Maya came from the merger of Alias and Wavefront and the mess at SGI. Most of them came from small companies with tiny product lines. Autodesk had sort of become the default acquirer of 3D animation products. That's when I dropped Softimage.Īs video editing went mainstream and Avid's sales of overpriced furniture declined, Avid sold off the 3D product to Autodesk. They did convert from Softimage to "Softimage XSI", which broke all existing plug-ins and didn't have a plug-in API that worked. They had no clue what to do with the 3D product. Softimage had a good video editor in addition to the 3D line, and that's what Avid really wanted. Avid made overpriced film and video editing systems, sold with semi-customer hardware and built into cool-looking furniture. Every low-end GPU today has far more power.) (I had a $2000 Dynamic Graphics card in an NT workstation back then. It was too hard to use, and required more graphics hardware than most users had back then. Microsoft bought them, and when I went up to Redmond, the Microsoft guys were talking about making Softimage mass-market software. Back then, Softimage was #1 in Hollywood.
I wrote Falling Bodies, the ragdoll physics plug-in for Softimage, back in 1996-1997, so I got to see this happen. Alias transformed Wavefront into Maya in roughly this timeframe, while MS starved out "dot release" life support on SoftImage. Microsoft bought SoftImage, as a part of the effort to displace high-end Unix workstations with PC's running NT. 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. if you try to make ti more nimble and speed it up, well, it looks more fake.Īccurately simulating inertia and gravity is very difficult in hand animation and very tedious, and it still has the potential to look wrong. If you map the motions directly, it'll act heavier and slower. 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. No, practically all CGI is motion captured - actors in suits covered in reflective balls act out the actions. 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? If Blender can get its UI overhaul right in the next release, some XSI users may migrate to the open-source software. the all-CG primates in "Dawn Of The Planet Of The APES"). It was particularly strong at pulling off complex character animation, including complex muscle-and-sliding-skin simulations (e.g. It has powered films ranging from the first Jurrassic Park to the recent LEGO movie. the once-excellent Autodesk Combustion), because it didn't make enough money for Autodesk's profit hungry shareholders. But this is hardly the first time Autodesk has killed a successful product (e.g. A lot of people are very pissed off about this. 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. Some are considering moving to the open-source Blender 3D software, to escape from Autodesk's business policies completely.
SELLING SOFTIMAGE 3D SOFTWARE
Many are considering migrating to SideFX's "Houdini" (), 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. Many Softimage users are wondering what other 3D software they can migrate to. Its going to be called "Bifrost", as it is the "second coming" of Softimage ICE. 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. There is a huge thread about this over on, anybody who built their studio pipeline around Softimage XSI, including many indy game developers, is royally screwed. Autodesk bought Softimage XSI for cheap, and just killed it to remove competition from their flagship products 3DMAX and MAYA.
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