An Open Letter to Carl Bass, president and chief executive officer of Autodesk Media & Entertainment Dear Mr. Bass My name is Perry Harovas. You dont know me, but I am a 10 year Softimage user. 10 years is actually a small amount of time when compared to my peers who having been using Softimage for up to 20 years. I am writing to you because I cannot be silent on this. I have been in this business for 25 years. I started out using Lightwave in Video Toaster V1 on an Amiga computer. I then moved on to Alias PowerAnimator and took the new abilities of that software (over Lightwave) into feature films out of a small studio in (of all places) Newark, NJ. I was an Alpha tester of Maya, before it was even announced publicly. I put up with no docs, breaking code, a renderer that was written only months earlier and barely worked, changing workflows, etc. I learned everything I could about the software, and eventually co-authored the first book about Maya, Mastering Maya Complete 2. I was the loudest, most exuberant fan of Maya on the face of the planet. I couldnt get enough. I worked myself into bouts of sleeplessness in an effort to know more about this seemingly magical application that would allow me to create anything I could dream of. Except, in reality, the word dream is appropriate, because as I took on larger projects and tried to do more work with it, I found one of the largest obstacles with Maya was (and is) that it needs a support team behind it to code tools into either working together, or sometimes, working at all. A good example of this is when I was directing two 30 minute CG childrens shows with me and my small crew of 4 other people. We had 6 months to create 60 minutes of animation, including building the characters, rigging them, animating them, texturing, lighting, etc. An insane task given the budget, crew size and amount of animation. But we plunged head on into doing it. Then, after many, many minutes of animation had been done, we found that our characters were coming into our scenes with no animation except their mouth lip sync. Where had all the animation we did gone? Our one technical guy on staff looked into it and happened to find that the animation curves were still there, but had detached themselves from the character rig (his skeleton, if you will). Fortunately, he was able to code up a way to automatically reconnect the animation curves to the rig, saving months of work. We then realized we were not going to be the only people to have this issue. We spoke with Support, and they acknowledged this was a known issue. We even offered to give them our script to help others who were having similar issues. They refused to let us help. We then started experiencing render problems, referencing issues, and a list of other things so long that I cant remember it now. Needless to say, it was frustrating, it prevented the quality from being consistent, and endangered our whole company. We soldiered on, finishing the two shows on schedule, barely, and vowing to NEVER use Maya again. We eventually decided on Softimage|XSI. Sure it was rough re-learning a new application, but it was rewarding in that it worked, didnt fail us, and didnt need a dedicated team to produce work that was better than what we could produce in Maya. This was astonishing to me! Thoughts of Why did we not do this earlier? ran through my head. The power in one application seemed to be nearly limitless. Limitless, that is, until I started Alpha testing Moondust, which eventually became ICE. This was an area I knew nothing about, coding, and suddenly I was doing things that I could not believe. I created a way to have fur just appear on the silhouette of my cartoon dog, in literally 20 minutes of fiddling around with ICE. Even with the lack of documentation at that point, with the alpha, and then beta, status of the software, it was the most powerful tool I had ever used. Bar none. No doubt, No hyperbole. I could not believe what I could now do, just ME, not a team of people. Imagine what a team of people could do? Well, there is no need to imagine, we have many examples to point to from just the last few years: -The Lego Movie -The Mills 98% Human ad -The Embassys Science Project commercial -Iron Man -Pacific Rim -Now You See Me -Subaru Car Parts ad These are just off the top of my head. This software, the one your company just retired (also known as EOL, or End Of Life) is Softimage. You remember Softimage, dont you? You bought it from Avid in 2008. I wouldnt blame you for not remembering, it never showed up on your home page, it was barely promoted, and it was something that you had to hunt for in Siggraph demos. Softimage, the software that gave rise to dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (in a previous, less powerful, incarnation of the software). Softimage, the software that gave the world Terminator 2, Death Becomes Her, Babe, Casper, Jumanji, Mars Attacks and just too many others to list. Softimage, the software that invented Inverse Kinematics. Softimage, the software that Animal Logic used to create the number one movie in America at the time Autodesk made this announcement. Of course, I could go on. But I am sure you get the point. This is the software that your company just killed. That really is the only word for it, KILLED. Killed, because it is now seen by many as obsolete even though, as you hopefully know, it is the newest of the 3 DCC apps your company owns and far from obsolete. It is now perceived that way because of this action. I have been in visual effects and animation production my entire career, and a few years ago I also started teaching. In 2007, I moved myself and my family from the East Coast of the USA to Illinois. While there, I helped start a new college in Chicago called Flashpoint, The Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which was renamed to Tribeca | Flashpoint Academy when Robert De Niros Tribeca, purchased 50% of the school. I was the Chair of the Visual Effects and Animation Department. I wrote the entire curriculum in my department. The software world was 100% open to me, I could use anything I felt would be appropriate. I chose to use Softimage, not Maya, as the main application to teach the students. I took on what I called an agnostic approach to teaching 3D software, in that students would learn the best tool for the job, and hopefully not be as software biased as my generation was/is. The reason for this, as I told them, was because you never know when your software will just vanish, the company will kill it, or go out of business. Wow, I wish I wasnt right about that one... Knowing how to use many applications, how to be aware of what was going on behind the curtain of the software, was (and is) far more important and helped prevent being unable to work due to not having skills in one application, especially if that application was discontinued. Well, now because of the actions that your company took on March 4, 2014, that has happened, and I am in exactly that position. I can continue to use Softimage for a couple of years, but as you no doubt understand, the stigma associated with using EOL Software (never mind teaching it) is too great to bear. The driver support would quickly become a problem, the renderer support would be an major issue, and before too long, it will become impossible to use Softimage in production. So your company has now given me, all of us Softimage users, a choice. We can use 3DS Max or we can use Maya. Well, I chose not to learn 3DS Max as it relied too heavily on plugins, and Maya, well, you now know how that played itself out for me... I will make a choice, but it will be to not use Autodesk products anymore. I am choosing to learn an entirely new 3D DCC application, and I can assure you it will not be an Autodesk product. I could easily go back to using Maya, especially with my history with the software. I choose not to. See? A choice. Even if I thought Maya was a great base of code on which to build the future DCC application that will rule the world (and I certainly do not), I wouldnt use Maya based upon principal alone. Maya is not a great base to build upon, because as you are well aware, it is more than 17 years old and wasnt written when multi-core processors were even a dream in the labs of chip makers. It is really like tearing down the 5 story building, in favor of making a 10 story building on the foundation of a 17 year old house that has been patched together with one new idea after another. The foundation is showing its age, the wood is starting to rot, and yet the plan is to build on top of this base. That is what I believe you are doing with your companys plans to build upon Maya. A company that does this to their loyal customers, in my opinion, is a company that does not have the best interests of those customers at heart. A company that does, what your company did in less than 6 years (killing a product) is a company that should not have made the purchase of that product in the first place. Was it not obvious, when Autodesk evaluated the purchase of Softimage, that having three DCC apps was not a good financial decision? Was it not obvious that this fairly small market segment could not sustain development on these three apps? If it wasnt obvious, then perhaps there is more wrong with Autodesk than anyone realized. Unless, there was another reason to buy Softimage, but that would be pure speculation... So, what now? I now teach at another well respected institution, and continue to work in the industry very actively. Will I still teach Maya? Yes. It is part of the curriculum, and will help these students get jobs in the industry. However, I will be teaching another product as well, again, to prevent what has happened to me and my peers from happening to these students that are just starting out on this career path. Mr. Bass, I have seen interviews with you. I believe you are a kind person. You certainly seem to be in love with this business. I hate the decisions that your company made, that you approved, but I dont personally hold any hatred for you. I just wanted you to know that there are many, many artists out there that just want to continue to use the application that we chose to use. We had a choice, and Softimage was what we chose to use. Taking away that option, your company has now asked us to chose software that we could have chosen before, and did not. This isnt a choice, this is a hijacking. I cannot speak for others, but, as you may now know, the overall sentiment of Softimage users is to chose NOT to use Autodesk products anymore. I can only believe this wasnt what Autodesk, or you, wanted. We are a very passionate bunch, who now are passionately opposed to using Autodesk products. Again, I cant speak for all of us, but the forums on your competitions websites are filled with users looking to switch. The most asked question on these forums seems to be something like: How do I do this thing I used to do in Softimage, in your app? That should tell you something Mr Bass. The users of Softimage just want to keep using Softimage, its workflow, its amazing tools, and not be burdened by the archaic workflow of your other two DCC apps. They want to do amazing work. They want to be able to feed their families and to keep their employees. They are so hungry for this, they are looking for this workflow in the welcoming arms of your competitors. The amount of money this may end up costing Autodesk in the not too distant future will most likely dwarf the amount of money it would have taken to just keep Softimage going. I didnt go to business school, but even I can see this isnt a great way to run a business. So, after this long email (that I actually edited believe it or not). where do I stand? Well, I want to ask you to reconsider your companys decision. This cannot be an easy matter, and I am sure I dont know all the legal and financial problems this may create. But in a naive, passionate, and yes, tearful, way, I want to ask you: Please bring back Softimage. Please keep this software we all love going. Please just keep it alive in the most basic way. Keep fixing bugs, keep updating the support for graphics drivers, keep updating the SDK to allow the large community of developers to continue to enhance it. Please do this for us, the people who put their faith, their financial dependence, in the software that your company owns. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Perry Harovas
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:18:40 +0000
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