Hi sorry for the delayed response, wrote that yesterday evening, as I'm on the clock.
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For MR EOL, At first glance, or maybe a factor among other things..
Unlike something like SI (dependant on OS)
MR is highly dependant on host app, and while Maya/3DSMax are still struggling in removing MR (built-in over a very long time),
... it seems like MR was stuggling in making their plugin re-integrate everything to the same previous (inevitably compared to) level,
also built-up over a very long time, in now very unwelcoming host apps trying to remove all traces of it.
The MR forum is full of integration issues, and it seems the new MR wasn't the same as the old.
Maybe other factors, but mere fact that it was let go while previously being included,
apart the previously mentioned points, the reasons to actually buy what was previously included would have had to be extraordinary.
(and actually were quite extraordinary for some things.)
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Bullit wrote: ↑21 Nov 2017, 22:27
but any of that was at best completely drwafed by other pretty extra-outrageous decisions in regards to essentially the only other long standing general purpose DCC
As such? give some examples. In my opinion XSI would be dead well before 2010 if wasn't for ICE.
Hum... XSI was litterally on a roll just before getting snatched.
(I still have some job stats somewhere)
Or after perhaps getting introduced late, it was most-definitely catching up...
(in terms of usage.. it was already there in terms of features)
that's until it got snatched-up.
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If there's any doubt as to why any exodus happened...
(otherwise pretty self-obvious.. but sometimes avoided)
Part of XSI's acquisition press release ::
"The acquisition is meant to strengthen Autodesk's position in the fast-growing video games market"
Quote from the list (2016):
Softimage, which also as a product that "owned" the japan game market, was immediately put in the Autodesk Games group.
Softimage's managers were made leaders of that.
Former softimage dev immediately went on to worked on an ICE-like game middleware, project skyline,
while softimage game customers were gradually migrated to Maya.
If Arnold aquisition press release said ::
"The acquisition is meant to strengthen Autodesk's position in the fast-growing particle rendering market "
and all Devs got repurposed to particle rendering,
then there would have been serious questions about Arnold's future, and people would naturally start looking elsewhere
while others would have went on using it because Arnold is also pretty good as it was.
--> So I think it settles the question of when Softimage actually died,
as it wasn't just Softimage game customers that were getting
'gradually migrated to Maya' from that first moment on.
And the very first intent was pretty clearly the gradual removal of XSI from the map,
(a prominent competitor, with a brand new game-changing visual programming language)
extra dev resources was just possible extra gravy, mostly ending-up all somewhere else by the next year,
And we can understand why people started leaving right there, Kim Aldis comes to mind..
more when we found-out from the outskirts that any remaining dev went to Sigapore..
and obviously lots more when it eventually got cancelled.
Despite being a smaller user base than standard Maya
(still larger than say Houdini's which also wasn't insignificant)...
luceric wrote:A typical Softimage studio had from 100 to over 300 seats ..
80% of the Softimage seats were in games and post (places like The Mills, Hybride, Animal Logic),
.
+ MPC.. Glassworks.. Whiskey Tree.. Janimation.. RodeoFX.. NerdCorps ... PsyOps, Seed Animation Studios ... ... ...
some having to rethink entire pipelines, reshuffle entire personnel
with the remaining 20% being freelancers
like many many small shops if not a large portions (?) of VFX small shops (?)
because of it's out of the box no-nonsense nature?
In all a couple thousand users, many of which worked with XSI their entire carreers (including myself)
then having to entirely relearn new ways of doing things, in either much more convoluted, OR much less flexible solutions.
FXDude wrote:... pretty extra-outrageous decision
.. indeed.
... "mindless" is a term that could be used, or entirely devoid of consideration.
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Otherwise,
XSI would be dead well before 2010 if wasn't for ICE.
ICE... in all it's magnificence, remains but a miniscule part of it.
Forced migration might have been easier to take if Maya was even remotely as straight forward or "productive" (which it absolutely is not).
ONE example... (apart many other examples such as any you'd find in the "what were they thinking!" series up on the XSI list) ..
this is a series of videos from our very (ex-)own Raphael Fragapane.
youtube.com/channel/UCX0OBmpsTUCeGaTDbHSb88g
I don't want to say that Maya rigging is "horrible", because that's probably relative to org size,
and how many TD's you have in your -
T-D *department*, then no doubt allowing for very granular control.
But in basically -any- other circumstance, it really is ... ... horrible!
The hole 17 part series is about properly rigging a unicycle,
you can watch the hole thing or skip to any section, or to whenever he's not covering general theory, and actually getting things done,...
(I downloaded them and watched at 2x speed with a player that maintained pitch... and I couldnt beleive it)...
no wonder why I had such a hard time finding node editor or indepth rigging videos...
...when "noodleing" (as he put it) in the node editor,
we see him getting totally confused, we could almost say most of the time, in an extra simple graph
while fighting (and say argh! at) NodeEditor glitches every couple seconds,
that while graphs can quickly get much(much!) messier,
... having a hard time even tracing back steps to refollow connections to nail down (almost constant) issues...
...and if not in the Node Editor, it's otherwise in a script editor window typing-in long pages of code...
that end-up being for trivial features,
... -barely- ever touching the 3dview,
(you can scrub any video to the end with your mouse)
or almost never like once every 30 min, to see that it's not quite working
(even if he's constantly saying "ok! now that that's working!")
or just to orbit around to go rotate something because basically nothing happened in the last 30 min,
before going-on doing or fixing things (at all times, hard to know what exactly)
in the Node or script editor for another half hour.
... the rig's "work" hierachy (not the hierarchy exposed to the animator)
ending up having dozens of nodes going pretty deep....
...same goes for constraints.. construction history .... ....... ............
Now It's worth mentioning that it has absolutely nothing to do with Raph,
who is by all means, and to the fullest extent, a seasoned and very experienced professional (at Animla Logic),
here making a series -for- proffesionals, and doing these things while talking is like a notch more difficult.
But even so.. it's just how Maya is for a host of big and small reasons.
"Like entirely normal for Maya, what's the problem?"
The problem is when you know how simple things -can- be (almost like a curse),
without implying expecting it to at-all work anything like what we may be use to.
And if Maya has one consistency, that would be it across the entirety of Maya.
I did that same rig in SI,
(or at least as far as I could tell what his rig actually did from bits and peices here and there after covering the entire series),
and took literally 15 min, and that's while making my own IK/FK switcher
with a keyable toggle that also snaps back the IK controller to current rotation,
(never 'snapping' the rigged object out of current rotation when toggling the switch back and forth)
without using ICE, which I also could just as well while remaining just as ... -simple!-
OR I could have just used a bone which all have built-in IK/FK blending (gradual sliders)
then it would have been 7 minutes.
Like unbelievable...
or night and day between that, and say any one of pooby's tutorials
where without knowing anything about ICE ,
you can see what's happening, what he's doing and why.
So either XSI is incredibly user-friendly, or Maya is incredibly user-un-friendly, I'm not exactly sure yet, but it's definitely one of those. (or both)
Edit:: typos & specifications