Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

News concerning 3D DCC business
angus_davidson
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by angus_davidson » 25 Feb 2014, 19:44

Yeah. that's probably what they have done. there was no sane reason to force it to install with Softimage.

I am actually only really curious to see if they got the Linux installer up to scratch (ie allow for Debian installs and not make people spend a week to get it working).

Other then that anything is a bonus. We are no longer paying for subscription (using the Autodesk ARC ) so I dont feel cheated anymore ;)
--
Technomancer at Digital Arts
Wits University

mantom
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by mantom » 20 Nov 2019, 18:53

luceric wrote: 18 Feb 2014, 15:21 Not sure about that characterization as a big/VIP client. You should ask him how many XSI seats, it's probably between 5 and 15, probably old versions. We've had developers spent month looking at various issue for Carbine. He's been on the beta since.. 1997 .. and we've been listening to all the flames for years. Never spoke to anyone else at the company. There were features and bug fixes we did every release for Matt even though he's not been the 100+ seat heavyweight like all the other game customers.
A little clarity:

Carbine had 300+ employees and (at least) 63 seats of XSI at launch of Wildstar in 2014. Autodesk reps visited onsite literally minutes before the announcement went live XSI was being retired. Carbine's parent company, NCSOFT, has many other studios with large installations of Autodesk product (1,000+ seats). This likely qualified Carbine as a VIP client, although we were never addressed as such.

You never spoke to anyone else at Carbine because of Autodesk's policy that only one person per site is allowed as the liaison. I was the designated contact. When Softimage was still under Avid (and before my arrival), Carbine gave up on Softimage because of the sequence of bad releases and lack of attention despite paying for a escalation / special projects contract for two years (their words). I worked very hard to try and right the ship.

I was accepted on the beta in 1999, but didn't participate until 2000 due to change in employer at the time. You're probably thinking 1997 because I was extremely active with tech support and submitting volumes of data to the games team to try to get Softimage|3D on stable ground.

Yes, engineers were tasked with Carbine issues occasionally, but to say it that way is misleading as Softimage was responsible for the issues that required such attention.

Softimage broke major features within the XSI Application that were critical to our ability to function, and repeated the mistake in numerous later releases. Example: real time shaders. Broken in XSI 6.0, 6.01, 6.02, 6.03, and couldn't get an OpenGL context in 6.5. We had to sit down face-to-face with Marc Stevens to put eyes on this problem, but even then it still got botched further before it was resolved. Shaders could not access vertex colors, user normals, or texture projections in XSI 7.0 because somebody decided to change the design of how shaders work without testing it. Instead of using label/value mappings, it used strings (names) instead. Problem was, legacy content could not function in this new paradigm because it was not possible to derive the name of the texture projection, user normal, and vertex color properties from inside the shader. Oops. I had to pound the door again to get escalation to fix it pronto in time for the XSI 7.01 release. Unfortunately, we had to wait until Softimage 7.5. On the calendar that fiasco spanned 18 months.

We were stuck on Softimage 7.5 for five years because later releases had show stopping problems. Softimage 2010 had reference model issues inducing corruptions, Softimage 2011 had a rewrite of the shaders and materials architecture causing the real time shaders to break again. 5 of the 8 beta and RCs for that release did not have functioning real time shaders - it was a repeat of XSI 6.5. When it didn't get fixed in time for the main release, I had to pound the tech support lines to get someone on it, but with no luck. During the Softimage 2012 beta cycle, the shader installation and workgroups were redesigned, but sporadically broken, and also had a geometry corruption in clusters. Both broke the real time shaders. After the issues were not resolved in time for the main release, I had to go through tech support to get someone on the issue. A developer was assigned to get the problem resolved in time for the advantage pack scheduled for the summer, but within a week he went on paternity leave for the next several months leaving us stranded. So no relief in the 2012 service packs. We had to wait until 2013 betas, and again the problem was still a problem and that's why I pounded your inbox. So, yes, you did assign a developer in 2013, but it was to address what was essentially a 2011 show stopping issue that was largely ignored and never resolved.

You must understand the context on the customer side: When I joined Carbine in 2007 the company was on XSI 6.0, 6.01 and 6.02 simultaneously because that release was so bad nothing worked and artists had to pillage functionality from each release depending on the task. Despite being on an escalation contract at the time, we had to wait until Softimage 7.5 (18 months later) before we got relief. That lead to Carbine terminating the escalation contract. Once on Softimage 7.5 we were stuck on it for the next five years until 2013 SP1 came out with the fix your engineer delivered (it shouldn't have come to that). Overall that's nearly 7 years at $40K per year in maintenance, or $280,000 for 2 functional releases. Not a good return on investment. Almost equates to buying new licenses at full price. Every release that came and went was a time I had to have a long closed-door conversation with the producer explaining why we weren't upgrading, and why we should continue to pay maintenance for a product that isn't working. On several occasions he was going to pull the plug on Softimage, but I had to reassure him I could get the issue resolved...because if he had pulled the plug I would've been out of a job. Not exactly a good situation for me as it was during the great recession. So maybe now you'll understand why you received such "flames".

Bullit
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by Bullit » 21 Nov 2019, 02:49

Thanks for sharing your side of story mantom

bvmadjen
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by bvmadjen » 21 Nov 2019, 21:59

it seems like softimage has had a troubled history with every owner that's acquired it since the 90s.

it's depressing, but not surprising.
the 2000s were awful, as far as the 3d industry was concerned.

luceric
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by luceric » 22 Nov 2019, 00:00

This is an old thread from 2014. I'm having trouble figuring out what it was about and what my quoted comment was meant to say.

I think there was a thread at the time on the XSI mailing list where people were criticizing us for not doing fixes outside of ICE.
I meant to say here that we did continue to make non-ICE maintenance fixes and you didn't need to be a VIP for that.

When I'm thinking of "big/VIP", btw, I'm thinking of the big Softimage clients had hundreds of seats. Not hundreds of employees, hundreds of *seats* of the product.

mantom
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by mantom » 22 Nov 2019, 11:48

luceric wrote: 22 Nov 2019, 00:00 This is an old thread from 2014. I'm having trouble figuring out what it was about and what my quoted comment was meant to say.

I think there was a thread at the time on the XSI mailing list where people were criticizing us for not doing fixes outside of ICE.
I meant to say here that we did continue to make non-ICE maintenance fixes and you didn't need to be a VIP for that.

When I'm thinking of "big/VIP", btw, I'm thinking of the big Softimage clients had hundreds of seats. Not hundreds of employees, hundreds of *seats* of the product.
This post was tossed to me in email from a former colleague the other day so I responded on a knee jerk. I didn't notice the age of the thread until after I clicked submit. If I had, I probably would've let sleeping dogs lie.

Anyway, I was just providing facts to illuminate our end of the equation as your response clearly indicated you weren't well informed about our situation. For example, saying we have 5-15 old licenses is very far off the mark. Makes our studio sound like a garage effort and paints me as a tiny runt with a chip on the shoulder trying to pick a fight. Reality was quite different.

I read you just fine on VIP being hundreds of "seats". Again, NCSOFT had way more than enough Autodesk product to qualify, and were not treated as VIP. Not complaining, just stating it as fact.

From my vantage point the argument many were making is there were several fundamental issues that had been sitting around far too long and not getting addressed. It was a matter of age, not quantity. Meanwhile ICE development kept pushing forward full steam ahead. The two are not necessarily connected, but the optics don't look good and are difficult to argue with.

I would equate that issue with potholes in the road. If the road has many potholes but they're all along the curbs, then it's easy to avoid them no matter their quantity. Just drift to one side of the lane and continue driving. Life is fairly normal. However, if there are only two very big potholes in the middle that cannot be avoided (like on a single lane bridge), you'll have to stop the car or risk disaster. Plotting a new route may not be possible if other cars are behind you and honking like rush hour traffic. You're stuck. That's how I felt dealing with the shader issue. Others felt similarly with their issues. That's more the point.

luceric
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by luceric » 22 Nov 2019, 19:05

Well, I regret posting what I did, and I would like to apologize.

But the way the feedback-loop with Softimage is painted here is not really how I remember things.

In 15 years of XSI, clients did not communicate through Autodesk policies and red tape. We had a beta forum opened year-around, users wrote and logged bugs directly, and we talked back and triaged them. There was never a policy of "one person per company", or bean counters counting of Autodesk seats to see if you were important. We had freelancers, multiple people from the same companies, anything that worked on that forum.

During the Autodesk days, we ran like a small startup, it was literally just two rows of desks at the Montreal office. We had just three managers today involved in decision making, Chinny, me and the QA manager, and sometimes developers wanted to pick up things on their own, too. A truely agile team. For escalations, that was a separate team with dedicated developers and you got to decide what they work on (it's like consulting).

With regard to problems with shaders in XSI, there were many faults. On XSI's side, as you note the architecture changed and was flaky. But game clients did use the new shader APIs and the software wasn't broken between 7 and 2013 for everyone.

When we got reports about custom shaders, like any plugin things, we often had no way to reproduce them because we didn't get the plugins which were sometimes complex and depended on other tools. Sometimes we eventually did get the shaders, and in one famous example, a shader had a simple XSI version check that prevents it from working on any newer build. If I recall correctly, we didn't have the code, so the developers was debugging this in assembly language. This stuff can take way to long to get found out. NDAs back and forth, etc. I don't know what the solution is short of having developers embedded in production.

Personally I think the source of the mess is that while in mid-2000s softimage was dreaming of making being a game developer tool, the team wasn't large and qualified enough to property design, document and test all of the game-related things. Even at its peak.

bvmadjen
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by bvmadjen » 22 Nov 2019, 20:56

I hope you don't mind my comments, as this seems to be a two-person conversation...
but I wonder what was going on at Avid at the time, while Softimage had ambitions for a game engine?
Wasn't Avid having financial problems at the time...so much so, that they sold Softimage to Autodesk?

Also, the mid-2000s was a terrible time.
Two many companies being bought out or merged.
(though it wasn't limited to the 3d industry.

mantom
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by mantom » 22 Nov 2019, 21:00

Apology accepted.

The Autodesk contract from our reseller clearly stated one designated contact per site for all communications. There was an electronic form and everything. Whether that was enforced on your end is a different matter, but it did come into play when we contacted Autodesk for support for other products. Like you said, beta ran most of the year and I tried to get help there most as it was more attentive than regular support. Made more sense to fix something moving forward than looking back.

I did a straw poll back in the day to find out what other games studios were using as a means of finding remedies. In my limited polling every other game studio I contacted used the real time shader nodes available in the render tree, or used the wrangle nodes to inject HLSL/GLSL code. They did not write custom hardware shaders in C++. So in that respect we were the lone users of the path we chose and blazed the trail to find every little problem along the way. We did try to use the built-in GLSL wrangle node in the render tree, but performance was way too slow, and there were too many tools and workflows that would've needed to be rewritten to support the workflow change in the scene and update legacy content.

One problem is XSI had many different types of real time shaders (OpenGL, GLSL, DirectX, HLSL, Cg, ...). Each shader type was it's own environment with it's own issues. Just because something worked in Cg didn't mean it would work in HLSL, for example. Wildstar's game engine used HLSL for all it's shading. Attempts were made to mimic the shaders in XSI, but XSI's support for DirectX was two versions behind, buggy, and unacceptably slow. So he tried OpenGL which had more current support and worked, but then had to convert the HLSL code into GLSL and bootstrap it into the C++ OpenGL shader code which then ran inside of XSI. It was the bootstrapped GLSL functions our legal team wouldn't allow out the door as it was our game engine shading code, so that's why you couldn't get our shaders. But at the same time, you didn't need them to debug because the primary issue was getting an OpenGL context or other very fundamental thing. It's initialization, not rendering. That's what was so frustrating for us. Even more frustrating is it was caught in previous releases (XSI 6.5) as a test-able problem during the build process, but still wasn't getting detected in later builds for reasons unknown to us. It was an exasperating head scratcher.

I would agree with your assessment on the Games ambitions. I remember many conversations with Gareth Morgan in the 1990's when he would say Softimage was trying to position Sumatra (XSI) as a game engine that could do 3D content creation (or something to that effect). Certainly raised my eyebrows....and my glass. Which reminds me - never go drinking with Gareth Morgan :ymsick:

mantom
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by mantom » 22 Nov 2019, 21:50

bvmadjen wrote: 22 Nov 2019, 20:56 I hope you don't mind my comments, as this seems to be a two-person conversation...
but I wonder what was going on at Avid at the time, while Softimage had ambitions for a game engine?
Wasn't Avid having financial problems at the time...so much so, that they sold Softimage to Autodesk?

Also, the mid-2000s was a terrible time.
Two many companies being bought out or merged.
(though it wasn't limited to the 3d industry.
Softimage did have ambitions for making XSI a game engine of sorts, but that was back in the 1990's when XSI was still under development as "Sumatra" and owned by Microsoft. Microsoft had just released DirectX 1.0 and were pushing the .x file format to start their venture into the games industry. This is long before Xbox existed.

The idea wasn't a true game engine per se, but rather substantially improved OpenGL accelerated viewports with real time interaction which were a marked improvement over predecessor Softimage|3D and rival applications so content could be created and exchanged more readily with real time environments. The landscape for DCC applications back then was very different as most were focused on the high end professional markets for painting, compositing, rendering, tools, and were CPU driven, often single threaded. Hardware acceleration was still in it's infancy and getting simple geometry on screen with a texture map, lighting, and shadows in real time was still a challenge and expensive (hardware) on anything that wasn't a Silicon Graphics workstation.

I cannot speak for Avid / Softimage, but it was public knowledge Avid was not in the best shape financially at the time Softimage was sold to Autodesk. Part of the reasoning also involved Softimage not being well aligned in the company's core business of video editing as it's strength wasn't visual FX and motion graphics needed by many in the video editing markets.

luceric
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by luceric » 22 Nov 2019, 22:07

Actually, Softimage was looking to buy a game engine as late as 2007. One acquisition candidate was Shark 3D.
It was part of a proposal to pivot the company into the game middleware business.

bvmadjen
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by bvmadjen » 24 Nov 2019, 01:31

that wouldn't be the first time Avid did something stupid. Just a few years back, they acquired the company that made Sibelius, a great music notation software.
The people that made Sibelius were fired soon after Sibelius was absorbed into Avid (to go with their ProTools line). Those people are NOW working for Steinberg...the makers of Cubase.

Speaking of stupidity...since it was apparent when Autodesk acquired Softimage, that Softimage had the base for a 3D game engine, why didn't Autodesk just develop Sotimage further, instead of acquiring ANOTHER middleware company like Scaleform? (Scaleform was discontinued a few years after they were bought out).
Greed clouds the vision, apparently.

mantom
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by mantom » 24 Nov 2019, 01:51

There's a difference between having a 3D engine vs. thinking you have one.

it was more the latter case as the philosophy of engineering an engine is quite different than a 3D DCC application.

luceric
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by luceric » 25 Nov 2019, 03:20

bvmadjen wrote: 24 Nov 2019, 01:31 The people that made Sibelius were fired soon after Sibelius was absorbed into Avid (to go with their ProTools line). Those people are NOW working for Steinberg...the makers of Cubase.
What happened during 1998-2006 was that Avid was growing and investing and getting into consumer Audio (m-audio, Sibelius, Pinnacle acquisition, etc). Then, in 2007, the financial crisis hit and the money vanished. The CEO (who was from Digidesign and pro-consumer) was removed, and Avid was taken over by the board. The company was refocused onto its core Editing business, consumer audio and video were abandoned, and the other parts were broken up to be sold, including XSI.
bvmadjen wrote: 24 Nov 2019, 01:31 Speaking of stupidity...since it was apparent when Autodesk acquired Softimage, that Softimage had the base for a 3D game engine, why didn't Autodesk just develop Softimage further, instead of acquiring ANOTHER middleware company like Scaleform? (Scaleform was discontinued a few years after they were bought out).
Greed clouds the vision.
Autodesk had Maya, 3DSMax, Motion Builder and other 3D engines before buying Softimage, and there is not much you could salvage specifically from Softimage to make a game engine. Autodesk was developing its own game engine tech, based on Motion Builder, which was a true real-time engine. Companies acquire not only to get code but to get expertise and market. They bought not only Scaleform, but also a legitimate game engine, Bitsquid. The people who ran the game group during that time were the people who ran Softimage in the previous decade, and therefore would know its potential. You could say they were continuing the plan they had started at Softimage, although the Autodesk game group predates the Softimage acquisition. Autodesk got out of middleware a couple of years ago.

bvmadjen
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by bvmadjen » 02 Dec 2019, 00:59

regarding avid and sibelius...that explains everything.

it seemed like Autodesk was acting the part of vultures in the 2000s. Maya was for sale. Softimage was for sale, as well as others.

I guess that what happens when greed infests everything. it clouds the vision. As well as antitrust laws. but it's not limited to just the 3d industry.

I read Autodesk dropped the gaming pursuits because they couldn't compete with neither Unity nor Unreal.

Bullit
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Re: Yeah!! Hail to Softimage, winner of three awards at VES ...

Post by Bullit » 02 Dec 2019, 16:36

So if they were for sale how is Autodesk a vulture?

If Autodesk would haven't bought them the most probable thing is they would have folded. Maybe some Hollywood tycoons could have bought Maya, but then they would have killed the StudioTools line for industrial design.

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