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Autodesk Says It's Killing Softimage Development, Support
An anonymous reader writes "Autodesk has announced that after the 2015 version of Softimage, which is scheduled for release next April, it will no longer provide software support. The publisher has confirmed the rumors last month, according to which Autodesk intends to terminate its software for 3D modeling and animation. 'We regret to inform you that the next version of Softimage 2015 will be the last,' can be read on the Autodesk website. 'This latest version will be released around April 14, 2014. Autodesk will continue to provide support for up to 30 April 2016. '"
Autodesk has 3 Animation packages: Maya, Softimage, 3d MAX. Autodesk long ago promised to consolidate all 3 packages into one.
Autodesk bought Softimage XSI for cheap, and just killed it to remove competition from their flagship products 3DMAX and MAYA. There is a huge thread about this over on cgsociety.org: http://forums.cgsociety.org/sh... ...Basically, anybody who built their studio pipeline around Softimage XSI, including many indy game developers, is royally screwed. Softimage's most powerful feature "ICE" (a multithreaded, node-based visual programming language that lets even non-programmers build custom tools and functions inside Softimage) is being migrated to Autodesk Maya instead. Its going to be called "Bifrost", as it is the "second coming" of Softimage ICE. Many Softimage users are wondering what other 3D software they can migrate to. Many are considering migrating to SideFX's "Houdini" (http://www.sidefx.com/), which is a very powerful procedural-animation software used extensively in some of the most complex VFX shots you see in Hollywood films, like the character shatter effects in TRON LEGACY. Some are considering moving to the open-source Blender 3D software, to escape from Autodesk's business policies completely. Basically, Autodesk bought Softimage, slowly killed it, ripped out the best bits, and is now forcing Softimage users to migrate to either 3DMAX or Maya, which are Autodesk's cash cows in the Media & Entertainment division. A lot of people are very pissed off about this. But this is hardly the first time Autodesk has killed a successful product (e.g. the once-excellent Autodesk Combustion), because it didn't make enough money for Autodesk's profit hungry shareholders. A sad day for Softimage XSI users. It has powered films ranging from the first Jurrassic Park to the recent LEGO movie. It was particularly strong at pulling off complex character animation, including complex muscle-and-sliding-skin simulations (e.g. the all-CG primates in "Dawn Of The Planet Of The APES"). XSI was a good CG software. It will be sorely missed by many... If Blender can get its UI overhaul right in the next release, some XSI users may migrate to the open-source software.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Just download Blender, and go with that. Cheaper, better, done.
I remember XSI had a reputation as being the easiest to use 3D modeling package, much easier than either Maya or Max and they sold it at a far cheaper price. So, Autodesk bought it and increased the price to $5000, to prevent it competing with it's overpriced Max and Maya packages and now they kill it.
Interesting, your take on SoftImage as related to the games world. XSI was after my folks were all driven away by the 3.x taper...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But how well does Blender import project files made with Autodesk products?
This is due to an event on our immediate horizon that we could see coming with both eyes tied behind our backs.
Enjoy your new Delorean.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Uh, they're licensing it perpetually, so it's not all dead - just the support. Buy some copies while you can, they'll last.
This is exactly the reason people should be moving away from Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and similar product offerings. It doesn't matter if it's a bit better sometimes or you've built up skill in these product line ups. In one fell swoop these companies can come in an destroy your learned assets, value, and livelihood.
My company uses GIMP exclusively (as an example, amongst other tools) and competes with the likes of these behemoths. We're one of the few companies in our industry that is actually growing and we're doing so by eating at the bread and butter of our competitors. We're a highly successful company that's been in business 6-7 years now. We're growing rapidly (financially, internationally, and the like, but not too fast either mind you, fast enough not to f' it up) and using 100% free software tools and systems as a matter of policy. You can do it. You just have to choose to do it. Implement policies that require users (wherever feasible) to switch. Doing it on your time scale is much more cost effective than doing it on someone elses and in many instances the tools really aren't so different that users need training. Not more so than switching from say Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007 (ie significantly less really, 2007 was the version Microsoft went from using a traditional user interface in office to using a 'ribbon').
Personally, I'm still a Newtek Lightwave 3D devotee due to its ease of use and intuitiveness compared to other packages, but I use a lot of Autodesk's more industrial design oriented software like Inventor...
It was really only a matter of time before something like this happened, though. I mean how long did people think Autodesk was going to try and maintain three competing 3D modelling and animation packages under the same roof when only one of them fits into their overall software suite ecosystem?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
XSI users have seen this coming for a long time now. I myself am a longtime XSI user and while the platform is damned powerful, it is silly to spread your development teams across three applications all trying to do the same thing. If they could sim
... from my perspective it looked like once they acquired all 3 they basically dramatically slowed new features
Autodesk can afford to do that because the competitors didn't move forward fast enough.
In the 3D scene *_all_* software package development have slowed to a crawl. You think Autodesk could afford to do what they do if their competitors forge ahead at neck-breaking speed ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
on a real keyboard instead of a damn smartphone :|
XSI users have seen this coming for a long time now. I myself am a longtime XSI user and while the platform is damned powerful, it is silly to spread your development teams across three applications all trying to do the same thing. If they could simply combine the best features of all three packages into one, they could devote more time to development of said package instead and have a truly amazing piece of work to be proud of.
There are things that package A does better than B or C and vice versa even though you never mentioned such things on the various sites dedicated to package A,B or C. Example, never mention Max or Maya over on XSIBASE. Like the sites dedicated to the other packages, they tended to have elitist issues when it came to their software of choice. Their software was the best, and anyone not using it was an amateur. Dare point out how the other package might do something a bit better and they would just lose their f*&king mind.
Personally, I found Softimage to be tougher to learn than the other two. It may be because I had years of experience behind XSI when I started playing with Max / Maya, or they may just be more intuitive. I can't say. I know the user base was smaller and, as such, official training material was a bit harder to come by. I have volumes of it here now, collected over the years.
I don't really care for how Autodesk holds back some features of it's software for those who have ongoing subscriptions ( Iray comes to mind ) but unfortunately the market for this kind of software is not very big. So you have the two big ones, ( Maya and Max ) and a handful of others which many folks have never even heard of. ( Houdini, Modo, Cinema 4D, Electric Image ( hah remember those guys ? ) Lightwave and so on. )
It's sad to see such a powerful package go away, but hopefully something good will come out of it. Hell, I'm sure most users of said programs would agree with me but if they would quit coming up with new whiz-bang enhancements and just get rid of all the damn bugs, we would be thrilled. There is nothing quite like the dread you experience when you have been working on a model for hours and you tell Max / Maya to do something to it and the application goes into the " is not responding " white screen of terror mode. Because that's the exact moment you realize the last save you did was about an hour or so ago and there is a very good chance you're watching the last moments of your current version of your project vanish forever.
As far as I've seen, most developers in the game industry use Maya. A few that I've seen used Max years ago, but that seems to have been in rapid decline as well. Honestly, it makes sense to focus development efforts on your top products.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Is SoftImage responsible for all the incredibly unrealistic inertia and gravity models we've seen in EVERY film that ever used CGI? Why is nobody talking about this? Why was Gollum in LOTR so realistic when motionless, but as soon as he jumped off a ledge, his CGI nature was instantly revealed, due to the unrealistic inertia and gravity models?
Not a flame, just figured most people would have migrated to something else by now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Microsoft bought SoftImage, as a part of the effort to displace high-end Unix workstations with PC's running NT. It was all over, but the shouting. Alias transformed Wavefront into Maya in roughly this timeframe, while MS starved out "dot release" life support on SoftImage...
I wrote Falling Bodies, the ragdoll physics plug-in for Softimage, back in 1996-1997, so I got to see this happen. Back then, Softimage was #1 in Hollywood. Microsoft bought them, and when I went up to Redmond, the Microsoft guys were talking about making Softimage mass-market software. But that never happened. It was too hard to use, and required more graphics hardware than most users had back then. (I had a $2000 Dynamic Graphics card in an NT workstation back then. Every low-end GPU today has far more power.)
So Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid made overpriced film and video editing systems, sold with semi-customer hardware and built into cool-looking furniture. Softimage had a good video editor in addition to the 3D line, and that's what Avid really wanted. They had no clue what to do with the 3D product. They did convert from Softimage to "Softimage XSI", which broke all existing plug-ins and didn't have a plug-in API that worked. That's when I dropped Softimage.
As video editing went mainstream and Avid's sales of overpriced furniture declined, Avid sold off the 3D product to Autodesk. Autodesk had sort of become the default acquirer of 3D animation products. Most of them came from small companies with tiny product lines. Maya came from the merger of Alias and Wavefront and the mess at SGI. Autodesk picked up Lightwave and some other stuff, and of course they already had lots of 3D engineering tools.
This worked out well at Autodesk. The architectural design programs were integrated with the good renderers from the animation world, and images of what new buildings were going to look like got really good. (Adding a radioisity renderer with very realistic lighting models allowed architects to get all the right light fixtures in the right places.) Autodesk's real business is tools for making real physical stuff (their internal slogan is "If God didn't design it, one of our customers did"), but there's a lot of crossover between 3D design of real-world stuff and 3D design of animated stuff.
Softimage has pretty much been a has-been product for years now. After 20 years, it's probably time to phase it out.
I initially read the headline as "Autodest Says It's Killing Software Development, Support", but a moment's reflection revealed that was silly.
Autodesk would never kill development and support on their DRM.
I guarantee that's because of directors and/or supervisors. There's nothing procedural about the inertia or gravity of animated characters--they're either hand animated or adopted from motion capture (or a blend of the two). Motion capture can be tough because it only helps if the proportions, shape, and size match your CG character. It's awkward to motion capture a human and for a 100 foot tall, 7 headed hydra. Where the bad inertia and gravity show up is when directors and supervisors ask that things move slower or faster to match what they have in their head--regardless if it's realistic.
Inertia and gravity are easy to duplicate and are perfectly fine in any commercial-quality CG. The problem you may see doesn't come from physics, it may just be that those motions are extremely complex. Or perhaps they look fine and you are wrong. Many people are easily fooled about the nature of a CG image (that is, they tend to qualify as bad CGI anything that doesn't look 'good' to them, including real images and actors). Part of the issue comes from the language of film, where things that don't look film-like or TV-like are considered 'unrealistic', even if they are actually closer to reality.
When you have a pile of cash and market dominance and you have a choice of [a] innovating to keep ahead, and/or [b] lowering prices to keep/gain market share, or [c] buying your competitor to gain his IP and then kill his competing product, the nasy business will choose "c". Here's how it workes:
1. buy the competitor (his execs will be happy and "golden-parachute" out, some into retirement, others into non-competing businesses. his shareholders will be happy too)
2. cobble-together a quick new release if it's a software product. The team you bought will be lulled into thinking they have a future in your firm (and you get to evaluate them and decide which of them *might* get to stay). The REAL point is to get the existing customer base to pony-up for a new release (providing a burst of cash to help offset some of the acquisition costs) and think that the product is worth sticking with (in case you want to milk them again before shifting them to your old product)
3. have your team take apart the formerly-competing product, learning anything you can from it and getting ideas for how to improve your older products
4. gain PR benefits by advertizing that your newly-enhanced product line is better-than-ever.
5. add some of the best features of the acquired product to yours, and release a new verion of yours (getting your existing customer base to pony-up for the new version) and also begin offering the customers of your former competitor a chance to pay to move to your product (and make the not-so-subtle point that if they fail to "upgrade" to your product from the one they previously chose over yours they might not be able to in the future or they might have to pay a premium to do it later).
6. kill the product you bought; you've gained the knowledge from it, and those of its developers who met your standards, and all it's "best customers (the ones who mindlessly buy every announced upgrade) and its market share, all that's left are the parts you do not want anyway (the code you did not find useful, the devs that you decided you did not want, and the "cheapest" customers) so you get rid of all that with one action.
/
Autodesk has done this before. GeneriCAD, Drafix, were just a few competitors which Autodesk acquired and shutdown. Their practices are very anticompetitive.
the sad thing softimage was rewritten designed and built to be better then maya and it does that job very well, I've used both for 10 years ( & Lightwave, modo & Max ) and softimage is a much cleaner UI and logic, More powerful in relation to data in the interface and working ,. every detail was designed to be a improvement or better then how maya does it ,. most newer studio's who could change pipelines DID move to Softimage BUT it's easier to make a profit by forcing users into Maya ,over the last 5 years autodesk has been giving less and less in there updates for all 3D products and asking more and more each year add to that subscription only coming in next year and you have a big company doing what ever the F they want and the industries has to take it due the there complete control.
This is how Capitalism works.
Writing import and export scripts for Blender is fairly easy.
Simple, geometry-only stuff aside, FBX and Collada work to some extent, and you can use these formats for the interchange _in_theory_. Otherwise, Blender's interchange capabilities are as good as your scripting skills and format knowledge.
No, practically all CGI is motion captured - actors in suits covered in reflective balls act out the actions.
The "unrealistic" nature of the motion and gravity is almost always because the actor is under the influence of real gravity and has real inertia - you cannot tell a 150 lb actor to act like someone who weighs 50lbs because of inertia and gravity effects are different. If you map the motions directly, it'll act heavier and slower. if you try to make ti more nimble and speed it up, well, it looks more fake.
Accurately simulating inertia and gravity is very difficult in hand animation and very tedious, and it still has the potential to look wrong. Motion capture lets you be far more fluid and be done in a much shorter period of time, and in general the action looks less animated and more realistic.
You spent a lot of time attacking the language used and the even the author and not much time dealing with the merit of their argument
If you don't like Apple or Microsoft, because of their underhanded lock-in strategies, then you should really really hate Autodesk. They are the most corrupt software company I have ever had to deal with. If you value your sanity, never ever consider using their software as the foundation of anything important that you do. They will put you on an endless cycle of needless upgrades and they will do their damn best to eliminate the competition. Go with the competition. The sooner we can wipe this awful company off the map, the better.
Yes, that 3.x line did seem to go on 4-ev-er but we tried to get Sumatra out as best we could... Many cold nights unburying my car in Montreal at 2AM so I could drive home to Laval - at least with no traffic!
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Until I told him it was just middle mouse.
"Great. Now I have to buy and carry an external mouse and an external number pad to use it with my laptop." The last time I checked, if the user chooses to swap the buttons so that left is select like every other drawing program, Blender 2.62.0 would disable middle mouse emulation. Did this change by 2.70.0?
Writing import and export scripts for Blender is fairly easy.
I agree, provided the file format that you're trying to import is documented and provided there are no major impedance matches in how different tools represent things. To what extent does Autodesk publish the details of the formats of its products' project files?
"Autodesk picked up Lightwave and some other stuff, and of course they already had lots of 3D engineering tools. "
No, Autodesk didn't pick up Lightwave.
Lightwave 3D is still going strong, independent, and rgowing in features and data interchange between apps. It's the unsung hero of a lot of Hollywood work and rarely gets credit for it.
http://www.Lightwave3d.com
Dom
This is about half correct. ICE is not becoming Bifrost. Bifrost is the spiritual successor to Naiad, although some of the ICE people are working on it.
Also Bifrost isn't just coming to Maya it's being developed as a standalone API/SDK. So it's not a "Maya feature" any more than Renderman is a Maya feature.
As to profit hungry shareholders... XSI/Softimage has been a money losing expedition since the beginning. They had a really hard time getting people to transition from Softimage 3D to XSI. By the time XSI was released many of the users had already migrated to 3ds Max or Maya. It definitely has the newest core system but like Lightwave's attempt to rewrite its core they discovered that the time it takes is lethal to its marketshare. Microsoft bought it initially to port it to Windows NT in an effort to kill off SGI and prove that Windows could handle professional graphics. As a response Maya also moved to Windows so having succeeded in dumping money into Softimage they sold them off to Avid. Avid also dumped money into them hoping that they could have a total pipeline from edit to delivery in their post software. But after losing dump trucks of money on a failed product they too sold it off to Autodesk. Autodesk possibly bought it as a defensive move to ensure that nobody else would pick it up *cough Adobe* but they honestly probably thought they could turn it around. Well... they didn't it also cost them a crapload of money and now they're killing it.
XSI has been costing its corporate owners millions and millions of dollars for over a decade. I suspect it's never actually turned a profit in its entire history. The fact that Autodesk kept it alive this long is really actually surprising to me. It's been perceived as dead for the last 8 years.
As to the all-CG primates in Planet of the Apes... that was done by Weta and Weta has an inhouse proprietary muscle and sliding simulation system so you can't really add that as a flag as a + for softimage. Nor can you add Jurassic Park which predates XSI.
This is a good day for CG. Autodesk has wasted too many years spreading its resources across too many places and I for one am thrilled they finally stopped wasting their customers' money on a dead end.
Almost all CGI is hand animated. Pretty much everything in Avatar even was motion captured but then redone by an animator. Motion capture is great for capturing intent but its data almost always ends up completely unused.
A normal country wouldn't permit such monopolies.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah I just finished a shot with butterflies. They looked perfect but "Felt too frenetic" so they got slower... and slower... and slower... now they fly in slow motion and are approved. In real life they would fall out of the sky like bricks.
Well, also the problem is, if you worked with one package for a long time you don't see (or want to see) the progress in other packages.. All those products have their pro's and con's, but as Autodesk is clearly making it's money on 3DMax and Maya there is a reason why they would dump Softimage, new/modern studio's seem to go a different way, they seem to use 3dmax and Maya more than Softimage.. If Softimage is such a great package (which ofcourse it is in your eye's as you have been working with it for ages), why are other companies not buying it? Appearantly softimage isn't making the money it should be.. It would be something else if Autodesk was just dumping it if it would still make them a lot of money.. Maybe the latest versions of Maya and 3dMax have a lot of features and workflows Softimage has and therefore there really is no actual reason to keep softimage..
It's always crap if your favorite product is scrapped, but in the end you still can keep using softimage if you want to, it still will do what you need it to do, but you won't get any new features..
Changing the left button to select does not change what the middle mouse button does.
True. But it does change what left+right mouse button does. If RMB is select, L+R can be set in Blender to act as middle. But if LMB is select, the only way to get middle functionality is to either have a physical middle button on your pointing device or install an operating system whose input processing can emulate a middle button before passing the events to Blender.