softimage dies

[arwhe...@gmail.com]

Hello

My name is Alastair Hearsum. I'm head of 3d at Glassworks: http://www.glassworks.co.uk/

We use Softimage and as you may have heard Autodesk is discontinuing it. It has caused quite a furore amongst Softimage users , as you'd expect. I have already canvassed opinion from the SI users about their views on what they'll miss but I wanted to get a view from the "other side of the fence" as it were.

The question is very specifically aimed at Maya users who have had Softimage experience or work alongside colleagues who use SI. The question is:

Do you have a view on what SI features you envy and wish you had in Maya. If there are none then that is a valid answer. If you have some then please list your top 5 and a very brief description of why.

For your information a summary of the Softimage users poll is:

Clean elegant efficient user interface and logical workflow: enabling us to get things done quicker and with less pain. This so important and a really fundamental part of the fabric of the software.

ICE: its seamless powerful and all pervading presence; everything can connect to and control everything else

Render pass and partition system. It is absolutely robust and does all you expect. Indespensible.

Live operator stack and construction history. Its all alive all of the time enabling highly complex layering of effects and processes

Animation, modelling and rigging toolsets. They are peerless.

Thankyou

Alastair

[simonp91]

Hi Alistair, good to hear from you. Hope you are well. As someone who has used Softimage since the late 90's but always faced a predominantly maya based job market, there are certainly features that I wish wete in maya. The difference however is that features from any other software are a lot easier to add to maya than the other way around, and thus most people would have simply done just that wherever there is a particular tool from soft that one really wants in maya. My own list of native cross-over features would be :

1) of course Ice. While maya node editor is on the right road, it has a long way to go to match ice, not least a big library of nodes and compounds.

2) i much prefer the pop-free, undoable weight painting and smooth mode in Soft. I also love the mirroring tables/maps.

3) good old deform-by-surface op. Still dead handy

4) tab-based script editor is soooo much better than maya's. Naturally, i've made my own, but it should be native

5) while writing every tiny ui based script for softimage has to be written as a damn plugin, the plugin design is very intuitive and easy to pick up. Ui's aside (as maya is streaks ahead in that dept) writing plugins in maya is a dark art and anything other than intuitive. Perhaps a simplified method for doing so in a softimage fashion, could be added, which would open the door to the powr of plugin writing to a lot more people than those of us with more td experience or rnd peeps.

Simon


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[Ævar Guðmundsson]

Good evening Alastair, that's a really interesting question and I hope the active community here ( although understandably Maya Biased ) can discuss this out a little.

  Personally I'm not a veteran Softimage user but I've worked alongside many loyal Softimage users and on occasion supported the software on bespoke projects so hopefully I can throw in a couple of pence here.

  What initially popped into my head when I heard the news was a shocking "but,but,but what about ICE!!?" and got into an acceptance that many of the greatest technologies of the last century have indeed ended up in a drawer somewhere and ICE just got registered as one of those.

  Not being an in depth user I have tried it extensively and I can not say I got up to 5 reasons to leave Maya for it but these 2 hold absolute true in my mind:

--[ ICE

  Simulation as never before seen, intuitive workflow, easy to use, with razzle and dazzle only a click away

--[ The node graph itself

  Houdini tries, Maya emulates, Nuke utilizes, but out of all the 3D software I've tried the way Softimage implemented the node graph both visually and to detail made it one of those I could pick up and it just made sense to work in it, straightforward without complication and one could just get carried away with creating things in an almost self-explanatory fashion.

  As for your other points, hopefully these alternates can fill the gap in a large user base which preferred the approach used in the newly retired software.

--[ Render pass and partition system. It is absolutely robust and does all you expect. Indespensible

 When it first came out I was equally as impressed but as time passed other software caught up, the render pass system in Maya and Houdini (using v-ray,mental ray, Arnold, and Mantra for reference) all offer extended render pass control both in a simplified UI way, a more granular control approach from within the editors, and full fanatical control through the command line, variable evaluation, and environment control.

--[ Live operator stack and construction history

  Maya stores extended history in a way that it ripples through the chain if you alter things retroactively, but I'm not sure you will find a similar dynamic and accurate "retro-tweaking" capabilities.  You can, but will need to alter your workflow completely and there is not much to the visual side of things to that regard.

--[ Animation, modelling and rigging toolsets. They are peerless.

  a)  Maya, with all it's fancy ways, is primarily an animation software with a lot of extra features.  Surely a lot of people use it for many other things these days and whole infrastructures have been built on the sole fact of how versatile the software is, but it is still a fact that in the same way as the iPhone is an iPod music player, padded with limitless features on top, Maya as well is for animating and if you need anything else then you can also do that using the same software ( just so happens that Autodesk are quite skilled in that other stuff so it has kind of surpassed the animation side of things ).  The irony of the whole thing is of course the fact the toolset is so insanely good it hasn't received any updates since early last decade, fancy additions like Trax editors and such but the core toolset is still the power tool it is, with the exact same features as they were almost 10 years ago.

  b)  Among the most impressive features of Maya 2014 is a newly reworked modelling toolkit, right up there raising flags as one of the more desirable features in the new release.  You won't find much praise to that regard online since when you search for modelling in Maya you will stumble upon people discussing old methods but as far as I can see it kind of just does the work without complications.  2014 for example is the only version of Maya where I've never felt the urge to install third party modelling utilities as the most desired features appear to be mostly integrated by now.

  c)  If you are looking for a new rigging solution, and are going to be spending time on R&D anyway, something tells me Fabric is worth taking time on.  It's not meant for rigging, rigging there within is kind of like a happy second feature but all I can say it install Maya, set up the Fabric Engine, and watch in awe as the rigging industry revolts. 

  Hope this is along the lines of the kind of feedback you are after, in short; Softimage will be missed but alternatives exist, having to make the adjustment sucks of course but hopefully you'll be part of the Softimage user base which brings the good experiences that software gave us to a new user base which is always aching for something different.

[Serguei Kalentchouk]

Hi Alastair,

Nice to see you found your way to this list.

There's been a lot of doom and gloom on the XSI list since the EOL news but unfortunately a lot of the vitriol towards Maya's shortcomings is dishonest, misguided or at best uninformed.

Before I get into specifics I wanted to give a bit of background. I'm a long time XSI user, it was my first software some 10 years ago and got to work pretty closely with Softimage while I was in Montreal. That said over the span of my career I've used 3ds max and Maya extensively as the main DCC and now I'm in a 100% proprietary environment, so I feel like I have a good overview of the good, bad and ugly side of software...

I was very skeptical about transitioning to Maya from XSI and there are things that take getting use to and naturally there were things I really missed in no particular order:

1. Property Pages

Maya has a robust attribute editor but its very much tied to selection. There was something nice about the on-demand nature of the property pages workflow.

2. Expressions

Maya's expressions and the workflow associated with them is dirt poor compared to XSI. That being said, expressions in XSI are much needed to account for lack of a high level DG graph accessible to users.

3. Weight Painting

While Maya has done some work to improve this workflow it still lags behind XSI. Specifically XSI's weight normalization and smoothing algorithms perform much better. As I was mainly doing character work when I first switched to Maya this was no doubt the biggest pain I had to deal with.

4. Groups

Similar to Maya's Sets but as usual the workflow feels much better in XSI. It's such a small feature but I did miss it a lot.

5. Render Passes

XSI has workflow down pretty well and I think it is superior to Maya

6. SCOPs

Writing in-scene operators was a huge advantage in character setup in XSI and a great way to deal with complex problems.

7. ICE

Clearly most elegant visual interface to date and the provided collection of operators is a great starting point.

8. OOP Scripting SDK

After using XSI SDK it was difficult to accept the command nature of Maya Python (prior to PyMel or other custom OPP wrappers)

9. Modeling

Until the last release of Maya, its modeling tools lagged behind XSI a fair bit, this is less of an issue now if not at all.

10. Bones

XSI skeleton bones provide a really straight forward workflow for building rigs with a lot of complexity abstracted from the user. It takes quite a bit more steps and a more thorough understanding of what you are doing to achieve the same in Maya. However, a lot of the abstraction in XSI has come back to bite me in the end when trying to modify the behavior in significant ways.

That said however, Maya does have it's advantages and you can build an very powerful and scalable pipeline with it as your main DCC, although it will take some time and expenditure on your end.

First, Maya is built around a DG that is directly accessible to the users. In essence your whole application is an ICE graph which opens it up to a lot of possibilities. There are several examples of how Maya could be extended to take advantage of it, while many are in-house solutions you can take a look at http://www.soup-dev.com/ as an example of what is possible. In addition, the more generic nature of Maya's attribute types gives it greater flexibility than ICE in some regards. The biggest thing missing is a robust compound encapsulation mechanism (containers don't even come close).

Then there's the scripting and API. It might not be pretty but it is much more comprehensive and robust when compared to XSI. The native Qt integration is also nothing to sneeze at. With Maya I have been able to develop tools with greater freedom to achieve the workflow that is required by artists, while I did feel boxed in to a corner quite a few times within XSI.

Ultimately, you can make Maya do exactly what you want in the end and achieve quick turnaround time with a very decent workflow even though it might take some development.

Hope this is useful.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have, I'm happy to help.

Cheers!