All-rounded 3D softwares cannot please the specific requirements of each studio and each user, and that’s fair enough. As good as Softimage could be, it was a battle lost in advance. I sometimes wished to be ignorant too-it would have helped with my zen.īut at the end of the day, let’s face it. All they knew was Maya, they couldn’t compare it to anything else. My colleagues wouldn’t understand my frustration. Even now, I still refuse to do in Maya a task as simple as painting some skin weights. I spent my first weeks (months?) asking my teammates how they could possibly work with a such software. I found many of Maya’s daily tasks and the design of its API to be retarded. What dumbstrucked me was the process to get to that same result. The concepts in rigging are pretty much the same everywhere. I tried hard to approach this transition from an open-minded pespective and there was no big issue in transferring my rigging skill set. I landed a job at Weta Digital and had to learn Maya.
Meanwhile I was dealing with my own struggle in parallel. Softimage was marketed as a plug-in for Maya, had less features implemented, the developers eventually moved to the Maya team, and always more debates were being fired up on the list. We were proud to be Softimage users even though we started to feel more and more abandoned by Autodesk after each new release. It also quickly became indispensable.Ī Softimage ICE compound credit: Benjamin Paschke (with permission) Everyone had a blast using it, countless of inspiring demonstrations of the tool kept emerging on the Internet. With the implementation of the nodal graph ICE in July 2008, things quickly became out of control. That was a bunch of active, friendly, helpful, and innovative souls. On top of the quality of the software itself, both the developers and the community were forming a great symbiosis. Thanks to its well-thought architecture, it never got on the way when complex work was required. Some softwares are simple to use but don’t get you very far. Here again, everything made sense, even for a total beginner like me, and I quickly got my first scatter tool going. I struggled quite a bit at understanding how to write my code in the first place but the API itself was no problem. That’s how I started to use the Softimage SDK. I never wrote any line of code before then but I thought it would be a good idea to also learn how to develop. Thanks to that in no time I felt comfortable to get some rigs going. There was nothing preventing me from applying my ideas-Softimage had a fast learning curve, it was intuitive, and made perfect sense. My goal was to learn rigging and it was the best tool for that. I realized how stupid I was to give up so easily before. For that reason I took the time to setup my own shortcuts, to get used to the UI, and to get some sensations going. I had no other choice if I wanted to land an internship anyways. It’s only when I got in touch with Action Synthèse in 2005 that I got back into it. I didn’t like the default shortcuts, I didn’t like the UI.
I kept reading good reviews about the recently released Softimage|XSI and decided to try it out one day. Everyone within the online community that I was frequenting found it hard to use. It looked complicated and unintuitive, which paradoxically excited me. When I started to learn 3D on my own as a teenager, I used to play around with Maya 2.5.