Softimage retired by ADSK

Sad news. One of the best software I ever tried. A joy work with it.
Blame upon ADSK, never put money into this company.

http://www.jigsaw24.com/news/news/11949-autodesk-softimages-retirement-what-you-need-to-know/

is there a facepalm in this forum? Really, I think the only good 3d package in autodesk’s possession. Unbelievable.

They say they will be using softimage functionalities in max and maya… Looking forward to see the bug mayhem may come from this

for me, XSI is the only one 3d package that comparable to Blender
:frowning:
RIP

Page doesn’t exist anymore. Rumours are a dangerous thing sometimes :slight_smile:

Page was removed, but was only a question of time.
This is reported:

Autodesk Softimage’s retirement: what you need to know Autodesk have just announced that they will be retiring Softimage over the next couple of years. The good news is that it’ll be going out with a bang, with a final version slated for release in 2015. So why kill off Softimage? Well, Autodesk already have two insanely popular, industry standard 3D software products on their books – 3ds Max and Maya – and want to concentrate all their efforts on those, and start adding Softimage’s functionality into the Entertainment Creation Suites. So it’s not a proper goodbye, more like ‘see you around’. What do I do now? Anyone with Softimage and a current subscription will be able to migrate to a bundle of Softimage 2015 and 3ds Max or Maya free of charge to ease their transition over the next two year period. After that time, you’ll simply be migrated to the most up to date version of 3ds Max or Maya. The transition isn’t compulsory though, and there are a few things that current Softimage users can do. Softimage customers looking to expand their user base in the short term can buy a bundle of Softimage with Max or Maya for £3900. There’s also a rental licence available too, which you can pay for either on a perpetual or quarterly basis. How about Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites? Now for Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suites. For the 2015 releases, there will only be two versions of the suite – Standard and Ultimate. Customers on the Premium suite will be able to transition to the Ultimate, but downgrading to Standard won’t be possible. As only advanced subscriptions are available for the Ultimate suite, it looks like the prices of these will be lowered too. What about support? Don’t worry, Autodesk will still have your back covered with support. Subscription customers will continue to receive support for Softimage for two years until April 2016 or until their current subscription contract had run out. Service packs for Softimage are expected to be provided until April 30th 2016, and if you want to remain on subscription for Softimage but not migrate, you can retain your subscription until 30 April 2016.

The link is an ADSK reseller, not a blog. Also, no more softimage this year into techs preview and discussion. This time is practical sure.

If it is a joke, it is a very sick one. If it is true, it is a good reason for any Autodesk user to start looking around (hint: Blender and Houdini).

I’ll wait for the official announcement. I’ve seen this pop up from “legitimate sources” at least half a dozen times over the years.

The rumor has been going around strongly for a few days/weeks, I understand, and now this Autodesk reseller leaked these details (dates, etc). If you really need to wait for the official announcement to believe it, you won’t have to wait long: supposedly it is coming in less than 4 hours, at noon Pacific time.

My question for the Blender community is if there is anything that can be done to make Softimage users feel more comfortable using Blender, or to make it more attractive for them to adopt Blender in some capacity? Reading the unofficial Softimage forum (si-community.com), their users are very angry and very sad. As they should be, since some of them have been dedicated to Softimage for up to 20 years already, and their general consensus is that there is no other software in the market today that is all-around as capable, smooth, and stable as Softimage. Can Blender be demonstrated to them to be a worthy substitute, at least in some use cases? I really feel for them, and I’m personally sad as well, because I bought a couple of licenses of XSI in the past, spent many months learning it, and intended to eventually go back to it, except that I had been feeling uneasy about Autodesk’s handling of the software.

One thing is for sure though, this makes a very strong case against using Autodesk software specifically, and proprietary software in general. The concept of open-source software sounds absolutely brilliant right now (not that it wasn’t before, but this case is major evidence in favor of OSS).

The main things that keep people in Softimage are ICE, Arnold, Face Robot, Species, and Lagoa. Blender really doesn’t offer anything like any of these, so I doubt we’ll see a big exodus to Blender from their user base. I expect to see Houdini have a noticeable user bump though.

Well, from reading their forums, there are several other strengths that they praise as well, like modeling, character animation and smooth, painless, flexible workflow. While ICE is a major factor for them, I haven’t seen anyone mention any of the others you listed. Arnold is a 3rd party renderer that supposedly has at least a beta (alpha?) connector for Blender.

Agreed on Houdini for people doing FX work, but for character animation, the only two alternatives I’ve seen mentioned as viable are Maya and Blender, and many of the users are 1) Loathe to stay with Autodesk 2) Loathe to use Maya, a software which many of them consider to be inferior and outdated.

I still see an opportunity for Blender here.

ICE alone is enough to keep me licensed with SI. The modeling and animation tools are nice, but are honestly nothing special. ICE just makes both easier.

Face Robot is a built in module in SI for generating facial rigs and importing facial mocap.

Lagoa is a built in physics library, fully threaded, and fully supported by ICE. There isn’t anything else out there quite like it in terms of speed and functionality.

Arnold is FAR more than an external renderer for SI. It’s deeply integrated and supports nearly ALL ICE functions and nodes. Blender has, currently, no Arnold support at all. The only alternative is Maya (and, soon, Houdini).

Species is an add-on that is basically an integrated MakeHuman on steroids that produces production-ready IK/FK rigs and base models in two clicks.

Animation tools are the only thing I could see people coming to Blender for, but until we can sort out our painfully slow scene updates and get on top of a truly up-to-date viewport experience, people who join in will just find the tools to be wanting.

Thanks for the details, m! I was vaguely familiar with some of those, but particular about Arnold, I didn’t know it was that deeply integrated. I believe there is some work being done or on the roadmap for Blender regarding the viewport, isn’t there?

Viewport work has been in the pipeline for years. A couple of GSOC projects have tried to tackle it, but have been taking a questionable approach, IMO (prioritizing OpenGL-ES because “mobile is the future”, wasting time adding abstraction layers to continue supporting 10 year+ old hardware, etc.). Additionally, as far as I know none of the changes have made it into trunk since 2010. We really need a dedicated viewport team, but as everyone is well aware, it comes down to money and manpower, both of which are in short supply.

Understood, thanks.

By the way, official confirmation from Autodesk: http://area.autodesk.com/softimagetransition (“We regret to inform… blah blah”) :frowning:

Here’s the thread about alternatives for character animation: http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=4954

I believe that AD will just split the functionnality of SI and merge them, depending on their use, with 3DS and/or Maya.

I have suspected this day would come ever since they started relocating Softimage devs to work on Maya and making each release of Softimage less ad less impressive. But damn, I really liked Softimage. It was the only Autodesk product that I actually liked and I will be really sad to see it go.

FU Autodesk!

And then their super-bloated software packages can just keep stacking on the bloat. I hate Autodesk today. You know… more than usual days.

Well, AD learned a bit from Adobe last year… Welcome to the future… Autodesk CC!

http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-softimage/overview

Yep :frowning: At least we have untill 2016 to decide what we’re going to use, but to be honest, I dont know what we’re going to do. Because ICE has become such an integral part of our pipeline. We’ve developed our own ICE systems for Fur, Skinning, Instancing. Now all that work is going to get thrown away. I’m incredibly sad right now, Softimage is an amazing peice of software, it’s the only peipce of software I enjoyed using besides Blender.

:frowning:

I 'm sorry for those XSI users ; all of them knew this was coming when Adsk bought XSI :frowning: .

However I would like take the opportunity of pointing out the super important factor of fighting this menace called ADsk.

We all know that funds allow faster and bigger development, and Blender is not having enough of it.
We all know that Blender has a huge potential to go much more further than Adsk products.
We all know at some point in the future ADsk will release a refactored new version of Maya and Max (Probably written from scratch).

Funding blender for development is a very important factor. Donations hire Developers- Developers add functionality and features - Functionality allows us to do our work easily and be happy and more relaxed - Ease of use and feature rich suite attract more Adesk victims to notice and try blender - Studios implement/convert to Blender.

But current number of Blender Fund donors is 325 .
Current funds total to 4075 Euros per month.

if only another 200 people would donate the minimum amount of 5 euros each month. It would add +1000 Euros to that 4075.As far as I remember that meant the Blender can hire 1 full time developer.

if 2000 people donated 5 euros each month we could hire 10 full time developers. 5 euros per month is nothing people.

5 euros is a six-pack beer…
5 euros is a pack of cigarettes…
5 euros is a cup of coffee at starbucks…

So we have a chance to help and make grow what we all love as a community. Blender. Truth be told all the developers and Ton make it so easy to help.

So lets all say a big “Fuck you autodesk !” and help blender grow. :slight_smile: