now. Thanks to my python skills and that I have been working in Maya on and off for the last 10 years I can stand on my two feet. But lots of my skills are lost which needs to be relearned. And we are not talking 6 months to convert everything I have learned in Softimage to apply that in Maya.

In a way I think I actually lost the battle 10 years ago when I decided to stick with Softimage|3D and not jump on the Maya wagon. But survival instincts told me to keep Maya under a close watch, otherwise my life now would have been chaos :)

I still have high hopes though. I still think Softimage is a hell of a lot better software than Maya. I will still be fighting in the shadows.. hehe

all the best.

stefan andersson

 

--
Stefan Andersson
Creative

Mad Crew
Roddargatan 8
116 20  Stockholm
SWEDEN

mail: ste...@madcrew.se
phone: +46 (0)8 668 27 13
cell: +46 (0)73 626 8850
web: http://www.madcrew.se

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message is intended only for the
above-mentioned recipient(s). Its content is confidential. If you have
received this e-mail by error, please notify us immediately and delete
it without making a copy, nor disclosing its content, nor taking any
action based thereon. Thank you.

[Tim Leydecker]

Hey Maurice,

I know this discussion mainly revolves around getting Softimage´s
reputation spread out to potentially new business and people
previously unaware of Softimage´s potential and benefits.

Still, I´d really, really appreciate if you guys would also look
into setting up something like RSS feeds in a liason of marketing
and support, maybe a couple of channels one can easily subscribe to.

Most pressing reason for me to desire this is the limited amount
of time I can spend on actively searching the internet for news.

That´s why I like mailing-lists and am willing to adapt to RSS feeds.

I regularily need the following information, not just from Autodesk:

*news from marketing, including any sales and shiny announcements
*news and alerts from support, upgrades, latest patches, betas...
*news on third-party vendor/user material like tutorials (the area)

You guys have the area as well as the log-in protected support pages
but I must admit I hardly ever log-in to any of the two prior to
knowing I´ll get something out of doing that, e.g. a patch or tutorial.

Cheers

tim

I´m also subscribed to the Softimage facebook group. Died? "Whhat happpen?"

[Takayuki Watanabe]

Are you talking about these:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=14708441
http://www.autodesk.co.jp/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=1169823&id=13813990&linkID=13613794

---

Are you OK? Online Safety Special Site - Yahoo! JAPAN

[Szabolcs Mátéfy]

If you checked it in the Softimage era, it was full of images, and TechSmith videos of rigging, etc. They were really informative illustrated guides as well. That’s why I said castrated.

 

 

Szabolcs Matefy

Crytek Budapest

Senior Character Artist

Certified Softimage Instructor

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Takayuki Watanabe
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 11:26 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

 

Are you talking about these:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=14708441
http://www.autodesk.co.jp/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=1169823&id=13813990&linkID=13613794

[Stephen Blair]

Hi Tim

You can try this rss feed:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=f262500e7930b67bb97e91f36c8dfbdc&_render=rss

It combines Softimage info from the Product Support blog (xsisupport.wordpress.com), the Softimage KB (autodesk.com/softimage-support), Softimage announcements (eg what you see in Netview), twitter/adskSoftimage, twitter/ADSK_updates, and the Area (tutorials and plugins).

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Tim Leydecker
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 4:58 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

[Ahmidou Lyazidi]

Yes, part of, thanks for the link!

Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist

2010/8/3 Takayuki Watanabe <tkh...@yahoo.co.jp>

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

Hi -

Unfortunately, the majority of customer stories couldn't be migrated after the acquisition due to legal sign off on the client side. The majority of companies declined resigning a new agreement, it is difficult enough to get the rights the first time, and when a project is dated, the big studios often won't support the client stories anymore. I agree that it sucks that they aren't accessible anymore, I worked on quite a few of them and enjoyed looking back at them myself.

For Softimage certification questions, please email me.certi...@autodesk.com<mailto:me.certi...@autodesk.com> - you will have to go through the Autodesk Certified Instructor process, but we have received some positive feedback from our Softimage instructors that went through it, so I hope you will enjoy it.

Chris - I will email you offline, I'd be happy to discuss how we can work together more to support your teaching efforts. One thing that I should point out is that all of our Autodesk M&E products are now available on the Autodesk Student Community - including Softimage - for free for students and teachers from EDU institutions. (13 month licenses). www.autodesk.com/edcommunity<http://www.autodesk.com/edcommunity>

If anyone ever has any education or training questions, please email me directly at Jennifer....@autodesk.com<mailto:Jennifer....@autodesk.com>

Jen

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Ahmidou Lyazidi
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 7:09 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: A Softimage message

Yes, part of, thanks for the link!

Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist

2010/8/3 Takayuki Watanabe <tkh...@yahoo.co.jp<mailto:tkh...@yahoo.co.jp>>

Are you talking about these:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=14708441
http://www.autodesk.co.jp/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=1169823&id=13813990&linkID=13613794

Ahmidou Lyazidi <ahmid...@gmail.com<mailto:ahmid...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Yes all these have disappeared as well as the Japanese Softimage website these customers stories came from.
That's sad as even if I don't read Japanese language I was checking it time to time.
There was a lot of good customers stories and video tutorials in there.

Cheers
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist

2010/8/3 Szabolcs Mátéfy <szab...@crytek.com<mailto:szab...@crytek.com>>

By the way, I am a certified Softimage instructor. Do I have to refresh that, or is it inherited by Autodesk?

About the website. Almost all customer stories were deleted, castrated (sorry) at least. It is hard to convince a management, that hey guys, that and that game (Resident Evil series, Metal Gear Solid series, Final Fantasy XIII), or film (Appleseed for example, Ghost in the Shell 2) was made with Softimage. They see no trace of it so they book them as they were made with Maya or Max. Not the artists are the ones to be convinced in most cases, but the management. Here in Crytek Budapest we use a mixed pipeline of XSI for modeling, and Max for animating, because many of the higher level dudes consider XSI as a funny interesting little app, not as a killer 3d solution. It is funny, that we had a debate recently with the Max artists here, they didn't knew that Blur uses Softimage for animation and max for rendering and modeling.

Weekly customer stories, more industry tutorials, behind the scenes, etc would be really great help also.

Long live Softimage

________________________________
Are you OK? Online Safety Special Site - Yahoo! JAPAN<http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/security/>

[Ahmidou Lyazidi]

I see... shame on them then :)
Thank you for the clarification Jen!

Cheers
Ahmidou Lyazidi
Director | TD | CG artist

2010/8/3 Jennifer Goldfinch <Jennifer....@autodesk.com>

[Tim Leydecker]

Thanks Steve!

Now I´ve no excuse for not spending some time with customized
startpages (using firefox and the likes) that bundle multiple
RSS feeds, livestreams and whatever else stuff like facebook
throws at you...

arghhh. yet another can of worms. i want my life back :-)

Cheers

tim

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

Last note on the Softimage Facebook page - we have no idea who administers it, it was started by a 3rd party over a year ago.

I co-manage the Autodesk M&E Facebook page, and I always post Softimage information on it when something comes up. Mark's blog posts, new tutorials, etc. We will be doing a push on Lagoa soon as well, over 11,000 people are part of that community, so anything we post gets decent visibility.

jen

[Tim Leydecker]

ahhhh. it´s the wrong group i went to...

cheers tim

[Renan de Moraes]

Hello, everybody! This is my first message, here we go:

Since they are both from Autodesk, why we still don´t have in Softimage package a simple Backburner render submitter that works just like 3ds Max? I´m not a programmer, is it so hard to do?


best regards,

Renan de Moraes
www.consequencia.com

[Michal Doniec]

I use Softimage at work extensively as well. Can't formally speak for whole studio (outside of my pay range ;)), but both teams here use Softimage as a core of our art/animation pipeline.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Szabolcs Mátéfy <szab...@crytek.com> wrote:

By the way, I am a certified Softimage instructor. Do I have to refresh that, or is it inherited by Autodesk?

 

About the website. Almost all customer stories were deleted, castrated (sorry) at least. It is hard to convince a management, that hey guys, that and that game (Resident Evil series, Metal Gear Solid series, Final Fantasy XIII), or film (Appleseed for example, Ghost in the Shell 2) was made with Softimage. ----------
Michal
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mdoniec

[Matt Lind]

A little late to the party, but...

'automated testing' - key phrase. I would suggest adding 'hands-on' testing as opposed to just automated testing to your internal repetoire. Majority of bugs we find are of the variety that only show up from people touching the software or pushing buttons - and many of them are quite obvious which indicates they are not being tested.

Having beta testers at various studios is valuable in that they'll uncover hard to find bugs, but it's not the same as having a checklist and going through the tools to make sure they work. Studios generally only test tools they are actively using in production, not the entire software. Bigger studios will have significant amounts of custom tools, many of which replace the built-in Softimage tools either as workarounds for bugs, or to implement features not found in Softimage natively. In some ways it reduces the coverage which the software is tested.

I think it's of great importance to have somebody in QA doing a 'hands-on' checklist of tests on features to ensure they work before a build is sent out to customers. Especially the ones people have to report are broken again and again (hint, hint). At the very least, do the hands-on checklist for new features with a fine-toothed comb.

Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of
> Luc-Eric Rousseau
> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 6:20 AM
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: A Softimage message
>

> Actually, Softimage every day goes goes through 18 hours of
> automated testing on a farm of computers, the product is in
> beta testing year-around at hundreds of beta sites, we've
> asked everyone their production show stoppers and produced a
> service pack for 2011 this is the first time that I hear
> anyone saying that the product doesn't work out of the box.
> It's not like we upload this on the web without testing.
> There seems to be a genuine refresh problem with the particle
> cloud shader, however looks like this was discussed on this list only
> 4 weeks ago, two weeks after we had time to make a service
> pack. I'm baffled as to what we could have done better,
> given that the product has been in beta since November 2009,
> but I'll be discussing with QA.
> The problem was only reported through support about three weeks ago.
> We are investigating it.

[carl callewaert]

if you want to test of a laptop can run pretty decent Softimage. What and how do you test this?
They concern is not about rendering for me as we have other system for this.
I open demo scene of softimage and that all works. I try to open an high polygon file (a scanning of  my face) and softimage crashed. Is that because of Soft or the cheaper laptop?

laptop is: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX29111(ME).aspx
Any reason why a high polygon scene crashes on this computer?

carl

[Alan Fregtman]

Does it open on any computer at all? You're positive it's not corrupted, right?

[carl callewaert]

Yeah, it opens on my Mac Booth camp.

c

[Joe Williamsen]

It might be worth trying a few things: as always, try it with a fresh User directory to make sure something you've added isn't doing it. 

Another thing to try is to mute all of your viewports and see if you can get it to import (might point to a video driver issue). 

Also it might help to open Task Manager and watch your memory use - 4GB of memory might get eaten up fairly quickly - and if you run out, that can cause a crash.

Maybe try exporting it as a EMDL from the version you can get it to open on, and then see if you can open that EMDL on your Toshiba.... (or just save the scene and see if you can open that scene - either way).

[carl callewaert]

This computer is brand new. So, just installed the softimage 30 trial on it to see it all work on that computer.

• I will test the viewport trick
• I will test memory. I have 4 memory on my macbook pro and there is no problem there
• I will do the last trick too.
  

Do you think that computer is too low end to run softimage?

c

On 10-08-03 7:21 PM, "Joe Williamsen" <j...@joewilliamsen.com> wrote:

It might be worth trying a few things: as always, try it with a fresh User directory to make sure something you've added isn't doing it.  

Another thing to try is to mute all of your viewports and see if you can get it to import (might point to a video driver issue).  

Also it might help to open Task Manager and watch your memory use - 4GB of memory might get eaten up fairly quickly - and if you run out, that can cause a crash.

Maybe try exporting it as a EMDL from the version you can get it to open on, and then see if you can open that EMDL on your Toshiba.... (or just save the scene and see if you can open that scene - either way).




carl callewaert wrote:

Yeah, it opens on my Mac Booth camp.

c

On 10-08-03 4:25 PM, "Alan Fregtman" <alan.f...@gmail.com> <mailto:alan.f...@gmail.com>  wrote:

  
 

Does it open on any computer at all? You're positive it's not corrupted,
right?

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 3:10 PM, carl callewaert <ca...@fundi3d.com> <mailto:ca...@fundi3d.com>  wrote:
    
 

[Joe Williamsen]

Hardware-wise, it looks like it should work just fine - I don't think it's a hardware issue (*maybe* a driver issue). 

I don't know if there is such a thing as "too low end" - I think it all depends on what you're willing to live with....

[Ed]

I was also after this. it would be great.

it seams to be a plugin just for that, but i have never tried it...

i'm no programmer either, and wonder if everyone just uses the prompt way to batch render...

[Eric Turman]

For batch rendering, I would imagine many people use something more comprehensive and sane like Royal Render ;) http://www.royalrender.de/cms/

-=Eric

--
-=T=-

[Steven Caron]

i think they are hoping for a solution they can reuse and not pay for another

[Eric Turman]

Fair enough...how big of a farm are we talking about though?

--
-=T=-

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

For those of you who follow the Autodesk M&E Community on Facebook, we just posted a link to the Lagoa Vimeo channel, it would be nice to see some Softimage Community support behind it in addition to the great feedback we have received in the last 15 mins!

:)

www.facebook.com/autodeskME

Thanks!
Jen

[Gideon Klindt]

Slight chance, but maybe the RAM on the laptop is damaged? You might
want to run a good RAM diagnostic to see. On a desktop with good bios
you can also slightly alter timings and voltages to see if you get
more stability, but I do not think this is an option for you (you also
need to be comfortable doing such things).

Try a good mem test though. Have you tried both 64 and 32 bit versions
of SI? Like wise, if you have another program that can load such a
large sized mesh you might want to try it. I think Zbrush or 3DC in
voxel mode might be good candidates. If it loads there then try saving
it out and then opening it in si?

I doubt the laptop is too low end- I have loaded large (to me) meshes
300MB objs in v5 32bit in 1.5GB on a very early dual core with no
problems.

--
Gideon D. Klindt
gideonklindt.com

[Eric Thivierge]

Thanks for the info Jen! Letting us know when / where to go to to help
spread the word is really helpful. :)

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
Technical Director
http://www.ethivierge.com

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Jennifer Goldfinch
<Jennifer....@autodesk.com> wrote:
> For those of you who follow the Autodesk M&E Community on Facebook, we just posted a link to the Lagoa Vimeo channel, it would be nice to see some Softimage Community support behind it in addition to the great feedback we have received in the last 15 mins!
>
> :)
>
> www.facebook.com/autodeskME
>
> Thanks!
> Jen
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Matt Lind
> Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 2:39 PM
> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: RE: A Softimage message
>
> A little late to the party, but...
>

> 'automated testing' - key phrase. 锟絀 would suggest adding 'hands-on' testing as opposed to just automated testing to your internal repetoire. 锟組ajority of bugs we find are of the variety that only show up from people touching the software or pushing buttons - and many of them are quite obvious which indicates they are not being tested.
>
> Having beta testers at various studios is valuable in that they'll uncover hard to find bugs, but it's not the same as having a checklist and going through the tools to make sure they work. 锟絊tudios generally only test tools they are actively using in production, not the entire software. 锟紹igger studios will have significant amounts of custom tools, many of which replace the built-in Softimage tools either as workarounds for bugs, or to implement features not found in Softimage natively. 锟絀n some ways it reduces the coverage which the software is tested.
>
> I think it's of great importance to have somebody in QA doing a 'hands-on' checklist of tests on features to ensure they work before a build is sent out to customers. 锟紼specially the ones people have to report are broken again and again (hint, hint). 锟紸t the very least, do the hands-on checklist for new features with a fine-toothed comb.

>
>
>
> Matt
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
>> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of
>> Luc-Eric Rousseau
>> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 6:20 AM
>> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
>> Subject: Re: A Softimage message
>>
>> Actually, Softimage every day goes goes through 18 hours of
>> automated testing on a farm of computers, the product is in
>> beta testing year-around at hundreds of beta sites, we've
>> asked everyone their production show stoppers and produced a

>> service pack 锟絝or 2011 this is the first time that I hear

>> anyone saying that the product doesn't work out of the box.
>> It's not like we upload this on the web without testing.
>> There seems to be a genuine refresh problem with the particle
>> cloud shader, however looks like this was discussed on this list only
>> 4 weeks ago, two weeks after we had time to make a service

>> pack. 锟絀'm baffled as to what we could have done better,

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

Sorry, LAST post from me and I'll go away, promise!!

Mark Schoennagel also just responded to a thread on CGTalk, although officially he is on a post SIGGRAPH vacation. I thought I'd share this with you.

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to write a quick post and answer some of the questions and "concerns" on this thread- its not everyday you get a call out to write something! (...Luis!) lol OK, so I know communication on Softimage Lagoa and how it will all play out for customers has been a little thin so here's the scoop...

First and most importantly, Thiago Costa's awesome Lagoa Physics ICE compounds will be included with Softimage as core functionality once the maintenance release for 2011 ships in a month or so!! I believe the official product name will be the Softimage 2011 Advantage Pack and will arrive free for everyone who is current on maintenance / subscription. So everyone- Premium Suite or no suite will be able to play with it. Secondly, Holy cow Lagoa is sweeeeeet! Select an object, go into the all new ICE module of Softimage, click Jello and press play. ... really? boing boing boing... really??? I'm sure you all saw Thiago's video by now, the stuff towards the end is ALL interactive in the viewport, man it's so friggin fast!!

Alright next I'm going to say that myself and Lagoa were mostly responsible for Softimage NOT being in the stage presentations at Siggraph. The original plan was for me to be showing off Softimage for a few minutes in the theater during each Premium Suite demo for a total of five stage demos a day. The problem was once the Lagoa video hit the web interest in private Softimage demos went through the roof so we had to come up with another plan. After a lot of ideas were thrown around the best one was just to have me in the private sales suites or back at the hotel doing up-close demos. This was pretty much all my decision and how I spent most of the show. The good news from all this is some very important studios were blown away by what they saw are now looking at beta Lagoa as I type this!

Lastly, as far as the suites go I can understand some of the negative comments. A few people at Siggraph told me it felt like Softimage was just becoming a bolt on or a glorified plug-in in the eyes of Autodesk... nothing could be farther from the truth. I know there was a lot of discussion internally on how best to market these new suites with the overwhelming priority being getting Softimage in more artists hands. That's still Softimages Achilles heel, simply not enough people know how awesome it is, the suites WILL help!

Alright well that's it for now, I'll post something soon in my blog on all this too on the-area.com but wanted to give you all a little heads up.

Man...Siggraph wiped me out!!

Here's the link for the thread:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=59&s=b2f532ff121b6bc19ca95a1492dd9f74&t=905101&page=4&pp=15

> 'automated testing' - key phrase.  I would suggest adding 'hands-on' testing as opposed to just automated testing to your internal repetoire.  Majority of bugs we find are of the variety that only show up from people touching the software or pushing buttons - and many of them are quite obvious which indicates they are not being tested.
>
> Having beta testers at various studios is valuable in that they'll uncover hard to find bugs, but it's not the same as having a checklist and going through the tools to make sure they work.  Studios generally only test tools they are actively using in production, not the entire software.  Bigger studios will have significant amounts of custom tools, many of which replace the built-in Softimage tools either as workarounds for bugs, or to implement features not found in Softimage natively.  In some ways it reduces the coverage which the software is tested.
>
> I think it's of great importance to have somebody in QA doing a 'hands-on' checklist of tests on features to ensure they work before a build is sent out to customers.  Especially the ones people have to report are broken again and again (hint, hint).  At the very least, do the hands-on checklist for new features with a fine-toothed comb.

>
>
>
> Matt
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
>> [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of
>> Luc-Eric Rousseau
>> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 6:20 AM
>> To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
>> Subject: Re: A Softimage message
>>
>> Actually, Softimage every day goes goes through 18 hours of
>> automated testing on a farm of computers, the product is in
>> beta testing year-around at hundreds of beta sites, we've
>> asked everyone their production show stoppers and produced a

>> service pack  for 2011 this is the first time that I hear

>> anyone saying that the product doesn't work out of the box.
>> It's not like we upload this on the web without testing.
>> There seems to be a genuine refresh problem with the particle
>> cloud shader, however looks like this was discussed on this list only
>> 4 weeks ago, two weeks after we had time to make a service

>> pack.  I'm baffled as to what we could have done better,

[Ed]

in my case we're a small studio, about 6 machines and a server.

2010/8/3 Eric Turman <i.ani...@gmail.com>

[Eric Turman]

I thought that Holger used to have it available for free up to 5 nodes, but it is not the case anymore; 295 euros for 4 nodes. Still it is a really good product with a lot of features. Its really useful that it handles After Effects and Maya and many others that backburner would not.

--
-=T=-

[carl callewaert]

Oh I saw now installed the 32 bit trail version on the 64 bit computer.
I am installing now the 64 bit trail version to do the test. I will keep you
posted!

Thanks for the help!
Carl

[John Richard Sanchez]

Dont Go Jen!  You are always welcome here:) Always great to hear what info and tid bits you mark/ and chinny will have.

--
John Richard Sanchez
www.johnrichardsanchez.com

[carl callewaert]

I did open it with softimage xsi 64 bit and it crashed too:-(
I checked the memory while open the high polygon scene and it stayed the
same level.
I did the test with no active viewport too but it crashed too :-(

No, I have no clue anymore what to do :-(

Carl

[carl callewaert]

I got a step closer:
When I import the .obj with high polygons on that computer I
Uncheck: UV and UV mapping and than it import. Any reason why?

c

[Christopher Tedin]

Yes, please don't go! It's nice to have information from a great source.

[Christopher Tedin]

Awesome to hear such good news from Mark! Can't wait for the blog, and
some pics/videos.

[Renan de Moraes]

But Backburner CAN handle even Maya or After Effects (as seen on Digital Tutors), but it´s command line based! So, if it comes with Max, why not include it on Maya and Softimage?

[Eric Turman]

Well technically batch processing is all command line based, but there is a Royal Render GUI forMaya and After Effects. We have never had to do command line stuff in our day to day work with Royal Render.

Looking through the XSIbase archives, this may work for you: http://homepage3.nifty.com/jjj/XSIFiles/Plugin/Rendering/jhBatchie3/jhBatchie3.html

Personally even if I only had a 4 node farm, I'd pony up the cash for Royal Render; its worth it.

-=Eric

--
-=T=-

[Frank Lenhard]

i have to agree with Eric here. coming from max (man, its been a long time meanwhile) and
used backburner there a lot with small and big farm, RoyalRender is a different league.
however, it i do see the point, why not bundling backburner with si as well. its there and
it gets you off the ground out of the box.

ciao
franky

> -=Eric

____________
Virus checked by G Data AntiVirus
Version: AVA 21.1850 dated 05.08.2010
Virus news: www.antiviruslab.com

[Raffaele Fragapane]

My experience, however limited, with backburner is that yes, it will get you off the ground out of the box, but only to slam your face in it real hard from a higher altitude only moments later.
For the cost it entails to license a small farm, I'd seriously considered another inexpensive solution such as royal render.

If you feel adventurous though, arseburner can be made process jobs other than max. I believe Passion Pictures still uses it as a farm manager.

[Daniel Harjanto]

Like Raffaele said, we end up using Royal Render for both XSI and Maya pipeline we have.
Starting with testing XSIbatchserve for XSI and backburner for Toxik, we decide investing some money for small system like Royal Render is removing a lot of our headache.
In crunch time, problems in render pipeline is a nightmare.

Cheers,

--
Daniel Harjanto
Infinite Frameworks Studios
TD
http://misterdi.cgpot.com

[Tim Leydecker]

Thanks for the heads up. Jen.

www.facebook.com/autodeskME

I�d had a hard time finding the correct facebook group/list yesterday.

Please, don�t hesistate to demand as many "Like"s as you want in return.

Cheers

tim

[Maurice Patel]

Hi Matt

To be clear we have a very thorough testing process. Engineered code gets tested before it gets checked in, we run automated tests, QA runs production tests and we run extensive beta programs. Just because Luc Eric talked about automated testing does not mean that is all we do - far from it. We do the whole works. Software development is always a trade off - the more aggressively you develop new functionality or re-architect applications for performance/workflow/usability the more chance there is of introducing errors - so unless you want to limit feature development to small, low impact, easily tested capabilities with very few possible permutations you cannot but help increasing the risk of bugs. With such rich and complex applications the amount of permutations of what you can do in production is almost endless and it is not feasible to test every one so obviously not all bugs can be identified prior to ship. However, we invest a lot of effort on multiple fronts on trying to improve product stability

maurice

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

We just posted a review on Softimage 2011 from Post Magazine by the XSI community's own Ajit Menon, if you want to take a look:

www.facebook.com/AutodeskME

jen

[dyon d]

Hey Jason,

People talk, the fact that your organization thinks that brewing secrets helps them now is working against you; hence all the 'whats going to happen to Softimage'. It isnt just the grunts -read,us- wondering that, fyi. Nobody understands what Autodesk is doing with 4 softwares that are offsets of each other; and we all speculate that Autodesk doesn't either. 

Last one I heard-

... I heard that Autodesk is ripping ICE out of softimage and integrating into Maya ...

 Dude I would love that, but it is as probable as making MotionBuilder the engine underneath Maya.

The point is, Autodesk has the monopoly now, so just tell us what the plans are so we can buy the right tools and forget the rest. 

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Jason Brynford-Jones <Jason.Bryn...@autodesk.com> wrote:

I thought the last time I wrote something like this, would be the last time.

I am beginning to sound like a broken record; a record no-one obviously likes listening to.  So perhaps this really is the last time I will play this message as it seems to make no difference.


Marketing
It seems now the Softimage community is only focusing on Autodesk's marketing as the barometer for Soft's future.  Not "no marketing" but "less marketing" than 3ds Max and Maya.  Or that the new Max and Maya products WITH Softimage means no more Softimage?  This does not make sense.

New Max and Maya Suites
>From all our interviews Max and Maya customers want Softimage (not just ICE, but ICE is often a big reason) in their toolsets.  At an affordable price, that interops well.  OK let's give it to them, in the way they want it.

There are many more Max and Maya customers than Softimage.  Having product suites branded with the name 3ds Max or Maya are obviously targeted at selling to them.  This represents a massive potential for Softimage.  You might not agree with the naming, but you can't argue the logic.

Softimage as a standalone product is of course continuing as before (with some very exciting stuff in the works) and having the standalone product available to all Max and Maya users is a huge endorsement of Softimage and commitment by Autodesk..

Development
Since the acquisition there has been repeated fear-mongering about Soft's future.  Even though in that time, we have had two major releases (3 in the last two years) and one minor (check what others have done in this time) and of course there is more to come.

Even though we have exceeded revenue expectations, even though we are expanding our development.  Even though fundamentally NOTHING HAS CHANGED, people choose to focus simply on a lack of marketing and not Autodesk Softimage's track record.

We still manage our own roadmap, with the exception of working well with other Autodesk apps.  Something everyone has asked for repeatedly, especially ICE interop.

Our philosophy will continue around ICE as the architecture on which to build - that includes one day moving into modeling.  We have not abandoned other parts of the Software (see the list at the end of this mail) far from it - we have a very well defined focus and future.

Final thoughts - for this is the last time I will do this.

If you take one thing away from this mail, it is this.

The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click
The future of Softimage is bright... click

It really is...

Chinny


PS: Lest you forget....

Feature bullet lists since acquisition:

7.5

Animation
A new "Center" Shape Type option for Bounding Volume Constraint
New workflow for the FCurve editor: Selecting tangents will deselect keys and vice-versa

Data Management
Added a new preference: DataManagement/Bake scene properties on model export.
New Preference to ignore scntoc at load time

Reference Models
Assign objects in the scene or another model to a material in a referenced model's library

Modeling
A new single "MoveProportional" operator replacing the combination "MoveComponent" with nested "Proportional"
Proportional Modeling that does not break Symmetry

Rendering
Integration of mental ray 3.7+
Improvements to BSP for faster render times
Custom Workgroup shaders now support separate categories in the Rendertree
New Final Gathering option - "Enable Multiple Refinement Passes"
New mental ray "Motion-Based Displacement Quality" optimization option
SSS shader now supports light lists (include/exlude)
Gamma Correction is now supported in Alpha Channel
mental ray assemblies ("Stand-Ins") now support mi_point_to_object
Color Correction respects the alpha channel when applied on rendered output

Simulation
Updated version of Syflex, which is now multi-threaded
ICE: Get Texture Map from a position array is now supported
ICE: Adding objects to group in a model is now fully supported
ICE: Version history context menu now supports Private compounds

SDK and Scripting
New Undo/Redo callbacks for custom C++ commands
Curve.InsertKeyAtFrame - New method for inserting a keyframe without altering the curve profile
C++: New ASCII support to CString
New Animation Editor attributes accessible via SDK commands View.Get/SetAttributeValue
   + TrackSelection (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + DecomposeBranchSel (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + LocalPropsOnly (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + LockedParams (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + FlattenState (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + ColorCoding (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + ParameterValues (Animation Editor, Explorer)
   + ScriptNames (Animation Editor)
   + ParameterSort (Animation Editor)
   + DrivingAction (Animation Editor)
   + AnimatedParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
   + KeyableParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
   + FilterPreset (Animation Editor)
   + TaggedParameters (Animation Editor)
   + ActivationParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
   + MarkedParamsOnly (Animation Editor)
   + SnapToGrid (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
   + SnapToFrame (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
   + SnapSlopes (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor)
   + AutoSnapToFrames (Animation Editor, FCurve Editor, DopeSheet)
Main menubar menus and custom sub-menus will no longer show [u] and [w] icons
New Plugin Manager Preference for scanning and loading sub-folder plugins
Added CRef and CString >, < operators

Texturing
Unfold3D unfolding technology is now integrated cross platform in XSI
New Checkerboard clip type in the Texture Editor

UI
New preference in the Dopesheet for the default tool - Select Tool or Region Tool
Restored the resolution of relative paths in the User / Workgroups / Factory directories
Added support for re-order of script button in the custom toolbar
New Netview home page (with Preference to show at startup)
New option to delete unconnected nodes in the Render Tree

Crosswalk v.3.2
dotXSI/COLLADA Action source plotting
FBX support on Linux
FBX UI revamp
FBX new option "Export Selection Only"
FBX stabilization
COLLADA camera export improvement
COLLADA Huge scene data handling (improved import/export memory usage)
dotXSI/COLLADA stabilization



2010

Scalability and Performance

Many core algorithms have been optimized

Load and Save
Loading or saving large scenes and importing complex character models have been improved allowing greater productivity.

Selection
Selecting large numbers (thousands) of objects or components is now almost instantaneous.
Selection Filter switching has also been improved

Delete and Fast Delete
Huge improvements have been made to speed up the deletion of thousands of objects.
In addition, an even faster delete (Shift+Delete) will be introduced, which is the same delete expect there is no undo.  A progress bar will now appear when Delete detects a small delay.

Undo/Redo
Great efforts have been made to improve this performance

Freeze
Greatly improved

Envelopes
Interaction and Playback has been greatly improved especially in shaded mode

Reference Models
Overall Reference Model performance has been vastly improved.  With operations now only 1-2 times slower than regular models. (a 5000% improvement)
Loading scenes with many Ref Models has been increased by a factor of 2. Performance for the Delta operation has seen an improvement factor of 4-5. Offloading Ref-Models a factor of six improvement.

Duplication
Duplication has been significantly  improved, especially when dealing with many objects

Animation
The Remove Animation command in now 70% faster

Function Curve Editor
The F-Curve Editor is now considerably faster than ever before - especially when dealing with large numbers of curves or large numbers of keys.

Hide\UnHide
Another common scenario has been addressed to reducing the impact on the artist's workflow

Interaction
Opening property pages which display many objects' properties has been highly optimized.
Switching between transform tools and changing marked parameters now benefits from greater performance

Performance Tools

Scene Debugger
This view is a window onto the scene's performance and memory usage.




Complexity Management

Scene Search View
Dedicated view to search for scene objects and more
To help narrow down any search additional filters can be added, such as searching for only objects of the type bones or nulls.

Search Box
In the main UI there is a search box where you type in full or partial letters\numbers.  It will show you the results in a drop-down window, which you can tear off.

Material Manager Favorites Tab
Users can add their favorite materials to this tab, as a way of accessing them quickly when doing repeated tasks.

Scene management
Layer Groups. Multiple layers can be placed in a group in the Scene Layers View,



ICE Tree

Visual Performance Monitor
The ICE graph can now display which nodes are taking the greatest time to evaluate, 50% or more in Red

ICE

ICE Custom Node Creation in C++.

           Geometry Accessors
           Custom Nodes can now query more attributes found on objects, such as edge lengths.

           Multi-Phase execution
           TDs can now control which ports (or parts of a node) get executed in which order.

           Local Attributes
           Each ICE graph can now store local attributes


Modeling

User Normal Editing
New controls for characters

Tweak Normal Tool
Manipulator for precise normal control, including working in symmetry mode

Tweak Normal Preferences
A set of preferences for control over bleeding, distance thresholds as well as the Tweak Normal Tool's precision.

Turn Edge
A quick tool to reorient an edge, or collection of edges

Weight Painting
The Lattice Operator's amplitude now support weightmaps

Paint Weights toolbar standardization
The Paint Weights Panel embedded in layouts now supports narrow width


Animation

Autokey Camera
Each scene camera has an AutoKey option.  Whenever the camera is manipulated using the viewport navigation tools, it will automatically keyframe the changed parameters

Performance: Removing Animation
Using the remove animation command has seen a 70% speed improvement when the objects have many animation curves.

Function Curve Editor Performance
Performance improvements span multiple areas

           Selection
           Selecting curves, keys and tangents has seen dramatic improvements

           Drawing of Tangents
           Each key can show tangental controls adding even more detail to be displayed.

           Memory management
           The amount of memory this takes has been reduced to its minimum.  Also the memory usage has been improved when changing the selection.

           Curve Processing
           Smooth, Fit and Resample with many curves will now see better performance

           Open/Close
           When the Function Curve Editor is opened, all the many curves and keys and objects are populating the view.  This one time operation is now much faster.  The same for closing the view.


SDK

ICE Custom Nodes
Geometry Accessors
The Softimage SDK exposes access to geometry and sub-components.

ICE Multi-Phase execution
The Softimage SDK exposes the execution of ports in Custom Nodes.

ICE Local Attributes
Each ICE graph can now store local attributes

Play Control Event
When animation playback is started or stopped, the user can be notified of this event (or occurrence)


Scripting

Scintilla Text Editing
Softimage has many text editors (Script Editor, Shader Editor, Text Widget, Scripted Operator Editor and Expression Editor ) now use Scintilla features:
           Folding
           Folding collapses functions (groups of text)
           Syntax Highlighting
           Reserved words such as Function if true are highlighted in different colors
           Standardized Search tools
           Each editor will now use the same text search tools
           Separate Text Editing Preferences
           Each editor will now use the same preferences

UI

Bone shading
now have an option to be shaded in the viewport

Hide on Playback
A new visibility option will hide an object temporarily while the animation is playing back which will help performance.

Removed legacy particles
Simulation Module updated
All entries to create legacy particles has been removed
Functionality still there to maintain back-comp


2011

General
     Icon to Maximize Floating Windows
     Extra-wide icon to close PPGs and Views
     New Views
    *     Shader Code Editor
    *     Shader Version Manager
    *     Cache Manager
    *     Lip Sync


Camera and Viewports
    Viewport object transparency
    *     Object>Display>XRay Surface Display Opacity slider
          *     Change the viewport opacity of geometry using a slider
    *     Display Options>XRay Display Type>Transparent
    *     Viewport visibility menu>XRay Surfaces
          *     Does not draw any object which has XRay display opacity set to less than 1.0

    New buttons in Camera PPG to keyframe camera

   Camera frustrum display
    *     Camera clipping planes values now sliders

    Viewport Slate
    *     Text or tokens can be used to display scene information

    New menu toggle for X-Ray (display option)


Modeling
    Updated Booleans
    *     Booleans are now faster and more stable

   Polygon Mesh Internal Edges
    *     Symmetrize Polygons now mirrors the internals edges.
    *     Invert Polygons no longer flips internal edges.

    New implicit bone primitive
    *     Useful for ICE kinematics



Texturing
    Update to UV unfolding
    *     New option to unfold islands generated by the unfold operator
    *     Symmetry - if the geometry and cutlines are symmetrical so will be the unfold
    *     New PPG option to update the Unfold without packing as well

    Multiple UVs in the Texture Editor
    *     control+click to set the UV editable/non-editable

    Copy/Paste UV Improvements
    *     Edit > Paste UVs
    *     Edit > Paste Special > Using Source UVs Indices
    *     Edit > Paste Special > Using Target UVs Indices

    RenderMap/Ultimapper now use Pass Renderer (including 3rd party)

    Automatic Tangents and Binormals
    *     Softimage can automatically create tangents and binormals on-the-fly for OpenGL and DirectX RTS display modes



Animation
    Function Curve Editor & Dopesheet & Mixer
    *     Highlight playback range in background

    Preference for Collapsing Animation Layers
    *     Preserve Animation or Preserve Tangent Handles

    Preference for scanning for old plug-ins in fcurve editor

    Get>Property>Static Kinestate
    *     Used for reference (neutral) poses


Face Robot
    Automatic Lip syncing
    *     A new workflow for creating phonemes (and visemes)
    *     A new lip sync tab for Stage 5>Act
          *     Viseme Setup
    *     Support for English and Japanese phonemes
    *     Lip Sync Creation options
          *     Use AIFF, AVI, Quicktime or WAV
          *     Add text
          *     Automatically creates animation
    *     The new views can display the Phonemes and weight curves


Simulation
    Update PhysX library to version 2.83
    *     NOTE: Due to a change in the PhysX library, actual shape collision results will be different in 2011
    *     Support for CUDA acceleration for PhysX Rigid Body Dynamics (including ICE)


ICE
    Springs and damper attributes for ICE rigid bodies

   ICE Kinematics
    *     ICE can now drive the Global kinematic property
    *     The rigs' relationships can be expressed in a graph contained on a separate object (like a null)
    *     You can use the simulate ICE tree to easily do secondary dynamics
    *     ICE Kinematics and traditional Kinematics can live side by side

    ICE Tree
    *     User Tools>Replace model name with this_model
    *     Preference for disabling cycle checking when connecting nodes in ICE tree

    ICE Compounds and Nodes
    *     Includes much of Phil's ICE Pack
    *     Around 130 new compounds and nodes

Scripting and SDK
    Python now installed with Softimage

    Script Editor now support tabs
    *     MMB or control+W to close tab
    *     RMB on tab to open containing folder
    *     New file options including "save all tabs"

    Scripting Preferences
    *     Show spaces instead of Tabs
    *     Use Python installed with Softimage (Windows only)

    Custom Dynamic Shader creation

    RenderMap exposed to Custom Renderers

    Shaders
    *     Shader Plugin API
    *     Shader Parser Plugin API
    *     RT Shader Wizard (HLSL and CGFX)

    ImportFromSI3D Command No Longer Supported

    Many Object Model Changes

    many C++ API Changes


Data Management
    New Tokens
    *     [Camera] [CameraAspect] [CameraFormat] [CameraProjection] [CameraType] [Model] [Object] [Version] [CameraDisplayInfo]
    *     New Tokens and Templates page in documentation

    Cache Manager
    *     View>Animation>Cache Manager, Animate>Plot>Cache Manager, Simulate>ICE>Edit>Cache Manager
    *     UI Simplification
    *     Cache Manager hosts Read, Write and Simulation caches
    *     New Cache lists
          *     to read and write multiple objects at the same time (cache list or add one by one)
    *     Automatically scans the selection for available attributes to cache (listbox)
    *     Tokens are saved with the scene not copied from the template preference
    *     Simulation tab list all cache file node in read mode
    *     Animation read tab lists all source caches with their corresponding object

    Caching Improvements
    *     Multiple objects can be cached at at time (in the same path)
    *     Default template Preferences are used at scene creation, but can be overridden per caching session
    *     Consistent paths and file name tokens for all types of caching
    *     Current output path for caching is now visible
    *     Universal tokens supported (see Tokens and Templates [Data Management])
    *     Version token supported
    *     No frame padding in the cache File Name mean the frame padding setting from Scene Render options is no longer used.
    *     ICE particle ID attribute can be cached
    *     Setting the new XSI_CACHE_ASCII environment variable lets you save the .icecache file sequence in ASCII.



Rendering
    Shader Authoring
    *     All shaders available in Softimage 2011 now use the new Dynamic Shader architecture
    *     No longer have to load *.cgfx or *.fx files into hard-coded CgFX or DXFX shader nodes.
          *     Files are read directly by the Softimage CgFX or HLSL parsers
    *     Shader Versioning
          *     Shader Version Manager
          *     Versioning of shader compounds supported
    *     Option to make shader compounds uneditable
    *     Shader Editor
    *     Shader Wizard
    *     New Shader Events
          *     OnCreateShaderDef
          *     OnCreateShader
          *     OnConnectShader
          *     OnDisonnectShader
    *     New Shader Port Types to match ICE types.
    *     New Array Port Type.
    *     Improved Gradient Port Type.
    *     Shader Tree XML Export .xsishadertree
    *     New CGFX Parser
    *     New HLSL Parser
    *     New SPDL Parser
    *     New .mi Parser
    *     New generic .xsishaderdef Parser

    Shaders
    *     Around 35 new utility shaders
    *     Around 170 mental ray shaders

    General
    *     Common mental ray
          *     Softimage, Maya and Max now share the same version of mental ray
    *     mental ray 2011 (3_8_1_13) integration
    *     Faster and more stable
    *     Stand-ins for rendering animated ICE particle instances
    *     Improved setup for Physical Sky and Sun shaders
    *     RMB Material commands available in render tree material node
    *     Render Pass Partitions now support Stand-ins.

    Lighting
    *     Support IES light Profiles
          *     Use mia_photmetric_light in the light's render tree
    *     New flatlight
          *     Flat Light Mode on+Area Light(User)
    *     Additional Area Lights Parameters
          *     Use Geometry a light source (Area Light>Geometry>Object)
          *     Area light>Geometry>User
          *     Low Samples options
    *     Raytraced Soft Shadows
          *     New light parameter controls softness and samples
    *     New Light shape attenuation options
          *     Barn Door effect
    *     Light lists
    *     Local Ambient Lighting Property
          *     Get > Property > Ambient Lighting

    Render Tree
    *     Connect shaders to the camera node and pass node directly in the render tree (dynamic input ports)
    *     New shader families and new node color coding
    *     Shader nodes support new data types for their input and output ports: 2D vector, 4D vector, 3x3 matrix, 4x4 matrix, quaternion, reference, string, and custom

    Render Slate
    *     Show scene information (using tokens) in renders and render region
    *     Layout and color options
    *     Pass options control render, region and preview

    Multi-Camera Rendering
    *     Specify a "group" of cameras to be rendered per pass

    LUTs
    *     Softimage now supports Autodesk LUSTRE .3dl 3D LUT files
    *     New LUT Preconditioning options control linear to logarithmic conversions


Crosswalk
    Version 5.0
    *     Crosswalk 5 supports 3ds Max 2011, Maya 2011, and Softimage 2011
    FBX 2011
    *     New FBX scene scaling import and export options
    *     New FBX batch processing commands to support the scaling options

[Simon Van de Lagemaat]

I may be wrong on this but aren't publicly traded companies hogtied when it comes to promising features before they are fully developed and implemented?  This may have had something to do with the Enron fallout and possibly the Sarbanes-Oxley law but I'll claim almost total ignorance on that.

 

I actually pity publicly traded companies, they spend so much of their time documenting project costs and deliverables in order to account to shareholders.  I can't say for sure that this type of process slows development down but one would think that it has an effect.

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of dyon d

[dyon d]

It isnt about promising anything but publishing intentions. Im sure there is a legal way of doing this.

In the past maya nad max and mobu and softimage tried to out do each other which mean that their plans had to be secret for marketing and other reasons, this produced awesome stuff like ICE or the Mobu runtime evaluation or all the Nstuff from Maya... Now it is different, the curious thing to me- from the outside this is - that now that Autodesk owns all these things it still seems that they are competing against each other

To say that there will be new inventions from Autodesk is disingenuous; autodesk buys doesnt build; at best it will fix or collate, half the things Jason publishes were on the works years before- but whatever they decide to do in their mystery powows screws us if caught on the wrong foot. Say they killone of the softwares; what if my studio decides to invest in it? So while you say that it isnt legal for them to promis something, it really should not be legal for them to screw us if they want to, or they accidentally take a decision without informing. Using Autodesk is similar to swimming with a big whale, it may not want to kill you but if it flips its tail it can do some damage.

whatever, Jason, publish your plans, you have no competition 

...yet...

[Raffaele Fragapane]

No, there isn't.
All the other points you make might even have half a leg to stand on, but publicly traded companies have rigid corporate policies for a reason, and breaking them means you either get fired for endangering the company, or you actually endanger the company into getting a considerable fine.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 7:58 AM, dyon d <dyo...@gmail.com> wrote:

It isnt about promising anything but publishing intentions. Im sure there is a legal way of doing this.

 

whatever, Jason, publish your plans, you have no competition 

...yet...

[Eric Turman]

Agreed Raffaele, the beta testers are also restricted from statements and divulging information too. Just because Autodesk, like it or not, holds the majority of 3D DCC packages doesn't mean that they aren't going to try and innovate; there are still other 3D packages out there who would love to steal the thunder from their competition. The truth of the matter is that Softimage has the newest most robust core of the 3. And as far as ripping out code from Softimage to put into Maya or Max...code between packages is not like Lego blocks, you just can't snap it off of one program and onto another

Just for fun sometime, take a look at Autodesk's full product line; Softimage, Maya, & Max are a small part of all they have to offer. and yet they stil keep all & develop these programs even tough some of them look very simmilar to me. Softimage, Maya, & Max do the same basic functions, sure, but once you dig deeper into each package, its clear just how different they really are.

Plus, Softimage continues to have significant & productive features with each release...even the ones since the Autodesk acquisition.

I'm getting bored with people's speculation fueled from oft-times misinformed rumors. While provocative, its not constructive and only serves to lather up the community with phantom fears.

--
-=T=-

[Eric Turman]

Agreed Raffaele, the beta testers are also restricted from statements and divulging information too. Just because Autodesk, like it or not, holds the majority of 3D DCC packages doesn't mean that they aren't going to try and innovate; there are still other 3D packages out there who would love to steal the thunder from their competition. The truth of the matter is that Softimage has the newest most robust core of the 3. And as far as ripping out code from Softimage to put into Maya or Max...code between packages is not like Lego blocks, you just can't snap it off of one program and onto another

Just for fun sometime, take a look at Autodesk's full product line; Softimage, Maya, & Max are a small part of all they have to offer. and yet they stil keep all & develop these programs even tough some of them look very simmilar to me. Softimage, Maya, & Max do the same basic functions, sure, but once you dig deeper into each package, its clear just how different they really are.

Plus, Softimage continues to have significant & productive features with each release...even the ones since the Autodesk acquisition.

I'm getting bored with people's speculation fueled from oft-times misinformed rumors. While provocative, its not constructive and only serves to lather up the community with phantom fears.

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsx...@googlemail.com> wrote:

--
-=T=-

[Gideon Klindt]

"I'm getting bored with people's speculation fueled from oft-times misinformed rumors. While provocative, its not constructive and only serves to lather up the community with phantom fears." - Eric Turman

I couldn't agree more. While I was one of the people to "cry" about what feels like a lack of SI marketing in certain areas, the dooms day conspiracy theories by some of the user base is beyond over the top, and not at all constructive.

One would think that by now, with the response we've all received from AD in general and the SI team specifically, plus assurances from several people more close to the development of SI outside of AD, that things would have cooled substantially. In the end I think there are just some people so sensitive to the whole issue of "the future of SI under AD" that you have to wonder if they'll ever be satisfied- regardless of what is said or even released!

While it's hard to argue against their feelings at times, it is nearly impossible to argue their logic- as it often seems to be devoid of any on the subject.

To make maters worse, it only has the potential to spread cynicism amongst potential "converts" to using SI who might have been on the fence about using it.