The fact that they've not made any attempts to combine the strongest elements of Max and Maya all this time does seem like a strong sign of apathy on Autodesk's part. Why try to do better if you've already cornered the market, I guess. It actually seems ludicrous to me that they've been supporting multiple separate…
Flagship? Autodesk makes most of their money in areas other than games/animation, and from what I can tell Maya is taking over from Max in a lot of gaming studios. I prefer Max, but agree that development since max 2009 (so the year 2008 really) has been largely pointless. Any advances were countered by increasing…
I doubt they'll ever merge Max and Maya (and Softimage?) into a single package, there are just way too many problems that would occur. I think it's an idea that sounds great on paper but in reality would be quite terrible. Not only would there be a ton of bugs, but then there would be the question of "What does the UI look…
Exactly, the trust factor has just gotten worse with Autodesk. After switching to Modo, I have talked to the staff on Steam, even seen them play games like CS:Go with the user base. Hell, Brad Peebler has rap songs about Modo: http://content.luxology.com/modo/modcast/rGod.mp4 Who does this!?! Its for lack of a better word,…
I think we will see Modo get to that point though. The Foundry's offerings are the closest thing you can get to a complete pipeline offering. They recently offered whats known as the Collective, which is modo, mari and heiro. A couple more iterations and Modo might end up being on more even ground as far as animating goes.…
Pretty much what most will be doing I expect, along with other non-autodesk programs. This will be the final nail in the coffin for most XSI users. How can you trust a company like this? Sure migrate from Softimage to Max and then they'll probably nuke Max in a couple of years. You can see all the focus is going into Maya,…
As far as I understand it, perpetual licenses won't be sold for Autodesk products much longer, but subscription plans for existing perpetual licenses will continue. (We'll see for how much longer, but they'd face a mob with pitchforks if they simply discontinued these.) Yearly subscription is around 650 Euro right now for…
XSI was getting large updates and had great cheap purchasing options for freelancers and hobbyists. ICE Interactive Creative Environment was released in 2008, and is basically a more flexible version of UE4's blueprints that can be used for programing, fluid and physics simulations, particles, add animation features, etc.…
Softimage was a subsidy of microsoft, which was eventualy sold to Avid tech... so anythings possible. It blows me away how good Softimage had it... They used that program for VFX in Jurassic Park, Titanic and The Fifth Element... and xsi was used by leading media and entertainment companies, including Digital Domain,…
But will Autodesk eventually stop supporting license re-activation for the perpetual licenses for those who have already bought one (and will before they stop selling them). That will all but force users to go Desktop/yearly sub, or switch entirely. For instance, Adobe are still selling CS6 suites, but how long do you…