wow brad, you have my full support. even if its little compared to
what hard core xsi ppl could contribute.
i agree 100% with the production solutions, because thats what we do,
we produce content. i dont get paid to work with xsi and enjoying it
(sadly) :) i get paid for delivered content.
as i do most things the first time in xsi i would love to share ideas,
workflows and workarounds, shortcuts and such at xsibase. i currently
worked throught rigging the last two weeks (maybe noticable on the
topics of my "please help me" mails) and i learned so much.
with some mind exchange a lot of ideas might grow. for now i just have
certain "feelings" about different things in xsi, that i think, could
be solved better. but i did not really think about it. such a
discussion could get it easily started.
maybe some rules for such a thread would be useful to keep it from
straying away...
ciao
franky
Friday, June 16, 2006, 7:58:10 AM, you wrote:
b> Well said, Andy, and I completely agree.
b> The way things have always been is Soft selectively talks to
b> specific clients, or takes advantage of their production exposure
b> via special projects. They read whatever forums, trades,
b> whitepapers, and then sythesize their own solutions and workflows
b> in as much secrecy as possible, in order to gain some kind of
b> temporary advantage over the competition. That is, until the
b> competition does one of two things:
b> -Immitates the feature in a way as to merely provide a bullet
b> point in their marketing brochures
b> -Immitates the feature, but in a potentially better,
b> production-tested way, learning from the mistakes of Soft and
b> taking advantage of someone else's innovation.
b> If Soft's main exposure to production is via escalation, or
b> special projects, it is already a self selected, self fullfilling
b> direction on where they will develop tools. There's an entire class
b> of studio out there that doesn't use escalation and doesn't need
b> special projects because they have been figuring out how to solve
b> things and how to workaround on their own. The input of such people
b> is quite valuable, since they are already successful at what they
b> are doing. Instead, it's likely that Soft is only hearing what's
b> wrong with XSI, and how they need to make XSI work like the other
b> existing product, rather than learning what works in production
b> context that may be completely different or new.
b> I started the particle forum on XSIBase because for once I wanted
b> production people from various walks to do some synthesis based on
b> all the creative ways we've learned how to use particles and
b> dynamics to push things beyond their initial intention. But more
b> importantly, it helped provide examples of *what works*, and *what
b> can work* if we get expanded powers, and the positive is always a
b> better driving source for change than complaining about what's
b> broken or comparing missing feature sets.
b> I would very much like to get this kind of discussion going again,
b> specifically about animation workflow, rigging, lighting, shading,
b> etc, and my last attempt ended when people started flooding the
b> forum with wishlists instead of discussing the concepts and doing
b> some synthesizing of what works. I can try again to get the forum
b> going, but it's going to take more help and participation from
b> folks in this list, people willing to discuss concepts, and perhaps
b> reveal some tried and true as well as newly discovered production
b> techniques. We need more than wishlists from feature tallyers, we
b> need postive production experience!
b> Let me know which area to shift focus to and I'll do my best to
b> keep the thread on topic and organized as we did with the particles
b> stuff. But also realize that I want to keep the thread focused on
b> one main area at a time, to optimize the creative energy and
b> hopefully exhaust the ideas before moving on to something else.
b> Lastly, I don't want to limit the discussion to XSI-centered
b> thinking. It needs to be production-centered thinking, what works, and why.
b> -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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