Thanks for the open words, appreciated.
Sorry that Softimage developers themselves do not have the balls to tell us the truth - that Softimage became the fifth wheel around here.
You can almost see the responsible faces twisting with conflict of how to get rid of that bothersome Softimage, but with converting the userbase to Maya and not driving them out of the door.
Anyway, Maya is still not as cool as you would like it to be, and probably never will be, either.
luceric wrote:It's not really important, but the rendering API sdk were worked on at Avid, but eventually finished and shipped in Autodesk. This sdk fantasy is bit a waste of time, imho. the facts are that Maya and Max are already great SDK platform and you can build all the tools you need in there.
If you'd like to develop for AD products, these days you would probably go for Creation Splice.
Would have to learn KL and Python though anyway... bit much on the agenda.
luceric wrote:You could have built your NURBS tools in Maya 15 years ago.
Didn't code at that time... nor did I have to, because I used 3ds Max, and 1000 plugin-devs did the job.
But Max became ... Max as you know it these days. Expensive, old-schoolish bloatware.
Tried Maya when it came out, but couldn't make any real sense of that program. Still get this sinking feeling when I think about having to lift a job with it...
luceric wrote:You could potentially change the UI of maya to be like XSI if that's what you wanted.
Does not sound like a simple job, correct me if I'm wrong. Are there any Softimage-"themes" to download? I'm just a freelancer, not Weta Digital.
Talking about Maya's UI look-and-feel... it's not just icons and layout (which are horrible), but things like supra-keys, all the middle-mouse-button goodies, tools pivot, etc. etc. etc. spare me the list.
You KNEW yourself how far ahead Sofimage used to be UI-wise back in the days, you wrote parts of the damn thing, and evangelized it not too long ago.
Are you kicking your teammate's asses hard enough to improve that, or doing it yourself already?
luceric wrote:I believe the third party developers for XSI will evaporate within two years, because the user base is evaporating, including the big japan studios who are in the process of switching to Maya for the next gen consoles.
Sad news.
luceric wrote:
There are quite a few places that have one or two seats of XSI, but are they still on subscription, do they want to spend money on upgrades, and buying plugins - you'd have to ask the third parties. I've heard horror stories of third parties making plug-ins for XSI and then being really angry that they ended up having lots of mentions and demo download but no sales. In any case you may or may not agree with any of this, but if a team was sent to work on the XSI SDK, then lets say there are great enhancements in two years, is there anyone in two years that will want to start to develop for these new APIs no really knowing how many users will actually have this version of XSI - I don't think so.
These core problems are known for long. AD did not tackle them since they own it, that's 5 years... very far-sighted.
How come that the most artist friendly and nifty 3D software on the planet became such a hot potato?
Still, miraculously, it's better than ever, and people do brilliant things with it.