How long will softimage be Competative...?

[Draise]

Yeah, makes sense. But as a small studio in SI, you can still keep up 10 years and get REALLY good at what you do. The Mill is one example, and I'm sure they'll keep on ahead if they build off what they know.

A large studio may still need to stick in SI for the next few years if they already started in SI. Why start from zero? I am not sure where they will animate the Lego Movie, but I'm sure they may have to do Lego Movie 2 in SI again also, which is a few years in production already after the next.

I guess depends where you are now, 1 man or small team or even large.

As I said earlier, if you buy enough seats to keep a small elite team, you can stay competitive. The only question is not being able to "scale" with time (legally). So.. invest now? Be the one that hires that residue talent?

[Helli]

Nope your thoughts are wrong, sadly actually.

For several reasons:
Support. A company doing a feature film will not work with a software which is officially not supported anymore (I can't imagine that)
Talent. A company will not risk to sit there not being able to size up the team cause there is no talent out there anymore (no new soft artists coming after us, wich means you can't fill junior/intermediate roles which you gonna need).

You are right about small studios. It might be that they stick to Softimage for a while.
Most of them will do the transition because they will not risk being stuck in a couple years.

And it probably will be super hard to get either a permanent or freelance job from one of those studios.
Thinking about buying Softimage licenses now so you can grow a team later on sounds ridiculous to me.

It is just time to move on. Keep working with Softimage and do the transition in the next years. But don't think there is a future for Softimage. There isn't.
My tip if you are a studio. Take a very close look on Modo or Cinema (yes Cinema, they have quite a lot coming in the next years).

But in general Maya is the way to go as an artist (or Houdini / Maya if you are on the technical side).
Modo isn't hard to learn so I would also get into that one.

[brudney]

....

My tip if you are a studio. Take a very close look on Modo or Cinema (yes Cinema, they have quite a lot coming in the next years).

But in general Maya is the way to go as an artist (or Houdini / Maya if you are on the technical side).
Modo isn't hard to learn so I would also get into that one.

Somehow you didn't mention max... Did you simply forget or is there any other reason? ;)

I know a lot of smaller shops use it and imho it's great for one man band situations. When coupled with some plugins (like fume and TP) it seems extremely capable, producing great looking stuff in decent time frames.

[Helli]

Well it's an Autodesk product.

It's bad enough that people have to switch, why would you want to take another product from AD (if not at least the industry leading standard).

[brudney]

Well it's an Autodesk product.

So is maya ;) but I get your point.

[FXDude]

Studios going on with soft seem to treat it like an internal custom software,

Who out there knows Apollo? Buf, or Premo? Soft has any number of times the user base of those. (even in it's reduced state)

Otherwise for a number of freelancing jobs (when providing assets or fully rendered images) , or depending on what, it can be irrelevant if you are using C4d, Maya or... so long as you deliver. (with whatever best fits the job)

Not at all to say not to diversify and learn what is generally used out there.. but if there is a choice, Soft will more than likely remain a more than beneficial option, but I mean arguably not by just a small margin... as it's pretty much always been with XSI for a bunch of things.

Which I would assume being why any soft produced Image you've seen in the past year has been done with soft.

With complete abstraction of its offical status or what people think or do, they either tried things (or didn't), but they know what just works best for them at the moment while surely monitoring developments.

Edit: Concerning 'support', while they may have been pretty good, I personally don't know of any one or place that absolutely depended on XSI support for support.

[markraz]

My tip if you are a studio. Take a very close look on Modo or Cinema (yes Cinema, they have quite a lot coming in the next years).

Those apps are years behind XSI in features..

regardless, I doubt anyone who works for a "major" studio is worried about a 3rd party app. When you get to that level they use everything and anything under the sun, including lots of custom apps and plugs

[MauricioPC]

My tip if you are a studio. Take a very close look on Modo or Cinema (yes Cinema, they have quite a lot coming in the next years).

Yeah ... I'm learning Maya right now. It's different, but not terrible. I think you are right about 3ds Max. Yes it's used a lot, yes I really like Max, but ... the major development is headed to Maya, so why not learn that one since it gets more attention? Makes sense. And I've seen one-man bands with Maya doing kickass work.

I really like Cinema 4D, but I find that Maxon is even more secretive about the future than Autodesk and I didn't even know that was possible!

[Xsinode]

Very intersting discussion... I'm starting learn Sofimage around one years ago (generaly for modelling purposes) and EOL of Softimage became BIG BAD surprise for me. First time i think ...WTF i should go to maya or Modo. But then i'm think: if can't do anything in Softimage, why do I need another 3D software? And now i work in Softimage and im very happy. Softimage like a home sweet home. Nice tools, sweet interaction and incredeble powerful of ICE, and just amazing viewport (now im tell about performance). Not worth it "sprayed" into multiple programms.
P.S. Sorry for bad english. I hope you understand me.

[Maximus]

Personally i think modeling/UV/texturing/animation in softimage will be very good for more than other 8 years for sure. Time flies btw and in those 10 years if u look back, what software came out that outclassed in those fields? none. You could say modo, but still whatever you do in modo you can do in soft.

The only weak and very crap part of Softimage is the rendering. Mental ray is dead. so you have to rely on outside render engines and hope they will keep to support Softimage plugin.
As long as you have a render engine updated and supported, Softimage will go a very very very very long run. you will see.

[Nox]

Mental ray is dead. so you have to rely on outside render engines

That applies to most DCC packages...

[McNistor]

Yep, all "serious work" is rendered with 3rd party renderers- Arnold, PRman, Vray, 3delight (is it still alive?) and... Mray in the past when it was still strong and 3rd party for most apps.

[Maximus]

Mental ray is dead. so you have to rely on outside render engines

That applies to most DCC packages...

Actually in Maya mental ray is being developed and improved, so in 3ds max. I said mr is dead in XSI because we'll never get any sort of update. The mila shaders was never touched again. Pretty sure we'll see some news and update in maya (which already have a better integration feature-wise compared to Xsi).

Anyway total shame on AD. I still cannot believe the killed Softimage. Its totally retarded. (sorry for the rant).

[nDman]

Mental ray is dead. so you have to rely on outside render engines

That applies to most DCC packages...

It's depended what you like to achieve. In some cases there is not any match for MR (Direct Lighting, Toon, ...).

[FXDude]

Seems like there are extremes. As much as MR isn't necessarily the ideal, 3rd party rendering is definitely a major part of softimage that is continually pushed .. and not any renderer,
at least Arnold and Redshift, surely VRay, (very supportive of SI)
and I'm sure subsequent 3Delight versions will similarly continue to be SI Friendly )

[markraz]

Yep, all "serious work" is rendered with 3rd party renderers- Arnold, PRman, Vray, 3delight (is it still alive?) and... Mray in the past when it was still strong and 3rd party for most apps.

Mental ray is every bit as good as vray and is much better than renderman. I don't see why anyone would need anything other than MR... The SDK is part of the power and why it can exceed capabilities of vray and others. Mental ray is faster than vray too, if that matters to anyone. Vray is great for NOOBS who don't really understand ray-tracing, GI and the rendering process. It's one of those apps that you can have zero talent and produce photo-realistic images by just pressing "render"... Which is cool but that doesn't mean it's better than tools like MR that require some skill to maximize/utilize.

I recommended noobs download a 25 year old copy of POV ray and create a photo-real scene by typing into a text file to generate something impressive.... Vray is great but it's not unlike inventions such as autopilot or spellcheck.. It becomes a crutch after a while. You are shielded by the real process of rendering.

"serious work"?? so old ILM films from the 90s are not "serious work"....