Long time in DeskTopPublishing…
Do you remember the excellent Macromedia FreeHand?
Compare this over 10 years old app to any illustrator, or any open source inkscape and see.
It was able to do miracles on single core engines ~300MHz. Ram ~100-200Mb
It was able to handle a multi pages small publication. Like QuarkXpress or PageMaker… InDesign didn’t exist.
Macromedia… what a wonderful software company, flash, dreamweaver, etc etc
…
Adobe did it
Auto Bulldozer did it.
Pixologic? This is different, they had Sculptris. But they didn’t retire it.
Not at all. They just stopped developing it.
In this case, they didn’t adopt dynamic tessellation, no, their engine can’t handle it.
…
You gonna bet?
who’s next?
MAX or MAYA?
yep Freehand. Loved that program.
I bet sculptris dynamic tesselation will go into the new zbrush 5 with 64 bits and such.
I forgot the developers name Dr.Peter or something like that is he still working on pixologic.
I think they wont drop any software anymore. The only unexpected thing will be to merge both into a new suite without actually merging any code. I bet they are writing something from scratch which houses advantages of both sofware called " The Uber Pro Suite of Unparalleled 3 Dimensional Experience". Which is $ 600/month + $1500 yearly support fee. 
Autodesk selling Softimage is going to happen as much as Adobe selling Freehand.
Same deal they were interested in technology to include into their other packages.
only after Freehand was owned by Adobe did Illustrator get somewhat usable page and pen tools.
To let people buy such an old software source code (Freehand) is still a thread to Adobe.
Thus I hardly imagine ever AD selling XSI.
During a web conference on Tuesday, an Autodesk representative said that the company made the decision not to sell Softimage on because it now contains too much proprietary Autodesk IP.
So that nixes any ideas for open-source, as well. As if they’d ever consider that anyway.
I feel sorry for all Softimage User’s… ICE always impressed me, being a Node-Guy.
I could not say this move has improved my confidence in AD. (Not that there was any to begin with to be honest.)
It’s at least reassuring for my beliefs. Capitalism built so much which it is destroying now. Just a matter of how much it’s gonna take with it.
*The transition period is expected to last until February 1, 2016, approximately 2 years. (Autodesk reserves the right to change this date at any point in time and without notice)
I just hope they don’t put it out earlier, for the sake of all User’s and Companies.
There is some updated information. I must say that I am raging right now!
I would have been (kinda) OK about Autodesk reshuffeling the Softimage dev team to work on similar functionality and improvements on Max and Maya but putting them to work on Bifrost? WHAT THE ACTUAL **** AUTODESK?
Furthermore they are saying that they won’t port ICE to any other software, only that the “design concept” of ICE will live on.
But worst of all they claim they do it because they can’t “afford” to continue developing Softimage. This is the part that infuriates me the most. A multi-BILLION dollar company cannot “afford” to develop Softimage while they are paying their CEO’s absolutely ridiculous sums and still puts reasources into developing two versions of Maya, two versions of Max and SIXTEEN ****ing versions of CAD software!
I think they mis-spoke they couldn’t afford to cut into their shareholder’s profit margins:) like the BSG line “this has happened before, it will happen again”
The Foundry decided to do a 50% off deal for SoftImage users that wish to add Modo to their tool set to soften the blow a bit and show their support.
I propose the Blender Foundation should respond in kind, and offer a similar deal. I believe, BF can do a 100% off deal.
…oh wait a minute… 
I don’t think Blender could be a “replacement” for Softimage (specially for ICE, which is some sort of black magic hehe), but I DO think that this is a good oportunity for the users that will start to hunt for options to find in Blender a pretty good piece of software that can be added into their pipelines, even for small tasks. And who knows… maybe that could lead to get a lot more development in the future.
I obviously think Flakes will be the ICE replacement, though I have no idea how people will ultimately perceive it once it’s out. I haven’t used Lagoa, but I suspect Flakes+Bullet (which I will do) would come pretty close. I do hope eventually people will also use it to make things like species and face robot. There no reason why you couldn’t do that.
…I have no solution for Arnold or viewport performance, though. Flakes can’t solve everything 
My deepest wish is that production studios will someday realize they could stop pouring money to megacorps like autodesk and adobe, and start investing that to foss development. In the long term that will produce much greater returns, and shenanigans like this would never happen.
Maybe not so in a future, https://vimeo.com/87210801 Flakes. Besides ICE I was really impressed with the viewport. Well my post was really tongue in cheek. I just feel for my former colleagues on a Softimage pipeline.
ICE is a very deep and complex things, you can modelling, doing particle effect and rigging with it. ICE cover practical the entire software (except hair, was on schedule, but never done). ICE is visual programming, not scripting, I think (I’m far be an expert) can be really different, correct me if I wrong.
About viewport, yes, softimage one is rock solid. Hope viewport FX in blender will be ready a day (possible something more faster than bmesh…)
AnvilSoap, I didn’t know your work before. Look great.
I have high hopes for Flakes, but even if you can get all of the functionality exposed, and even if the speed of node evaluation can be at ICE levels, there are a lot of ui and usability tweaks that still need to happen to get it up to snuff. I’m sitting here with fingers crossed though!
EDIT: Was on my phone before, but now I can expand upon what I mean.
There are lots of things that SI and ICE do to make things easier for people. They seem little, but make a huge difference. Things like being able to drag and drop nodes onto objects, or info from the outliner onto node and have it intelligently figure out what info you’re trying to get based on the node or object types is a HUGE time saver. Things like being able to drag a ICE tree output into the toolbar and get an automatic custom operations button save time as well. Smart, contextual right click menus for nodes; auto-tree generation from manual work grabbed in order from the script browser; auto-completion; smart hookups and auto-expansion for individual nodes. All of these things seem little, but come together to make working as a TA with ICE a dream. Nothing will truly be able to compete unless they can nail the usability afterthought that has gone into the system.
How could it possibly happen, though? All the major packages have been developed for decades, all the top people are working at the respective companies. There is no foundation/company that is even accepting investment. You can’t expect companies to hand out donations, there must be some viable product being offered here, like support contracts. Nobody is even doing that, even though it is (at least part of) the business model of many other OSS projects.
I get the feeling that Autodesk doesn’t even understand their customers very well, because neither Max nor Maya are a replacement for Softimage, in terms of functionality. What’s going to happen is that people will jump ship from Autodesk to The Foundry and SideFX, which are far from being “megacorps” and whose VFX products are the core of their business, not some side-project.
Seems rather insulting - why even bother releasing a new version when you’re discontinuing it?
oh contraire - you can expect it to happen, and in fact its been happening for years already.
The thing is its not binary yes/no situation - companies use Blender and fund development already (hire devs to work on code). But OK, we could see more of it, its a bit of a chicken/egg problem too since there are not so many devs to take on contract work.
And yes - someone is working on support model
http://www.blendersupport.com
also a bit with the blendernetwork.
Probably to justify having done a bunch of work already since the previous release.
Heh, people likely already think I’m hyping Flakes way too much, so I try not to babble about all the nitty gritties of the thing. I have considered all of these thing and I’m in complete agreement. I will add these and a lot of other convenience things over time.
oh contraire - you can expect it to happen, and in fact its been happening for years already.
I guess you’re free to disagree, but I don’t see any exodus from Autodesk to Blender, even though Autodesk keeps giving more on and more reasons to jump ship.
I outlined earlier why this is unlikely to work out. Maybe it works for smaller, isolated features, but it doesn’t work as a core development model (which you should know better than I, seeing who actually contributes to the codebase).
And yes - someone is working on support model
This is more like tutoring and less than classic support contracts. Where does the money go for this support? To the the tutors! Maybe a little of that money left over for the BF, I don’t know.
What Blender lacks is an entity that takes responsibility for their product. It could be argued that Autodesk doesn’t do that, either - which is one reason why they get a lot of hate.
@Zalamander - well - user migration from other apps to Blender, and having companies fund Blender are 2 separate things.
Strange you say its unlikely to work out - when it already has worked out. Not sure why you’re so convinced this isn’t feasible.
Blender-support is new so time will tell, agree with your other points regarding support, we need much better support but almost nobody finds this fun compared to making 3d art or coding 