I am new on this forum and also new to Softimage!
I am well aware that AD murdered Softimage and that made me really sad, even though I wasn't a user.
However, I have heard good things about Softimage, even from people that don't really use it but have used it
at some point and found it really impressive (mainly because of ICE). So I have decided to start learning Softimage
to gather inspiration for making my own 3D tools that I plan to make in the future.
That being said I had this idea of that, as I'm learning how to use Softimage, maybe I should also learn how to implement
the things that Softimage offers. That way I'll have great experience when I finally do go about making my own tools, and
as a bonus, I could help preserve the legacy what appears to be one of the (if not the) best 3D tool out there.
So, I sort of semi-started last night to make my an open source implementation of Softimage that can't be bought or sold
by some large corporation. My time is pretty damn limited so I probably won't be going very fast, as of now I'm still just working
on getting a window open with an OpenGL context, hehe.
I really think this is what the soft community should be aiming for, not walking away from it in tears, but instead taking charge
and make it truly under the control of the users!
The reason I am making this post, is, however, not to start hyping everybody up that there will definitely be an open source
Softimage that you can use soon. I can not promise that, for me this is primarily a small research project. A small reason is to
inspire the community to eventually get involved. At least after the initial boilerplate stuff is solid and after I've written up style
guidelines etc. The most important reason however, is that I want feedback! I want to know which features of Softimage you think
are amazing, which ones that need work, which ones that suck and probably should be omitted in a fresh start etc. Tell me what makes
Softimage Softimage to you! And point out the warts. Also please offer an explanation of what the features actually do as I am very
much still a mega n00b when it comes to soft (I have however used Maya and Blender quite a bit in the past).
My impression so far is that what makes Softimage great is how well you can overview the structure of a scene and ICE. Something
that appears like a downside is Mentalray (I didn't enjoy it in Maya at least), which I can't incorperate anyway as it is proprietary.
Some misc technical details for those who are interested in eventually contributing (code) to the project:
- License: CC0 (Creative Commons 0 Attribution) = Public Domain. Don't suggest anything else because I dont' like copyright, and I don't like GPL. CC0 is the best public domain "license".
- Language: Pedantically modern style C++14 (looks quite different from typical C++, with auto and types on the right etc, never calling new/delete unless I'm optimizing shared memory. This is part of my research).
- Compiler: Clang, even on Windows. This is because it's the only one that works well everywhere and it has great tools for debugging and finding horrible bugs. I don't want to be arsed with being portable to other compilers, time is scarce as it is.
- (D)VCS: Mercurial.
- Repo URL: https://bitbucket.org/opensoft3d/opensoft3d/overview
Cheers!