shame indeed. Many users indeed. XSI superior, I know, right? Imagine what Softimage later came to be. Facerobot kicked everyone’s derrieres!
Yeah I know. Did you see the mention of thousands of speedtree instances with wind? That’s
what I meant. I know it can say handle a gigapoly of a single model. I need something that can do forests, a spaceship and 3 characters…Softimage could do it in stride…not much else can these days.
ANd Maya, yeah it can but with much pain on the user side.
BTW how’s the Lima tv station.? Still doing motion graphics? Or did you move on.
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Yes it did. Face robot was very cool.
ICE was incredibly brilliant.
Like I said before it’s crisis time in 3D land.
I hope C4D solves it’s yesterday technology today problem because without being able to handle heavy
geometry which was a staple of Softimage circa 2005…one has to wonder WHY ANY software can’t handle it…especially ‘flagship’ software in almost 2020. Shame.
I had no idea 2.8 blender would have a new interface…I kinda gave up any hope and hadn’t bothered to check it out. The narcissistic idea that the previous interface was something to be worked with was laughable… Right click select…for what? Ego, to be different, special? It certainly wasn’t \innovative’.
It was just annoying.
And now after all the years the ego relents and we now have left click select…which btw is pretty much how you select anything in most all software…not just 3D. Or was the team dyslexic?
I’ll give it another worl…but if it can’t handle thousands of wind driven instances and heavy characters I’m spitting in the wind, no? This is what I need… a software that can at least do that job well.
I don’t want everyone to think Softimage was the end all be all, but be honest nothing out there comes close. Nothing. Was it perfect, no. Was it going in the right direction, yeah until autodesk lied
and sank it. Then gutted it to bolt onto FrankenMaya. Like poor mudbox should have been lightyears ahead of zbrush by now…with all the money and genius talent at autodesk, right?
I’ve tried C4D and like it except for the geo limitation which makes it unusable to me.
Houdini has great tools and architecture but having node chart a mile long to do simple tasks
is stupid.
Maya, is FUBAR nothing can save that garbage.
Again, I’m not gas lighting, just very very frustrated. Like after all this time Photoshop STILL can’t effectively manipulate true 32bit images. Why, that’s where the tech is going adapt. But no, they buy and kill…now allegorithmic is doomed.
I love the idea of open source and whole heartedly support that. Open source removes the stock-holder incentive to cheat the customer and release garbage.
I’ll test Blender again with the new interface (logical, usable?) and see. Believe me I want it to work for me. I just want to create and have the least tech inhibitions in the way of that.
They’re just tools and if the screwdriver doesn’t fit the screw, get the other screwdriver.
The problem is, none of the screwdrivers are good enough.
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I was dismayed when Autodesk bought out Softimage, but at the very least, I figured they’d flay Max and/or Maya, then wrap the skin around XSI’s bones… Instead, they just hacked off some fingers and toes and half-hazardly attached them in random places.
Everyone that comes from other software thought this at first, including me, but it was done for a valid reason. It separates gizmo manipulation from selecting, so the Gizmo doesn’t get in the way. That said, I still switched back to left select at the earliest opportunity. Just too ingrained to avoid for such a small, occasional annoyance.
Ok, I was really wondering about that. It just made no sense to me, now it does.
Not sure it was a good decision but a logical one I suppose…if all you dream is discreet logic.
Interesting reason. Softimage had a quirky duplicate as well but at least it wasn’t necessary to paste…however you could CTR-C and CTR-V in Ice and rendertree.
I was off my meds yesterday and cranky, pardon.
I’m just so very disappointed at how things are shaping up in the 3D software world.
One of the larger problems is environment creation with terrain@least 4096*4096 nominal, grass, trees, flowers and props. Softimage does it fine. The GPU handles it fine, Maya not as well and the rest, well no. So what to do?
By this time…24years after doing Reboot I thought things would be much farther along.
For instance, How about at least a coherent muscle and ‘skin sliding’ system as straight forward as marvelous designer. Nope. Still rather primitive. Envelope weighting is an all or nothing parenting relationship based on percentages. Still relying on cluster shape anim to alleviate joint hose bending tragedy…why no viable option to hold volume.
Geometry crashin is still a big problem from hair to cloth to skin…why? A quarter century later and envelope weighting hasn’t advanced much
For me Softimage is a great final staging software. Sculpt in whatever, clothes in marvelous, paint in what works for you,plants speedtree, plant factory, xfrog…etc. then a staging software to bring it all together.
Im only harping on Softimage because it can do what it does…it could be any software…it’s just a tool.
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Like all things, it slowly moves towards entropy, I suppose. 20 years ago, everything in 3D was new and exciting. The industry was abuzz with bright-eyed and bushy tailed artists marveling at how someone managed to create convincing facial wrinkles before the age of zbrush. And developers were marching miles, instead of today’s inches, across the uncanny valley.
Now days, the industry seems afraid to stray too far from the status-quo. That’s part of why I love Blender. It’s polarizing for some, but the Blender fellas aren’t afraid to try unconventional ideas and see what works. 
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The industry has long switched to Katana, Clarisse and Gaffer for final scene assembling, lighting, shading and rendering, using Alembic, USD and OpenVDB for moving data in their pipelines.
This was necessary because Maya and not even Softimage can deal with these amounts of data.
I’m currently using Ross Xpression and Ross Cambot to do virtual objects for the same News Channel in Lima, 3d is mostly a hobby for me, so I’m using blender a lot. C4D I use also for xparticles because that plugin is a beast. If C4d can overcome its slow performance (and I’m sure they can) they could be king in 3D. Sadly, Epic doesn’t have an extra million dollars for Maxon.
Yes, I know about all those. Tried Clarisse very interesting.
Guess I was pining for the older days when everything was under one hood…but seriously that’s just not possible anymore.
The trend is like going back to wavefront. Open modeler, save, open kinemation, etc.
But all the back and forth can get mind numbing. So then things were stuffed under one hood…but that came to an end when specialty software came in strong.
It’s necessary because no one can expect one software to do it all.
Softimage tried real hard even with a built in compositor.
Then when z and mud came along it’s like really?..more features to stuff into one program.
As things matured and some things became relatively standard like sub-d, .obj, FBX etc
things could be more easily moved in and out of different software.
That’s when things broke off in many different directions. Different software for clothes, plants, terrain…etc.
So certainly it makes sense in a big production enviro, but it’s not for the freelance desktop guys.
Way too expensive to build even a mild pipeline. Ever notice how expensive speedtree is?
And there’s one for games and one for cinema and you not supposed to use the cinema version for games…lol…why…mo money.
Maya and Softimage couldn’t handle it because they’re last century code based in obsolete 32bit systems.
Both were sorely in need of a core upgrade. Even still, it makes more sense to fractalize 3d into many different software, even if it’s daunting to learn so many.
Ramblin man…I know
Well I’m in Trujillo if you ever want to learn for real.