Didn't see this mentioned here yet ... ICE for the masses (relatively speaking).

https://unity.com/visual-effect-graph

I wonder if Softimage might have fared better if its community had evangelized it more like Blender's community does and not let a great software languish in obscurity. Yeah, that's really my overwhelming impression upon dipping my toes into the Blender world: these people are PASSIONATE about thei...

May I make a slight amendment to your all's suggestion? Form a post-Softimage collective to raise funds, yes, but instead of donating directly to the Blender Foundation (where our influence will be questionable and might even be resented by existing users), hire our own team of full-time/part-time p...

Just google around for trueSpace websites -- you're looking at Softimage 5 years from now. Except trueSpace was free for awhile, and SI never was. So it'll likely be worse, since the bulk of Softimage users are people using it commercially, and have incentive to find a replacement sooner than later.

I think the numbers I mentioned would be too low *IF* the intent was for another company to purchase it and begin selling it commercially, as a competitor to Autodesk. Clearly that would not happen for any reasonable amount. But if the aim is only to have it open sourced, and further for Autodesk to...

I posted this on the mailing list earlier: I had an idea the other day: what if we crowdfunded a LOT of money -- $5-10 million, say. And (once raised), offer to buy Softimage outright from Autodesk. If they pass it will be held in trust and used to pay for a small army of full-time developers to add...

That's a lot of trouble. Just use a keygen after 2016.

I've been busy with some other stuff so haven't spent much time on this since my initial push. I'm trying to figure out the best way to generate a static archive of everything -- maybe just some oldschool HTML frames (one with categories, one with thread titles, another for all the posts in a thread...

I'm sure this idea has been floated elsewhere, but ... what if everybody just stopped buying Softimage updates until Autodesk formally abandons it? And then start a Blender-style "we'll buy the source code from you" kind of thing? Given the relatively niche nature of Softimage these days, ...

Well, that's probably true -- and maybe it's a good idea not to pollute the Internet by making the archive directly indexable by search engines. (Though it will be searchable wherever it's hosted) But the reason I'm personally doing this is not for esoteric SI knowledge, but rather simply for nostal...

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I was removing them for good -- I was just curious how small the actual text of the posts would be compared to the full HTML of the pages I extracted them from. Rest assured that when I'm done, all the images you saved for posterity will be included in the threads :) ...

PS Couldn't a service like the Wayback Downloader be a good start? Possibly, but based on my admittedly-superficial investigations into archive.org's copies -- the coverage isn't very good, at least for any given "capture" (crawl instance) -- lots of threads/pages missing. But of course t...

So far, so good! I've extracted the metadata and raw post content from the .zip archives provided in this thread (thanks, Bullit!). There are a total of 11,753 posts in 1750 threads (from 1,555 users). Presumably that's just a fraction of the original forum, but it's better than nothing. Some of the...

stripping this from the forum database while still maintaining something usable to distribute might have been considered too much work... For somebody database-savvy, it's actually only a few minutes' work (dropping some tables, nullifying some fields) -- but since these were apparently artists wit...

So I'm a little late to the Softimage party, by a decade or two :) In my google searches I periodically come across people talking about the good/bad old days. On the Autodesk mailing list, somebody alluded to the xsibase database being publicly released at some point. Is that true? Is there any way...

Woot!

Any file host would work (filehosting.org, rapidshare, etc), but if you already use Dropbox I'm PM'ing you my email address now.

Thanks in advance!