Well said, Andy, and I completely agree.
The way things have always been is Soft selectively talks to specific clients, or takes advantage of their production exposure via special projects. They read whatever forums, trades, whitepapers, and then sythesize their own solutions and workflows in as much secrecy as possible, in order to gain some kind of temporary advantage over the competition. That is, until the competition does one of two things:
-Immitates the feature in a way as to merely provide a bullet point in their marketing brochures
-Immitates the feature, but in a potentially better, production-tested way, learning from the mistakes of Soft and taking advantage of someone else's innovation.
If Soft's main exposure to production is via escalation, or special projects, it is already a self selected, self fullfilling direction on where they will develop tools. There's an entire class of studio out there that doesn't use escalation and doesn't need special projects because they have been figuring out how to solve things and how to workaround on their own. The input of such people is quite valuable, since they are already successful at what they are doing. Instead, it's likely that Soft is only hearing what's wrong with XSI, and how they need to make XSI work like the other existing product, rather than learning what works in production context that may be completely different or new.
I started the particle forum on XSIBase because for once I wanted production people from various walks to do some synthesis based on all the creative ways we've learned how to use particles and dynamics to push things beyond their initial intention. But more importantly, it helped provide examples of *what works*, and *what can work* if we get expanded powers, and the positive is always a better driving source for change than complaining about what's broken or comparing missing feature sets.
I would very much like to get this kind of discussion going again, specifically about animation workflow, rigging, lighting, shading, etc, and my last attempt ended when people started flooding the forum with wishlists instead of discussing the concepts and doing some synthesizing of what works. I can try again to get the forum going, but it's going to take more help and participation from folks in this list, people willing to discuss concepts, and perhaps reveal some tried and true as well as newly discovered production techniques. We need more than wishlists from feature tallyers, we need postive production experience!
Let me know which area to shift focus to and I'll do my best to keep the thread on topic and organized as we did with the particles stuff. But also realize that I want to keep the thread focused on one main area at a time, to optimize the creative energy and hopefully exhaust the ideas before moving on to something else. Lastly, I don't want to limit the discussion to XSI-centered thinking. It needs to be production-centered thinking, what works, and why.
-Brad
> -------Original Message-------
> I'm pretty sure Soft is hard at work on the new particle stuff. A while
> back, Ronald came by our office and talked to us for an hour or so about
> what we would like to see and what we didn't like in the existing
> particles, which was much appreciated. It's nice to work a block away
> from special projects (though I doubt we were the only people they
> talked to). Maybe it took a long time, but I think the XSIBase particle
> forum seemed to have a big effect on getting the message across that
> users really needed a new particle system to happen. And hopefully,
> we'll see a lot of those ideas represented in the finished product.
> Personally, I'd love to see more similar forums on other topics. Things
> shouldn't have to be as bad as the particle system before we start
> organizing our thoughts. I think several topics in rendering, including
> this one, could use some discussion. (I agree with pretty much
> everything you said, by the way, Luc).
>
> It's really not reasonable to expect Soft to parse through every little
> request or gripe we make on the mailing list (though I know and
> appreciate very much that they try). Likewise, it's not really
> reasonable to expect every post from users to be right on the money.
> What I do expect is that Softimage and the user community both continue
> to improve the lines of communication for discussing what features we
> really want and really need in future versions of the software. I think
> in terms of getting design ideas across, we still don't have it quite
> right with the list, escalation support or regular support. None of
> these channels does a good enough job, in my opinion, of formulating and
> sharing a consensus of multiple people's opinions. I always get an
> empty feeling in my brain when threads like this one die, because we
> really haven't formalized anything, and it's not totally clear what we
> want, but there's a lot of good thoughts going on. In an ideal world,
> with infinite resources, we would all gather and have a summit on render
> trees with users, mental ray employees, Softimage employees, and a small
> army of pizza guys in attendence. In the real world, maybe we should
> just think about taking what happened with the particles forum and
> seeing where we can take that sort of dialog. I bet with practice, we
> could figure out a really good system for conversing about a topic and
> documenting the consolidated opinions. I'm not saying it has to be this
> particular topic, but I just think, since there are obviously features
> and changes we'd all like to see, we should do that sort of thing more
> often, and think about how we can improve the process. We shouldn't
> wait for things to get as far behind as particles to consolidate our
> thoughts. Especially since it apparently always takes Montreal longer
> to implement things than they'd hope ;) Maybe we should even just pick
> a new topic every two months or something and have at it.
>
> -Andy
>
> Nick wrote:
>
> > and aren't we just tired of talking about that topic.
> >
> > I guess if the particles were fixed then you probably wouldn't have to
> > hear anything about it... the problem is nothing's been done about
> > them for what, 4 major version releases now at least? You can't just
> > expect the customers to give up on them and shut up, if anything, the
> > more you don't do anything about them, the more you'll hear noise
> > about it, until finally you don't hear jack and that's bad news
> > because it means all your customers have gone elsewhere...
>
>
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