record live transition Q&A webinar?

[Shenan]

Well, to be fair, he did say that there were more reasons than just that for why it would be difficult to open-source it. I don't remember them all, but the one that made sense to me were any third-party contributions. I don't know if this is the case for Softimage, but a lot of commercial software relies on third-party libraries and perhaps patents that are licensed, so if they ever wanted to open-source it they would have to detangle their code from those libraries and patents, which could be a messy, laborious, and I imagine expensive process. One recent example of this was the Lightworks film/video editor. They have taken a few years to go through this process and arrive at a working program free of third-party IP. I'm not even sure if they're quite finished yet.

Of course it would also be possible for them to just rip out any third-party stuff and drop a non-working Softimage that could take years to get working again.

[Hirazi Blue]

I actually rescheduled a meeting "last minute" to be able to watch this…

[xsi_fanatic]

A quick recap of what happened in the video. The webinar doesn't bring any new information. Nothing that hasn't been asked or answered. Less than 25 minutes throughout the webinar, they stopped airing because of "technical difficulties". However, what really pissed me off was the fact that the people in charge are obviously a bunch of amateurs. Reasoning with them is close to impossible as everything they know about the DCC apps is purely theoretical.

And what hurts most is how they mention all the updates and care being given to Maya. They're basically taking all the good features of Softimage and putting them into Maya. So they're spraying salt on the wounds and to air that at such a sensitive time shows just how oblivious they are to the decisions they make.

Idiots ! We're owned by a bunch of idiots !

[scrubjay]

Was it just me, or did Bifrost look pretty poor compared to ICE? It is a plugin, not really a part of Maya. They presented that as a 'feature'. No real interactivity, and seemingly so slow at solving they would not show it in their tech demo. Plus no hint of a node based interface.

[Bullit]

You need to understand that Autodesk moves at Autodesk speed: slow and very slow

Biforst doesn't came with nodes. It is just a fluid sim.

[grendizer]

OK they say they're gonna put the best XSI ideas into maya, but to what extend? The spoke about non linear animation Tools in Maya that would look like the ones in XSI. What will it be exactly? If they want to calm down the Softimage community, at least they should show us a bit what they're doing.

[angus_davidson]

I doubt very much wether they have anything to show yet. After having a watch nothing has convinced me that this isnt panicked PR. The old Softimage Team have been on Maya for the last two years ?

[angus_davidson]

Which means they were woefully unprepared to in any way replace ICE. Just from the tone of it though if I was a Max. user I would be very worried. All aboard for sideline central.

[Hellomojo]

Hi there, is the webinar on youtube or somewhere so I can have a look, missed it ?
Thanks a lot.

[Hirazi Blue]

Yes, it's on the original page the stream was on yesterday also...

[luceric]

Marc revealed tons of thing about future releases, it's really funny. So has chris vienneau on that long mail about maya that was copied here. Never has there been such a huge non-NDA info dump. But I guess you have to listen very carefully to catch it all. Some stuff was also demoed at siggraph in the "tech preview" bit. The softimage community also got to see maya 2015 videos before maya users!
btw, Marc is the vice president of everything-but-Max-and-Smoke and in my experience doesn't follow what's going on on the other side of the fence, and wouldn't be trying to get people to move to Max. I think M&E could have had a seat for Max on that panel, although from what I gather people don't seem to be very interested. I guess if you're a potential Max transitionner, you already know.

[NNois]

I really don't catch where all this is going on the maya side. seems like power tools but shaped as like carrara tools, sames goes for xgen.

Speaking about interface design and futur do you really think this is where tools needs to tend ? with push-buttons/menus etc.
Is it really a benefit and a progress for the user ?

[grendizer]

Yes I read again this long email from Chris. Project H seems interesting. But still... waiting several years for things we already had in XSI... is this a good deal? Some things will be better in Maya 2017 than in XSI 2015 once they are finalized. But will XSI's excellent workflow be reproduced? I have serious doubts. In that case we'll be waiting 2 years for not much.
XSI purchased in 2008, Maya with "project H" finalized in 2016 (if everything goes well). That makes 8 years during which Softimage could have been developped further and become THE unparalleled 3d app.

[MauricioPC]

Well, looking only to what was shown, I really liked what I saw (just looking as features). There's some things that will improve a lot on using Maya as a modeling tool, I like the new manipulators (small stuff, but you use it everyday) and even though BiFrost is for now only a fluid sim, I though more impressive than the first time I saw Lagoa videos (I'm no user of Lagoa, just saying the impression).

As for the lack of Max, Marc said that the majority of Softimage users were asking questions about transitioning to Maya and that's why there wasn't mentions of 3ds Max.

Now, I do have to agree with Luc-Eric (I like disagreeing with him) that a lot about future releases and roadmap has been shown on the video and on that long e-mail on the list. It's better than never hearing anything about it, right?

[Bullit]

No it is not. Credibility, there is none.
And you can't compare Bifrost with Lagoa.
Lagoa does much more than Bifrost, despite that i think that Lagoa has a convoluted usability. It just depends what you want to do.

Edit: actually reading http://www.fxguide.com/featured/bifrost ... epth-look/
Bifrost seems to not have yet spray. So i don't consider it at release quality even for a fluid sim.

[angus_davidson]

There was a lot of information , on new features in Maya, very little on whats been done to help transition (ie as in workflow related) Very little on education which was disappointing for me and they didn't seem to know about their own ARC program. It was very much a balls in a vice presentation, And we got to see stuff a few hours in front of the Maya guys (which if any of them figured it out they would have watched the stream.. umm videos live.. mostly live)

As we have to move to Maya i was looking for all the positives for me and there were a few. The modeling tools shown were better then expected and I can see some students playing around in bifrost. If was making a living out of using Soft I wouldnt be smiling now though, to many if , buts and a few years down the line.