Hirazi Blue wrote:Maximus wrote:Softimage is alive because of ICE, if we didnt have ICE back then it would be dead for real.
It's true, but sadly it's not the whole picture IMHO. Softimage is, as you say, alive because of ICE, but it's still so much more than "just ICE". It being "just ICE", however, seems to be the main perception of Softimage by others and that might just as well spell trouble for the software in the long run. This might be considered yet another stupid/defeatist notion (although it isn't intended as such), but if you look at development over the last couple of years, I sometimes wonder, what will happen to Softimage once they run out of new things to add to ICE...
;)
Thats why i dont think its gonna die anytime soon, you wont run out of things to add to ICE because its a giant environment, everything will be replaced by ICE, they just need time and development will require time. Even if i'm disappointed by the latest release mainingly because of the rendering aspect, i cant criticize what Softimage devs are doing. If you compare v 7.0 to 2013 being objective there is a lot of improvement and development.
We still have the most stable and performant software compared to 3ds max and maya, people tend to forget the work they did under the hood on the sdk, which made possible arnold/vray/maxwell, all the gret plugins by users, just check rray.de
In terms of tools i dont feel the need to switch to max maya or modo at all. Softimage has everything. Of course i'd like updates in some areas, but honestly speaking of removing it from Autodesk products, killing it, or integrating ICE in maya is simply ridicolous.
It has a huge market in east for videogames, lots of "big" studios use it, its simply unrealistic they gonna kill it.
I dont think Soft will need that much features from maya or max (and if any its just a situational, user wish, feature). ICE to me can handle everything and will get updated constantly.
There are already a lot of custom deformers you can build with ICE that you simply cant do in max or maya without a TD writing them. Here they are for free, customizable with a low level knowledge of ICE. I've made myself more than 20 tools and i suck at ICE. Just copy/pasting stuff from other users and customizing them, then slapping them into the menù.
I'm the first to shoot at AD for lack of updates in the field i need for my work, but this doesnt mean that they arent doing an overall good job. Devs are brilliant, if you take into account what they did for example with CrowdFX. Ok not everyone will use that, but its a damn good work, now tell me what max or maya got at the same level of development in last years?
Nothing is comparable to the same level of development and new, in term of total new addition.
Now imagine next version will have tools like this, it could be everything, maybe next time you will have a HairFx module, or a CompositeFX, or anything really. Devs are brilliant people and as i said ICE is a beast and saved soft. It just sucks that it needs a lot of time so the perception is they are developing slow.
Still i think a little more could be done but meh i'm happy the software is still alive, its supported by some software houses which i didnt expect, like Next Limit, Chaos Group, Solidangle, Exocortex and many others.
There isnt a single signal they are gonna kill Softimage, its just people mindset that is dooming everything.