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

[MauricioPC]

Given that this is all rumour I will say this with a pinch of Salt.

However should it be true and given that we have redshift, vray and arnold as great plugin render platform.

Why the Mothery duck of all the things they need to sort out in softimage do we get something that we seriously dont need. Renderer changes are so far down the list as to be invisible except with binoculars.

*I need tea*

What I liked is that this is something that shouldn't be touched if the plan was to finish at the v2016, for example. So maybe some more things will happen improve before the end.

P.S.: All will end in the end.

[angus_davidson]

The list of things that need attention is sheer endlessly. Like in politics: the really sore spots don't get the attention... we will have all grey beards (or hair) when all the wishes came true... or already be a case for the undertaker... ;p

mental ray progressive... possible already with CtrlGhost, right?
However, as a fallback option it might still make sense these days, so no harm done if it gets some love. Been a while anyway. After all, it's integration and choice of shaders is great, and 3.12 will have FG with GPU support:
http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2013/ ... 3-12-beta/
What we can expect from that remains to be seen, but at least it is under active development.
Redshift, although swiftly developed, is not feature complete, and e.g. procedurals are yet to be tackled (planned, though). Arnold is too expensive for many. VRay's integration is not yet completely worry-free, too.
And: mental ray is not even particularly slow anymore - if you don't make certain mistakes (like I did recently).

As far as I am aware CtrlGhost is only for Max and pretty much stopped at the 2011 version.

The point is though that AD is not listening to what their user base actually want and in some cases what really needs fixing. That is very worrying to me. In all my time in Softimage I have yet to hear anyone ask for them to improve the renderer. If anything it was to actually drop it completely, and with the cost saving allow the user the option to buy one suited to their needs.

That being said if you take take the long view then any development is better then a sharp stick in the eye.

[luceric]

I had been told by my devs that progressive rendering needs a modification to the render region, otherwise it doesn't refresh correctly. It's my understanding that you can't just turn it in on with ctrl ghost - also that does turn on part of the system, the render region will not do the full redraws redraws necessary.

[MauricioPC]

In terms of AD to actually listen to the customers, I think the 3ds Max thread worked because there were lots of importante 3ds Max users complaining.

But we had longer threads here asking for change and nobody even appeared to read it. Except maybe Bellsey and Luc-Eric, but they are here regularly.

In any case, from what I read, 3ds Max still has PFlow as monothread. So I guess they will be more pissed.

[SreckoM]

Situation that is now is how AD wants it to be, and I am 100% sure that reflects size of userbase.

[Eugen]

A good part of the Softimage user-VIPs is on the mailing list regularly. They do complain, but politics says ICE.
Matt Lind for example, TD at Carbine
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/#page1
a 100+ heads company and (still) heavily Softimage-based, is among those who asks for improvements aside from ICE, for years now. Nada.
If people like he do not get recognized, who will?

Those who ask for ICE improvements are the lucky ones these days, since ICE is kind of the 'sexy'-feature of XSI, and as we know, sex sells...

[MauricioPC]

A good part of the Softimage user-VIPs is on the mailing list regularly. They do complain, but politics says ICE.
Matt Lind for example, TD at Carbine
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/#page1
a 100+ heads company and (still) heavily Softimage-based, is among those who asks for improvements aside from ICE, for years now. Nada.
If people like he do not get recognized, who will?

Those who ask for ICE improvements are the lucky ones these days, since ICE is kind of the 'sexy'-feature of XSI, and as we know, sex sells...

Didn't know that. Damn ... I had my hopes that something would change. Maybe the Soft PM is afraid since when the PM appeared here last year, around the Unfold event and after a few months he was gone from AD. Perhaps there's a curse?

[Eugen]

That guy really got pissed recently, in the beta forum. There's somewhat of a situation (slightly exaggerated) of ICE and non-ICE players against each other, struggling for the scarce resources there are. That's the outcome of unfair product politics.

I happen to be among those who don't need ICE much, but I'm just a nobody (with a somewhat malicious tongue)... no idea how the 'non-ICEies' (or 'less-ICEies') could communicate their wishes with a little more impact.
Already thought about sending a lifetime supply of 'Manner Schnitten' (sweets originating from Vienna) down to the Singapore devs... no avail.

[luceric]

A good part of the Softimage user-VIPs is on the mailing list regularly. They do complain, but politics says ICE.
Matt Lind for example, TD at Carbine
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/#page1
a 100+ heads company and (still) heavily Softimage-based, is among those who asks for improvements aside from ICE, for years now. Nada.

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.

[Eugen]

Thanks for the insight!
I assume what you say was before the Autodesk buyout?

[csaez]

We should backup our opinions on "ADSK does not listen their users" on something more specific, perhaps the small annoying things is a good starting point.
http://softimage.uservoice.com

Just saying

[luceric]

Thanks for the insight!
I assume what you say was before the Autodesk buyout?

no, I had a developer work on the real time shader issues he had as late a softimage 2013.

[angus_davidson]

We should backup our opinions on "ADSK does not listen their users" on something more specific, perhaps the small annoying things is a good starting point.
http://softimage.uservoice.com

Just saying

Perhaps this needs to pumped on twitter etc more frequently. Not sure how many folks know about it.

[rray]

Just a side note because you mentioned softimage.uservoice.com:
I think the site should have 'hot' ideas listed on the first page not the top voted ideas.. these have become very cemented on the first page that way giving the other entries less visibility and making it a bit biased.

[Eugen]

We should backup our opinions on "ADSK does not listen their users" on something more specific, perhaps the small annoying things is a good starting point.
http://softimage.uservoice.com

Just saying

There's something wrong with the CSS of that page, at least here.

Posted a few things there, Nurbs (of course), and selection improvements. Altough for my workflow this makes perfect sense, those are not particularly fashionable wishes, so there was little response by other voters.
But then, even the top listed wish - native PyQt - doesn't seem to be important enough.
Talking about PyQt... is there some technical reason why this still is not introduced? After all, there's Steven Caron's addon, as a proof of concept.

[csaez]

Posted a few things there, Nurbs (of course), and selection improvements. Altough for my workflow this makes perfect sense, those are not particularly fashionable wishes, so there was little response by other voters.
But then, even the top listed wish - native PyQt - doesn't seem to be important enough.

I guess my point is that there's still some interest for mental ray integration/fixes, I was not saying ADSK should implement absolutely everything on that list in order of popularity.

Talking about PyQt... is there some technical reason why this still is not introduced? After all, there's Steven Caron's addon, as a proof of concept.

AFAIK: PyQt license, no linux port, some technical difficulties with the PySide implementation.