@Retail pricing means nothing if Avid isn't willing to give users deals. I can only speak from my own experience here. Alias has bent over backwards to slash prices (thousands of dollars) for us unofficially. Last year when we went to buy a copy of Soft it took weeks before we got an answer back and when we finally got somebody who was interested in selling us a copy they told us that the price wasn't negotiable. It left a bad taste in everybody's mouth here.
What I was getting at is that it doesn't matter how cheap the software is, if it doesn't do the job it's not a bargain. If you setup shop to support floating licenses or need to acquire/selloff licenses to keep the bottom line in the black - how flexible is the A|W system? Not much at all. Just getting a software in the door isn't the only cost, you have to maintain it.
The A|W people came into a few companies of mine in the past and also dropped their pants for deals, but I always shooed them away because when it came time to actually using the software, their tech support engineers were jerks. Heck, we even had a former A|W tech support guy working for us at the time and they still wouldn't help us. When we tried to get into a beta testing program, we were told that our company wasn't big enough....and we had nearly 30 licenses! Ever since then, I've stayed with SI as I can get more done with courteous help than without. I don't like being scammed into a purchase or screwed after I've made one.
XSI has much better rendering which is a big part of production in most places (if you're in post, you may need shadow casting particles for example). Given two packages at equal cost, wouldn't you pick the one that delivers better image quality?
@@You wont get an argument from me about rendering being better in XSI over Maya. It's a real sore point for lots of Soft users who went over to Maya but I think you overstress the importance of the renderer. The Maya renderer is bad, but it's functional.
That depends on what you do. Maya renderer is hardly functional for cartoon rendering or anything requiring utmost realism.
@But my comments were not meant to put down XSI but point out the fact that XSI needs to be "all that" and more if it's going to win back users. As an ex-Soft user who had to migrate to keep my carreer going (there is only one big shop left in Toronto that's using it for regular production) I can't over-stress the fact that I like Soft and I'd love to see more shops go back to it.
I'm in the same boat here in Chicago. But I don't think XSI has to be "all that" and more. It just has to hit the important points of production - modelling, rendering, animation editting, etc... If XSI does those well, the customers will come because the other available packages are all lopsided to one department or another.
@That's very presumptious of you. Don't assume that just because I'm using Maya means that I can't animate. There's no need to be so defensive, I certainly didn't mean for this to degenerate into a Maya vs. Soft discussion. It certainly doesn't help to generate meaningful discussion when your knee jerk reaction is to defend XSI at any cost and to talk down to somebody you don't even know.
Excuse me? Where did I say that I thought you couldn't animate, Huh? All I did was make a general observation based on my experience in production plus those I've talked to. A|W users tend to focus on FX and modelling - that doesn't mean ALL of them do that. What it does mean is that the software tends to get developed less in the animation department than the modelling, painting, or particles for example, as this is where the user requests fall. It doesn't mean you can't animate with the software or any less of an animator, but it does make the job a bit tougher compared to it's competitor.
@@As far as being better for animatiing hands down, I wouldn't go that far. XSI's Animation Mixer seems a lot better (but I don't do much non-linear stuff personally) and the Fcurve Editor has a more efficient workflow but Maya is pretty good when it comes to interactive object manipulation due to it's manipulators which is really nice for quick character posing.
You're talking about manipulation, I'm talking about motion editting - two different things. In my opinion, you can never have too many animation tools. The whole point of my previous statement is that animation continually seems to be an afterthought in the minds of A|W developers. If they keep that up, they'll only shoot themselves in the foot and eventually users will look for a solution outside of Maya. It has to play itself out more over time, but the ball has started to roll.
@Let's not forget that the dopesheet was missing until 1.5 which is what made lots of us traditional keyframe jockeys give up on XSI in the first place. To be fair however, I've been reassured by some good folks at SoftImage that that glaring omission didn't go unnoticed by them and that they haven't given up on us lowly keyframe animators.
Mixing is a very overlooked component of animating even with the likes of XSI and other NLA enabled softwares on the market. Cel animators have been working this way for decades, but in a more literal sense. I know I was waiting for it to arrive for many years. When you start animating with the mixer to any significant degree, you'll soon realize that the dopesheet becomes much less important than in the past. Other than being able to slide a few keyframes here or there before motion is compiled into a clip, it really doesn't have much purpose that can't be handled by the mixer more elegantly.
Also, what exactly are flexors in Maya?
@Basically, they are lattices at joints which control the way the bend behaves. It's a different workflow from traditional enveloping and point weighting (which Maya does too.)
Could you elaborate a tad bit more please?
Matt
Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
Softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com
