Ogre Forums

sinbad wrote:Holy cow.

So on the serious pro side, what does this leave? Houdini?

Mudbox VS Zbrush
Softimage's ICE VS Houdini
Toxic VS After Effects

I really think that the next steps are focused to beat Adobe Premiere and maybe a RT tool to fight vs OGRE?

So who wants to bet on whether Adobe buys out Autodesk, Autodesk buys out Adobe, or Google buys them both?

Autodesk is lacking the 2d art side, Adobe is lacking the 3d stuff (although CS3 can load max models).

There's already Adobe Max 2008.

Wow that looks just wrong.
It is amazing how big companies can destroy the competition but just throwing money at it.
For then tens to hundreds of millions of dollars is just pocket change, but is it the cost of a business operation to get a competing product out of the way.
In a way it the ultimate authoritarian control.
In some places it is the state that tells you what to do, here it is the big corporations that tell you what you will do. Oh, what was I thinking, it is Fascism.
I was in one on those companies that was bought by another large corporation and as result lots of people simple lost their job because of downsizing of the studio.
On another note, it is no like they are buying anything of any relevance, XSI wasn’t going anywhere.

VictorMoran wrote:Wow that looks just wrong.
It is amazing how big companies can destroy the competition but just throwing money at it.
For then tens to hundreds of millions of dollars is just pocket change, but is it the cost of a business operation to get a competing product out of the way.
In a way it the ultimate authoritarian control.
In some places it is the state that tells you what to do, here it is the big corporations that tell you what you will do. Oh, what was I thinking, it is Fascism.
I was in one on those companies that was bought by another large corporation and as result lots of people simple lost their job because of downsizing of the studio.
On another note, it is no like they are buying anything of any relevance, XSI wasn’t going anywhere.

Facism ? ... dude, they bought them because somebody was selling.

From what I heard, the funder of softimage (Daniel Langlois) had financial problems and it's his remaining part in the company which has been sold (About 30%). Well it's just rumors, I don't have facts. Autodesk and softimage both are in Montreal, so for us in Montreal, this is a natural move.

VictorMoran wrote:In some places it is the state that tells you what to do, here it is the big corporations that tell you what you will do. Oh, what was I thinking, it is Fascism.

Seriously, if one would follow your line of argument any action would qualify as fascism.

Whatever guys... they don't own Bryce 3D or Poser so its not a monopoly.

the big 3 under one roof, so much for a competitive market...

sorry to dredge this thread up from the depths.


I knew Autodesk buying Softimage would be bad news, I just tried to install a copy of XSI 6.0 foundation that I had laying around but never gotten around to using, I've been using XSI 5.11 foundation for years and it has been perfect for my needs but there were some features in XSI 6.0 that I wanted to check out so I thought I'd blow the dust off my copy and install it. Unfortunately I can't, it seems like the activation server has been switched off so I can no longer activate my product, does this mean that if I ever need to reinstall XSI 5.11 I won't be able to do that either ?


anyone else had experience of this ?

I'm planning on contacting softimage customer support but I don't expect a lot of help from them.

Why not?
You bought XSI and you are entitled to support.
They haven't closed it down: http://www.softimage.com/

jacmoe wrote:Why not?
You bought XSI and you are entitled to support.
They haven't closed it down: http://www.softimage.com/

I'm not optimistic they don't seem to be going out of their way to support users of older versions of Softimage, they've taken down the downloads page where you could download older versions of the software so I can't even get hold of the most recent version of XSI 6.x that I'm entitled to.

Well, there are always not-so-legal methods to get the newest version or activate the software. And if you've got a license but there's no support anymore it should even be legal to use them (at least in Germany).

I have a suspicion that they've changed their licensing options for all Autodesk software: subscription based.
Try contacting them.

I'm about to go thru this pain myself Lizard. I have a 7.01 license, and I just reinstalled my OS (went 64-bit). It looks like the automated system of releasing and renewing licenses will not work and I'll end up on the phone with Autodesk. Good times ahead!

XSI is a really nice app (the ICE stuff in 7 is really cool), but overkill for what I'm playing around with (realtime assets). I've been trying to learn Blender lately myself.

I mailed the customer services, they were actually pretty good and have gotten everything sorted out for me now.


I did take a look at blender a while ago but decided the pain of learning a new interface was a bit too much, blender's interface is quite a bit different to anything I'm used to.


Softimage is by far my favourite 3D package it's a shame they dropped foundation though.