Noooo frigging way!!!! So im the guy who had XSI / Sumatra crash at the 7:05 mark!! Hillllllarious!!! That was the massive unveiling at Siggraph, 3,000 people in front of me and it goes poooof! No recovery for that one! lol To be fair that was the only crash of the night and it was still in early early alpha. The entire demo is on my youtube if you're bored. These guys should have hit me up, I have soooo many more juicy details I could have shared. The reason Avid bought it is a pretty crazy tale. I was the "Senior Evangelist" for Softimage for over 20 years. Very sad ending but one hell of a ride! Lots of my demos were in the video too, havent seen some of those in over a decade. The coffee cup exploding into million of bits was my favorite. All those cool films all of us Softies has a little something to do with. What a trip this was. Thanks to the producers, you made my week!
I will NEVER forgive Autodesk for buying and killing Softimage. While Maya is a good software in may ways I've gravitated to Blender, not only because it's free and I'm not working with 3D as much as I used to but it still hurts whenever I'm using other 3D packages. I'm baffled that after all this time that they are still are doing things in a much more convoluted way or not able at all. While Blender is still a hodge-podge of impressive and but many limited and eccentric solutions, I make an effort and a point of using and donating to it over anything Autodesk.
Was the program called "Studio?" I can't quite remember. SoftImage created a program that did everything the Avid could do but for way cheaper. Avid knew they'd be out of business if anyone found out about it, so they bought SoftImage and killed it. Never to be seen or heard from again.
I have a degree for Softimage XSI. Still amazing software, it's modeling is still amazing. There was a little studio in my town that gave some courses for it and i still have it. Good times.
How would you compare it (for polymodeling) to modern softwares like Blender. I'm really curious about XSI and want to try it for myself but finding tuts (or even the software) is difficult and I want to know if it's worth the trouble.
*YES!! YESSS!! JESUS RETURNS AS A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. TO EVEN STILL HAVE THAT COURSE FROM THE LITTLE STUDIO SHOWS THE VALUE AND APPRECIATION YOU HAVE FOR WHAT WAS A GOLDEN ERA FOR INNOVATION. BRAVO*
Thanks for this video. The power of Softimage and as you mentioned, was Very "Intuitive", logical and very easy to learn. It was also designed with the Artists and Animators in mind. I also used to use 3D studio before that when it first came out on Dos environment. Autodesk was jealous of Softimage from get go and I knew what would happen to it (XSI) when Autodesk bought it back then. But Karma always comes and catches up with you. Thanks to Blender (which is growing in heaps and bounds) making all the other big shots look like they are stuck in a quick sand and sinking slowly. Long live Blender!
Not all, SideFX Houdini is still pretty innovative. That being said Epic acquired a small piece of them recently, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them eventually buy SideFX out wholesale given how much potential it has for procedural modelling in Unreal Engine.
Either Blender or Houdini will take Maya’s place soon. Maya will loose it’s first place as best choice for studios. Blender and Houdini are being way more innovative than Maya nowadays. This will end Maya.
soft image XSI was THE BEST 3d software for animation. And I have worked with Maya for over a decade. Had XSI 1.0 got released before Maya 1.0, it would have ruled the industry. Unfortunately it got delayed, and by the time it came, industry pipelines already adapted Maya.
Don't forget that Alias went far and beyond giving free licenses right away to all early VFX schools, and pushed for its use in education . They made big deals with studios to keep them pumping the idea that Maya was the only option ( they probably gave it for pennies for ILM ), and had a huuuuge marketing campaign behind it, way before Autodesk bought it.
@@migovas1483 they also dropped the base price to $2K and were advertising it on late night, deep cable. This might have been when SGI sold it to that teacher's union in Canada.
@@migovas1483 I hear that the podrace shots were done in Lightwave and ILM got free seats of Maya so that they could say that all the work done on the Phantom menace was done with Maya. The first version of Maya was so buggy, that we managed to do a whole music video with animated characters in the time that someone managed to do a single shot.
Still the secret sauce of much of my work. Maya is a huge bag of "acquired" tools that don't play well together. I hope their death to free and "unpurchaseable" Blender is very painful.
I always wondered why this seemingly amazing software died It’s always bad when a few companies start acquiring and consolidating all products be it sofware, entertainment franchises and whatnot. This is a clear reminder of what happens with this
it's because those actually making the programs don't actually run the companies, and those that do prioritise profits above everything else, even if it means throwing away good products. This is also why Warner Bros. and Netflix keep cancelling things and an entire finished film was scrapped They also operate on the idea that the _rate_ at which they make profits can and will just keep growing. They don't just want to keep making money, and they don't just want to make more money as time goes along - they're operating with the goal of _increasing how fast the money comes every year._ They don't just seek infinite growth, they seek infinite *_exponential_* growth. Which is nonsense. That's the reason there's an economic recession every 10-20 years, and the reason a shitton of tech companies fired a giant percentage of their employees recently is to avoid having to pay as much as they'd need, and barely escape the incoming recession this reality is unsustainable, and it just keeps eating itself up
Who ever gets more money from their products and then have the upper hand when consolidating the market…. They promote and prioritize their own software That’s my guess
Out of revenge, most Softimage users switched over to SideFX Houdini after getting burned so badly from Autodesk. Everyone already knew that Autodesk's efforts to push three major 3D packages to compete with each other was destined for doom. ICE was the one part of Softimage Autodesk wanted to plunder the most; and they did. The Softimage community will NEVER forget what those software rapists at Autodesk did!
As far as I am using Blender as my main 3d tools now, but the nostalgic times from studying Softimage since Avid era as well as Maya and 3dsMax at the time is so deeply unforgettable. I really missed Softimage as I am having fun playing with it. It really ahead of its time. From its luxury interface to introducing a used of nodes, compositing and capability for handling such a high dense polygon model. I really still wish that XSI still can continue.
ha ha damn, I've been working on a video about Softimage for the past few weeks, and was waiting on a VGA capture card to arrive. The main point I was planning to demonstrate how to get SI|3D working properly on every platform it was released on (IRIX, NT, and Red Hat for 4.0). I'll bring attention to this video in mine and link it in the description when I finish it. Thanks for bringing attention to Softimage, I really miss that software
Back about 1989 or so, when Softimage was in late beta, I was tasked with evaluating animation packages for purchase by a small company. The options were Wavefront, TDI, and SI. We were getting heavy pressure from all the vendors, and I went to Vancouver for a couple days to evaluate. I was impressed, but cautious, and I wrote an extensive justification for my recommendation. I did not recommend SI and my bosses agreed that the better match for the company was another package. The president of SI called my boss and told him I should be fired for not choosing his product. I sent him my evaluation and called him up. I tore him a new asshole and told him I would never recommend doing business with him in any future situation. I used SI for many subsequent jobs and found it a great, capable product. But that guy really pissed me off.
fantastic video, and a great idea; telling the history and changes of software and it's impacts on 3D industry. It's really interesting, thanks for sharing
There's a few notable mentions of software prior to Softimage. TDI, Wavefront, Bosch FGS 4000, Cubicomp, Alias. They all played a part in innovation before Softimage was born. It is generally considered that Avid bought and buried DS as a way to protect the Avid Media Composer market. The first SGI + Softimage|3D system I worked on was a PI35 (35Mhz.... yes... MEGAhertz) and the entire system cost about AU$200K. The Wave model alone was about AU$11K. Fun times !
That's the way it was. This was a serious history lesson. I came from Mac, ElectricImage and FormZ in the 1990s. It was really hard ball back and you needed deep pockets. SGI isn't around either.
Softimage is not forgotten. I've used it during my time in the Philippines, Japan, and Singapore. By 2015, Autodesk employed me for the sad reason to be part of the team to End of Life the DCC that put food on my table.
2:32 correction after facts check-up on wiki: Softimage3D - 1988 Houdini - 1996 3dsmax - 1996 --- So Softimage actually did exist almost a decade earlier
I am not super educated in this particular field. But I was watching Godzilla (1998) tonight. And saw that the Godzilla effects were created with Softimage. So it got me curious and was sent down this rabbit hole. While the movie itself is not great, the Godzilla shots from that movie, made 25 YEARS ago, still hold up beautifully today! This software, from these look back videos, seems really impressive! Too bad this software died on the vine and was discontinued. It seems, even today, people still talk about how good this software is/was. I wonder if any studio or company could ever resurrect this software for today’s world? I realize there are other options now. And many people are set up and educated in other environments. But it seems there is still a base for this software, all these years later. 🤷♂️
Please make a video about Blender. With an in-depth story behind its origins. Blender was originally an in-house tool called Traces used by a studio called NeoGeo (This is a different NeoGeo from the ones who made Arcade games).
And two decades later it's finally usable for light production 🤣. Don't get me wrong Blender isa fantastic organization and helps the industry as a whole by giving people an affordable entry into the space. But it still hasn't figured out how to grow up.
@@pogo575 Well, unlike big companies like Autodesk or Maxon. Blender is a small foundation with not that many employees. Also, most of the features are developed by the community.
@@no-one3795 If I had to pick between C4D or anthing from Autodesk or Blender. I would take blender. But maaaan it was a horror show for a looooong time. It's still the perfect entry vehicle for aspiring artists and for most Hobbyists its more than enough. I poke at it once every few years to see where it's at and really hope that someday it can figure out how to mature but I can't wait another two decades for it to catch up to where professional software was 15 years ago. I can still run circles around most Blender guys with a 10 year old copy of Lightwave. But everyone wins. I see Blender as a free educational tool and that's good for everyone.
Started using Softimage in '92. I believe it would have easily been the best out there since then (can only imagine how awesome it would be now) if it had not changed hands repeatedly. 1994 Bill Gates/ Microsoft... slowed development to port it from Unix to Windows with the failed hope of adding 3D software to Windows 1998 Avid... slowed down the Sumatra/XSI release to rip off its in development nonlinear editing capabilities with no regard for the 3D software they bought. And of course as Softimage was making a slow comeback from all of that, Autodesk bought it (late 2008) to kill the threat of competition and swipe the ICE code (node based programming) that everyone was starting to talk about to put it in Max and Maya (the now clunky Bifrost). For as little love as Softimage got for the last 15 years of its development (and none for 8 years now) it still holds up pretty good (especially with Arnold 5.4 from "2020" despite the fact that Autodesk bought Arnold in 2017 and immediately killed the continued development of Arnold's SItoA plugin) Nice try devils!
Softimage would've been dead by the mid 1990s had Microsoft not acquired the company. Daniel Langlois essentially bet the company on Softimage|DS, which was vaporware that ran on SGI, and Softimage|3D was falling apart at the core because it was designed by the seat of their pants. They attempted to fix Softimage|3D with v2.65 by rewriting the modeling kernel, but the job was too big and the bugs rippled up to the surface in ways that drove customers away. They didn't put out that fire until 13 service packs later with 2.65J. By then, Softimage was mired in many lawsuits. They lost the case against Animal Logic over the ownership of Eddie, and in Canada court, loser pays ($200 M). Many of the outsourced developers who built plugins for Softimage|3D were suing over patent infringements which lead to the demise of the character module. When Microsoft acquired Softimage, they paid off all the litigants to make them go away. Microsoft saved Softimage. When Microsoft ported Softimage to NT, it exposed the problems of the Softimage architecture, and that's why Sumatra (XSI) was started. That too had it's problems using Microsoft code at it's core which gave them development advantages to get up and running fast, but also limited them in the kinds of features and performance they could achieve. They tried over ambitious projects such as building the Sumatra around mental ray at the core ("Twister"). When it became clear it wasn't going to work long term, Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid, and from that point on Softimage was essentially playing out the string as there was too much ground to make up vs. Maya.
yes, SI probably would have gone belly up if we didn’t get bought .. just meeting payroll costs every month, was always a worry in the beginning. DS was being re-written all the time, always starting from scratch when they realized dead ends. but obviously significant enough development there in NLE for AVID to buy them. M$ really just wanted something. anything. to run on NT that would convince other markets to migrate to NT. but when a company buys you and doesn’t really care about the core of what you do .. sigh. same with AVID, same with AD. yeah, people started to leave. too many cooks. too many client directions. M$ just figured you can throw $ at any problem. no so. there are drones, and there are creative deep thinkers. not too many thinkers out there to hire. especially in the early 90s. Character module .. was pretty esoteric, it was never clear to me why that evaporated, but honestly you needed to be a savant to animate that way and no one in our industry knew how to push that forward into the world. many things we developed were just way too ahead of the curve. key low level issues of modeling held everything back due to the coder that made it. he was a genius, but he didn’t know how to resolve those issues. he also wanted to retain his monopoly on the empire. we all did. there was no way to rectify that and still have everything else function .. which was the XSI project. a total re-write. plus continued 1.x, 2.x, 3.x development. I couldn’t see how 4.0 would ever happen so I decided to bail before my dreams got realized with the potential of the tool. never got a chance to use that. resigned. moved on, with my own boutique development in retouching and near real-time emulsion technology, since most everything can be done in 2.5D .. every frame the user sees is nothing more than flat 2D pixels in the end, so that was my path forward since mid 1995. always miss SI|3D tho. that was my baby. what I have created as a cinematographers tool since 2010 .. keeps me pretty happy tho.
Autodesk is evil. You could make a 1h long video just talking about how many softwares they bought. That's all they do, buying the competence instead of creating quality products to compete with. As animator, every time I have to work with animation layers, NLA, or synoptic views (they now call them pickers) I can't help it on feeling disgusted for using an original idea from Softimage that was ripped off and pasted to the inferior Maya. I'm sure modellers, node programmers or uv unwrappers would feel the same.
Softimage was present in the pipeline at Digital Domain, but it was never a dominant DCC there. The initial purchase when DD was first starting up in 1993 was a more or less naive choice following the pattern set by ILM with Softimage for animation and Alias for modeling, with Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman for shading. Problem is, without a mature software department and a ton of custom glue and support code, these two DCCs didn't talk to each other, or to Renderman, particularly fluidly. Neither had strong particle systems either, or particularly good renderers. So on our first film project we had a "Come to Jesus" meeting where we spelled it out that the effects for this picture were not going to be possible with these tools. And so, from True Lies forward, DD became a SESI-Prisms house, possibly the first major studio in SoCal to base their effects pipeline around SESI's DCC, depending on when VI/FX transitioned away from Symbolics. And then we made the natural progression to Houdini, eventually. Some of the noteworthy Softimage uses in the 1990s at DD was for the T-1000000, animated by Daniel Robichaud for T2-3D, the crowd animations used on the decks of the Titanic and I'm pretty sure it was also used for Michael Jackson's "Ghosts" which was a short film and music video directed by Stan Winston. And then there was also likely several animation-centric commercials that it may have been used on. It was exceedingly rare on the features side though.
@@SiliconClassics I have some character animation in my background but I've almost always been focused on VFX. Soft3D wasn't a true VFX platform until XSI got ICE. As for Prisms + Houdini for character animation, I know it can work but most animators have long preferred the interaction for animation with Soft or Maya. Couldn't really say all the specifics why. Some are very valid I'm sure and then some of that has to do with how they were taught. I'm reading about more inroads now with Houdini, Solaris, USD and KineFX into more pure animation, and tangential industries that haven't, historically, been big SESI customers. But I wouldn't expect a major paradigm shift. Something shiny and new can be enticing but when you've got work to do, no end in sight and no appreciable downtime, you're going to be sticking to what works for you most of the time.
Someone should find a way to liberate Softimage's source code so that development can continue as a possible open-source project. Not only would this bring modernization to Softimage, it'd also light a bit of a fire under Blender to innovate even more.
Softimage like every commercial softwares must include patented libraries and the like. They could not just put it out there as open source. Some libraries can’t just be used for open sourcing. You pay licence fees in order to commercialize your products with them. Removing and replacing all that libraries dependencies would be too much work in order to put a software like Softimage available as open source. I don’t see that happening soon.
Great videos as usual! Can you possibly do a history of 3D sculpting? I know you’ve done the first GUI software (Sketchpad) and I’m always curious when sculpting began dominating the industry with Zbrush. I know clay models would be sculpted, but at one point, Mudbox during King Kong by Peter Jackson, Zbrush with 2.5D and then sculpting, as well as Maya’s primitive sculpting Artisan, all came out. I’d be curious at to what was first? I think Artisan seems likely. There’s like 2 videos about it on UA-cam from the 1998 1.0 version of Maya and they talk about how it was good for wrinkles on skin and clothing(obviously what sculpting still is important for to this day) So it’d be curious to me definitely when sculpting began substituting for character creation.
Do people still remember Softimage?? I am not Alone??? Softimage was Blender back on its day, at one point it was retailed for $500, and was on Fire, but then comes big Bully Autodesk and buys it to put it 6 feet under...
I like Blender a lot but its main issue is its over-dependence (or mine I guess, arguably) on addons to really get the most out of it. I couldn't use it without HardOps. Heck I couldn't use it without Machin3Tools either. And a few others, like SpeedRetopo probly. I'm going to try XSI for the modeling and for the hotkeys.
Autodesk will NEVER EVER get a single dime from me. I might user their shit, but I am not gonna pay them and there will always be 2Gig space on my computer reserved for XSI.
Vitaly Bulgarov still uses SoftImage, and from what I've seen, it's still more capable than Blender in many modelling aspects, like tweaking vertices on the fly without losing your selection, selecting adjacent edges (with no addons required)...
i still watch those old softimage vids on classic computer it stil great to watch those wireframe previews lightwave went in this direction they were realy great cg days i heard softimage cost 60,000 dollars with xsi
No. XSI did not cost 60K. You're thinking of XSI's predecessor Softimage|3D (aka Softimage Creative Environment). The original Softimage only ran on SGI IRIX workstations until the latter 1990s when Microsoft funded the port to Windows NT. SGI workstations were notoriously expensive, and yes, Softimage|3D on an SGI Indigo workstation could easily run $60K US.
it used to be 120K for the whole package (this was the common price point in the industry @ that point in time .. circa 1990), or lowend was around 60K .. as far as I know we were one of the first companies to let the user buy buttons +/- modules ala cart, as well as have a dev kit to let the user created their own tools within ours. i.e., you could buy just certain modules, like have a few modeling only stations, .. then create a cheaper render farm with the cheaper NT boxes of the day. you really needed a serious SGI for DCC tho - geometry engines. you couldn’t do much on NT for a long time. when M$ bought us .. they dropped the price 88% over night and that screwed up the entire world market. M$ didn’t know what to do with it, but .. honestly the only reason they bought us was that no companies wanted to code for NT .. so they kept buying companies to force them to. I remember the company meeting about it. everyone thought they were nuts to even try. i.e., no graphic card support. no I/O support no editing support etc. oh .. no problem. we will force the industry to create those things. uh huh. sure. how long will that take. lots of us left that sinking ship. so many good people in all aspects of the company bailed .. and that splintered development. the 88% off thing was a weird gamble to increase market share, cannibalized the highend. made a really weird lowend market to try and compete against the big companies. + loads of companies went bankrupt, or filed for chapter 11 (Disney, DD, etc.) thanks for nothing M$. it was a very flexible art tool, that was used for DCC in all kinds of different markets. most of the core clients tho used it for :15s and :30s commercials, until the likes of Disney / ILM / Pixar started to think way outside the box of what is possible in the early 90s. everyone expected everyone to have in-house development. not everyone tho has the $$ or staff to do that, but that constrained what you could do, and which projects you could bid on. the only limit was your imagination. we wanted to offer a robust tool for a single boutique artist to shred, and the demo artists we had back then did incredible stuff in front of a new client. in mins. from scratch. sold a lot of systems. but many ways to skin a cat as they say. there is no ‘ best ‘ tool, but we sure tried to make it.
softimage still decent than most of software, may be in one day we will see rebuild of this software because no one not know what s going inside AD I still dont know why it shout down, because of code? i dont know but its still working like a charm even in 2022
Autodesk bought Softimage to kill it, because it was starting to compete with Maya/Max, they also wanted to take the ICE system from xsi and apply it in Maya (Bifrost).
CAT - character animation toolkit was developed by a third party as a Max plugin long before the Autodesk Softimage acquisition. The CAT developer later went on to work for Softimage and sold the software to them at that time, but I don't believe CAT was ever available for use in Softimage. It was always a Max product only. Autodesk acquired the rights to CAT as part of the Softimage buyout, and then integrated it into Max.
XSI though me that FUCK ANY UI that has a shit ton of meaningless icons. Back in the day XSI's main competitor was EXACTLY that, pretty sure nothing changed since then.
You seemed to have missed the fact the SoftImage developed "Studio" (I think it was called.) Which could do everything the Avid could do but for $15k instead of $150k. So, Avid bought SoftImage and killed that program. Then they totally neglected SoftImage3D and it basically died. SoftImage3D was so great and I never did learn another 3D package as well.
Great video, criminal what happened to Softimage. So many company's could have bought it like ILM or Valve Corp? Imagine having Softimage on Steam for FREE?
I helped refine the UI + UX of it from 1990-95, and was dismayed that ILM ‘ only ‘ used the animation segment of SOFTIMAGE|3D, because we had deep deep deep function curve editing tools (thanks to my bézier curve editing experience since 1988) in all aspects of typography and graphics. I needed a toolset that had zero limitations, so that’s what i helped create back then .. we could render out as many pixels in an image as you had hard drive space to save, even tho the best monitors could only display what we now call 720p. we could (in-house) output to a film recorder. I did tests at 1K, 2K, 4K and 8K. this was in 1990. how long did it take for the industry to have broadcast HD .. sigh. everyone bitching about the cost. the first trade show I attended in the summer of 1990, Nikon showed a real-time HD camera stand for production graphics. it took eons for the broadcast world to output stuff in HD, let alone 4K. Japan had broadcast 4K tho way way back, and were already working on 8K. one of my early clients needed a single source texture map that filled the largest drive you could get. 2GB. wow. okay. it is only money. most of our clients didn’t have even 1 GB of space. system drives were probably smaller than a CD. that contained the OS, AND 200MB of virtual memory. and .. then you needed to build a scene, and render out frames on the same drive. + why most projects were :30s or less. u didn’t have space for more frames. or the time to render them. so .. yeah. ILM had all kinds of tools, developed their own rendering ... and needed to build a way to get the animation data IN/OUT of our package. of course they did. at the trade shows tho, patrons came up to me and wondered how come they were seeing ‘ the same ‘ Jurassic Park ‘ and T2 footage at our competitors booths too. well .. no one is lying (as they were inferring). it took multi millions of dollars & teams of dedicated people to pull off the 6m of scenes shown. I knew M$ had zero vision for what our software could do, so resigned in mid 1995 and returned to coding my own stuff again to advance real-time and near real-time graphics. have never looked back. no one else has my toolset, but they can book time on my systems. the coders I worked with were über geniuses, ILM would not have known what to do with it (the code base). maybe one day, I will buy it back, and develop it further .. but many of my coding friends have since died. my fav version was 1.65 ... then they kinda ruined it with 2.0 and later. too many cooks in the kitchen. every client wanted us to go in a different direction. sigh. oh well. we tried our hardest to create the deepest and most intuitive, shredding system we could fathom. that lifted the bar of everything across the planet.
I tried my hardest. Found some investors to talk to Autodesk but they zero interested in selling. 5 years prior it was bought by Adsk to be killed. Avid was struggling financially and needed some fast cash to have something positive to say on the earnings call.
@@DeviatingVapors It makes me happy to read what you write. Using XSI since 2004 til now. Tryd to switch to blender several times but even drawing a simple linear curve, click click click is not possible...
I owned Microsoft Softimage, loved it... was the greatest software until Autodesk bought it and killed it... inside there was a software that could do amazing morphs... Avid had it, Microsoft had it and Autodesk killed it.
If you were studying CG in the early 2000s XSI was the primary tool being taught with the belief that all the studios using Softimage 3D for vfx work would naturally take up XSI as its primary tool. But they didn't. They all switched over to Maya instead and the writing was on the wall for poor XSI even though it was arguably better software. Its material node system was vastly superior to Maya's as was its rendering and modeling tools. Once Autodesk bought it we all knew it was just to eliminate it as competition for Max and Maya.
XSI was not the primary tool taught in 2000s. Maya was because it made it to market first by a full 2 years. XSI was playing catch up the entire time, but had a lot of momentum for the reasons you mentioned with regards to features. However, the watershed moment was in early 2002 when just before the release of XSI v3.0 Softimage announced they were raising the price of XSI from $5,995 US (essentials) and $11,995 US (advanced) to $7,995 and $13,995 respectively. 2 months later, Alias|Wavefront announced they were dropping the price of Maya from $7,995 to $2,995 for the base package in order to grow the user base, and also made the educational version free (XSI educational was $500 US per year at the time). Softimage did not counter. I was running an XSI training center at the time and literally overnight my phone stopped ringing, and never recovered.
@@avidsiman hmmm. that was quite the chess move (if those time stamps + price points are accurate). very difficult decisions. everyone thinks s/w shouldn’t cost anything because it is just electronic. but those developments take a crazy amount of thought, effort, and everyone has rent to pay. dropping the price .. that just hurts the industry, and gives the impression there is no value to that code. i don’t know .. I saw first hand what kinds of things were being developed. proprietary. + off the shelf solutions. in all kinds of labs. absolutely incredible stuff. so .. I ended up going proprietary. no one else is gonna create work like mine. because they don’t have the same tools. 1990-1995. wow .. what a lot of cutting edge stuff was developed in that era. compared to 1985-1989 no contest. mostly. companies that figured hardware was the way forward (Quantel, Symbolics) eventually got eclipsed by software peeps, as hardware comes out all the time. every season there is better stuff. Quantel paint was done with hardware. and PS .. did it better. quicker. cheaper. bye bye dinosaurs. in broadcast u need it NOW (!!). but how many years are you gonna be enamoured by that 1M box, when every year there are companies around the globe constantly making and showing new bags of tricks. depends how incredible your hardware is. or isn’t. but I like an old quote from Steve Jobs .. always sticks in my mind. software is just code you haven’t quite got right [yet]. u always want it to be hardware tho. no latency. u have to be able to think that way tho. how can you make a chip. that does something. when a building worth of coders are feverishly writing every day, gezzus. even pressing a CD. it is literally obsolete as soon as tomorrow arrives. but .. but .. but the glass master we made. and the 1,000 min pressing. what about that. sigh. that is why we moved to a downloads model. it might have been ILM .. the suits wanted us to send the software by modem. not a 9-track tape cart. otherwise no deal buying into our stuff. so we did it. took eons. they didn’t care. wanted the proof of concept. and .. that it could be done. wouldn’t have to count on FedEx. knew they could pay for a T1 connection. not have to wait for dialup speeds. showed we wanted to support the industry. do you remember how many floppies things came on? insert disc 9 of 13. oh crap. floppy #8 has a read error. ugh. except .. I don’t want a constant development streamed piece of software. usually. being bleeding edge is great until it makes you bleed everything out. it worked fine yesterday. now it is busted. I need a tool. that is stable. hard wired. to use for a decade if I want. bugs and all. I know what not to touch. don’t go changing it. I like it. just the way u sold it to me. but .. Adobe .. they want people current. and .. want a constant trickle revenue stream to keep the lights on. I thought that would be the death knell (of them). but they are still here. and I still don’t wanna subscribe to that business model. so I don’t. many better tools to retouch with vs PS. am I missing out on the next great thing, or saving myself a lot of grief. prob both. sure. I get all the sides to it. but. no thanks. I need to be offline. and use the same version. til I wrap the production. that’s what industry people need. .. but also one of the reasons I left the coding adventure. couldn’t stand that clients wouldn’t upgrade. they didn’t see the ginormous drain it had on development, but how could they. they just needed to be able to rely on a great tool. seems like a simple request. it ain’t simple. but seems like it. from the end user perspective.
The death of softimage is sad, because it is a very good and advanced software, it is like destroying maya because blender gets better every day, it is absurd, today many things can still be done with the latest version of softimage and the interface it is much better than for example 3d studio.
Sadly no, but after 8 years if Autodesk had any real programming and development of their own (and balls) they could make it public domain without being worried.
its very sad that softimage was overtaken by maya, it was a better program than maya; houdini actually exists still, im glad it made it out alive and wasn't robbed by autodesk. I hope that blender and houdini find some mutual ground like how unreal is trying to join with houdini, as those two programs are clearly the best ones out right now.
I bought XSI 7.0 just a couple of weeks before version 7.5, this one by Autodesk. I was then supposed to BUY that "update". CROOKS !!! My hatred forever !
I did exactly the same thing. My legit 4 figure purchase was toast when they pulled the online license server. That's right kids, they actually stopped the license server, nuking all our legitimate purchases... until we, ahem, un-nuked them.
in my time there, a license was always that. you paid 120K per license to use it. for 365 days. you didn’t get to own it. or use it for a day past that negotiation price. if you bought 2 or 10 licenses, it was never full price for each. whatever the sales guys and your boss worked out. we owned it. we need to keep the lights on. you’re just renting it.
@@mathajar9563 Are you using XSI? I was quite easy with ICE. Im away from home until after the game dev conference, i might still have the project files i could send.
@@kkgenk7007 This was way back in the day, it was only a couple years earlier that you could even spin a 3d model around on a windows NT workstation. Software like Softimage didn't sell that many because the only market was film vfx and some video games. As the need increased the price decreased.
Great video without the usual anti-Autodesk jihaddist, rethoric we see when discussing Softimage. Can't reverse the space time continuim. Time to accept reality and move on. I think Blender 3 has the best unified toolset today. Certainly better than Maxon C4D.
@@gonzogorf7019 What good are presets when you have to buy an Xparticles subscription from Insydium to get modern particle Dynamics. C4D has no native fluid sovler and a single threaded"cloth' system that is only useful for draping table cloths,bedsheets and window curtains And lets not even broach the subject of Character animation.
@Morten Bartholdy Of course Autodesk cannibalized Softimage and discarded it like some old carcass. However people need to get over it and move on and enjoy all of the great options we have here in the age of GPU veiwport displays, Free tools like UE5, Blender, unity. Davinci resolve etc. Softimage was 3D software..not some fundamental human right .
Autodesk killing programs? I'm so surprised! /S As someone who uses their products as part of my job, they're an awful company with half baked, buggy programs.
softimage was not multi-threaded other than the envelope operator. XSI had a multi-tasking interface, but it was not multi-threaded. ICE was developed later and bolted on with it's own architecture plugged inside of XSI. ICE was multithreaded via parallel computing.
ICE was fully multithreaded. I used to piss the hell out of the Maya and Max people in the office by building a deformer out of ICE nodes that were literally 50x faster then native code. That was my goal internally at Autodesk, show up max and maya whenever possible. :) muhahahha Annnddddd then I got fired. lololol
@@jeffs.4854 That's what I was thinking. Not only that...like 3 or 4 industry professionals (one standing next to Bill Gates) said it throughout the video itself LOL
Noooo frigging way!!!! So im the guy who had XSI / Sumatra crash at the 7:05 mark!! Hillllllarious!!! That was the massive unveiling at Siggraph, 3,000 people in front of me and it goes poooof! No recovery for that one! lol To be fair that was the only crash of the night and it was still in early early alpha. The entire demo is on my youtube if you're bored. These guys should have hit me up, I have soooo many more juicy details I could have shared. The reason Avid bought it is a pretty crazy tale.
I was the "Senior Evangelist" for Softimage for over 20 years. Very sad ending but one hell of a ride! Lots of my demos were in the video too, havent seen some of those in over a decade. The coffee cup exploding into million of bits was my favorite. All those cool films all of us Softies has a little something to do with. What a trip this was. Thanks to the producers, you made my week!
I will NEVER forgive Autodesk for buying and killing Softimage. While Maya is a good software in may ways I've gravitated to Blender, not only because it's free and I'm not working with 3D as much as I used to but it still hurts whenever I'm using other 3D packages. I'm baffled that after all this time that they are still are doing things in a much more convoluted way or not able at all. While Blender is still a hodge-podge of impressive and but many limited and eccentric solutions, I make an effort and a point of using and donating to it over anything Autodesk.
"The reason Avid bought it is a pretty crazy tale."
I'd love to hear that story. Is anywhere to be found or could you maybe make a video about it?
@@useresu301 which is that story? please
So what’s the story of Avid buying Softimage? I’d like to know their reason.
Was the program called "Studio?" I can't quite remember. SoftImage created a program that did everything the Avid could do but for way cheaper. Avid knew they'd be out of business if anyone found out about it, so they bought SoftImage and killed it. Never to be seen or heard from again.
I have a degree for Softimage XSI. Still amazing software, it's modeling is still amazing. There was a little studio in my town that gave some courses for it and i still have it. Good times.
How would you compare it (for polymodeling) to modern softwares like Blender. I'm really curious about XSI and want to try it for myself but finding tuts (or even the software) is difficult and I want to know if it's worth the trouble.
Max has powerful modeling tools. But also it stole from xsi. I was using xsi about 2005 and I scan say it still holds up today.
I still use Softimage 2013 and have XSI 5 somewhere on a disk.
Blender it is these days :p
*YES!! YESSS!! JESUS RETURNS AS A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. TO EVEN STILL HAVE THAT COURSE FROM THE LITTLE STUDIO SHOWS THE VALUE AND APPRECIATION YOU HAVE FOR WHAT WAS A GOLDEN ERA FOR INNOVATION. BRAVO*
Those were the days. I used to be a demo artist for a SGI and SOFTIMAGE dealer. Creative environment had what it takes to blow people’s minds.
Thanks for this video. The power of Softimage and as you mentioned, was Very "Intuitive", logical and very easy to learn. It was also designed with the Artists and Animators in mind.
I also used to use 3D studio before that when it first came out on Dos environment. Autodesk was jealous of Softimage from get go and I knew what would happen to it (XSI) when Autodesk bought it back then. But Karma always comes and catches up with you. Thanks to Blender (which is growing in heaps and bounds) making all the other big shots look like they are stuck in a quick sand and sinking slowly. Long live Blender!
Not all, SideFX Houdini is still pretty innovative.
That being said Epic acquired a small piece of them recently, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them eventually buy SideFX out wholesale given how much potential it has for procedural modelling in Unreal Engine.
Either Blender or Houdini will take Maya’s place soon. Maya will loose it’s first place as best choice for studios. Blender and Houdini are being way more innovative than Maya nowadays. This will end Maya.
The wealth of knowledge you sought and turned into a digestible 17 minutes was a great watch. This is very interesting to learn about, great content.
soft image XSI was THE BEST 3d software for animation. And I have worked with Maya for over a decade. Had XSI 1.0 got released before Maya 1.0, it would have ruled the industry. Unfortunately it got delayed, and by the time it came, industry pipelines already adapted Maya.
Don't forget that Alias went far and beyond giving free licenses right away to all early VFX schools, and pushed for its use in education . They made big deals with studios to keep them pumping the idea that Maya was the only option ( they probably gave it for pennies for ILM ), and had a huuuuge marketing campaign behind it, way before Autodesk bought it.
It was no slouch at modeling either, Vitaly Bulgarov is still daily driving it AFAIK.
@@FlameForgedSoul sure. also the ICE particle system was very good.
@@migovas1483 they also dropped the base price to $2K and were advertising it on late night, deep cable. This might have been when SGI sold it to that teacher's union in Canada.
@@migovas1483 I hear that the podrace shots were done in Lightwave and ILM got free seats of Maya so that they could say that all the work done on the Phantom menace was done with Maya.
The first version of Maya was so buggy, that we managed to do a whole music video with animated characters in the time that someone managed to do a single shot.
Still using Softimage XSI in 2022, because nothing compares yet to it's flexibility and workflow. Softimage still rules from the grave.
same here, using in conjunction with houdini
Still the secret sauce of much of my work. Maya is a huge bag of "acquired" tools that don't play well together. I hope their death to free and "unpurchaseable" Blender is very painful.
That makes me very very happy!!
@@markschoennagel5076 Good to hear from you Mark :) Long time fan !
@@3DeeFanatic 😁😁😁
I always wondered why this seemingly amazing software died
It’s always bad when a few companies start acquiring and consolidating all products be it sofware, entertainment franchises and whatnot. This is a clear reminder of what happens with this
it's because those actually making the programs don't actually run the companies, and those that do prioritise profits above everything else, even if it means throwing away good products. This is also why Warner Bros. and Netflix keep cancelling things and an entire finished film was scrapped
They also operate on the idea that the _rate_ at which they make profits can and will just keep growing. They don't just want to keep making money, and they don't just want to make more money as time goes along - they're operating with the goal of _increasing how fast the money comes every year._ They don't just seek infinite growth, they seek infinite *_exponential_* growth. Which is nonsense. That's the reason there's an economic recession every 10-20 years, and the reason a shitton of tech companies fired a giant percentage of their employees recently is to avoid having to pay as much as they'd need, and barely escape the incoming recession
this reality is unsustainable, and it just keeps eating itself up
Who ever gets more money from their products and then have the upper hand when consolidating the market….
They promote and prioritize their own software
That’s my guess
Out of revenge, most Softimage users switched over to SideFX Houdini after getting burned so badly from Autodesk. Everyone already knew that Autodesk's efforts to push three major 3D packages to compete with each other was destined for doom. ICE was the one part of Softimage Autodesk wanted to plunder the most; and they did. The Softimage community will NEVER forget what those software rapists at Autodesk did!
As far as I am using Blender as my main 3d tools now, but the nostalgic times from studying Softimage since Avid era as well as Maya and 3dsMax at the time is so deeply unforgettable. I really missed Softimage as I am having fun playing with it. It really ahead of its time. From its luxury interface to introducing a used of nodes, compositing and capability for handling such a high dense polygon model. I really still wish that XSI still can continue.
ha ha damn, I've been working on a video about Softimage for the past few weeks, and was waiting on a VGA capture card to arrive. The main point I was planning to demonstrate how to get SI|3D working properly on every platform it was released on (IRIX, NT, and Red Hat for 4.0). I'll bring attention to this video in mine and link it in the description when I finish it. Thanks for bringing attention to Softimage, I really miss that software
I wish you the best of luck!
OMG! you actually pronounced it correctly. you're too legit!
No shit right!?!?!?
Softimage will always have a place in my heart.
What a great history lesson! I remember those times!
Back about 1989 or so, when Softimage was in late beta, I was tasked with evaluating animation packages for purchase by a small company. The options were Wavefront, TDI, and SI. We were getting heavy pressure from all the vendors, and I went to Vancouver for a couple days to evaluate. I was impressed, but cautious, and I wrote an extensive justification for my recommendation. I did not recommend SI and my bosses agreed that the better match for the company was another package.
The president of SI called my boss and told him I should be fired for not choosing his product. I sent him my evaluation and called him up. I tore him a new asshole and told him I would never recommend doing business with him in any future situation.
I used SI for many subsequent jobs and found it a great, capable product. But that guy really pissed me off.
fantastic video, and a great idea;
telling the history and changes of software and it's impacts on 3D industry. It's really interesting, thanks for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it!
There's a few notable mentions of software prior to Softimage. TDI, Wavefront, Bosch FGS 4000, Cubicomp, Alias. They all played a part in innovation before Softimage was born.
It is generally considered that Avid bought and buried DS as a way to protect the Avid Media Composer market.
The first SGI + Softimage|3D system I worked on was a PI35 (35Mhz.... yes... MEGAhertz) and the entire system cost about AU$200K. The Wave model alone was about AU$11K.
Fun times !
I still have Softimage 2015 on my HD.❤️
Do you know where I can download it? or could you share it please?
That's the way it was. This was a serious history lesson. I came from Mac, ElectricImage and FormZ in the 1990s. It was really hard ball back and you needed deep pockets. SGI isn't around either.
Soft image was my first 3d app
Softimage is not forgotten. I've used it during my time in the Philippines, Japan, and Singapore. By 2015, Autodesk employed me for the sad reason to be part of the team to End of Life the DCC that put food on my table.
2:32 correction after facts check-up on wiki:
Softimage3D - 1988
Houdini - 1996
3dsmax - 1996
---
So Softimage actually did exist almost a decade earlier
I love softimage. Symphony rocked.
I loved the story. Thanks for taking the time to tell it.
Thanks for watching!
been using it since 1996 until 2022. Always in my heart as a 3D hobbist....
I am not super educated in this particular field. But I was watching Godzilla (1998) tonight. And saw that the Godzilla effects were created with Softimage. So it got me curious and was sent down this rabbit hole.
While the movie itself is not great, the Godzilla shots from that movie, made 25 YEARS ago, still hold up beautifully today! This software, from these look back videos, seems really impressive! Too bad this software died on the vine and was discontinued. It seems, even today, people still talk about how good this software is/was.
I wonder if any studio or company could ever resurrect this software for today’s world? I realize there are other options now. And many people are set up and educated in other environments. But it seems there is still a base for this software, all these years later. 🤷♂️
wow, great piece of history! very interesting!
To top things off, the co-founder of Softimage Daniel Langlois was murdered in Dominica yesterday.
Oh, who doesn't remember the Hitler videos about Autodesk internal discussions back then??? "Shut up, Pov ray boy!!" LOL
I started with XSI, loved it. Switched to Maya, and now Blender.
Iam still working with XSI every day with Redshift 3D renderer. Still going strong!!
You can use Sycles (Cycles) rendering engine from Blender.
I REALLY LOVED this program
Please make a video about Blender. With an in-depth story behind its origins. Blender was originally an in-house tool called Traces used by a studio called NeoGeo (This is a different NeoGeo from the ones who made Arcade games).
And two decades later it's finally usable for light production 🤣. Don't get me wrong Blender isa fantastic organization and helps the industry as a whole by giving people an affordable entry into the space. But it still hasn't figured out how to grow up.
@@pogo575 Well, unlike big companies like Autodesk or Maxon. Blender is a small foundation with not that many employees. Also, most of the features are developed by the community.
@@no-one3795 If I had to pick between C4D or anthing from Autodesk or Blender. I would take blender. But maaaan it was a horror show for a looooong time. It's still the perfect entry vehicle for aspiring artists and for most Hobbyists its more than enough. I poke at it once every few years to see where it's at and really hope that someday it can figure out how to mature but I can't wait another two decades for it to catch up to where professional software was 15 years ago. I can still run circles around most Blender guys with a 10 year old copy of Lightwave. But everyone wins. I see Blender as a free educational tool and that's good for everyone.
Started using Softimage in '92. I believe it would have easily been the best out there since then (can only imagine how awesome it would be now) if it had not changed hands repeatedly.
1994 Bill Gates/ Microsoft... slowed development to port it from Unix to Windows with the failed hope of adding 3D software to Windows
1998 Avid... slowed down the Sumatra/XSI release to rip off its in development nonlinear editing capabilities with no regard for the 3D software they bought.
And of course as Softimage was making a slow comeback from all of that, Autodesk bought it (late 2008) to kill the threat of competition and swipe the ICE code (node based programming) that everyone was starting to talk about to put it in Max and Maya (the now clunky Bifrost).
For as little love as Softimage got for the last 15 years of its development (and none for 8 years now) it still holds up pretty good (especially with Arnold 5.4 from "2020" despite the fact that Autodesk bought Arnold in 2017 and immediately killed the continued development of Arnold's SItoA plugin) Nice try devils!
Softimage would've been dead by the mid 1990s had Microsoft not acquired the company.
Daniel Langlois essentially bet the company on Softimage|DS, which was vaporware that ran on SGI, and Softimage|3D was falling apart at the core because it was designed by the seat of their pants. They attempted to fix Softimage|3D with v2.65 by rewriting the modeling kernel, but the job was too big and the bugs rippled up to the surface in ways that drove customers away. They didn't put out that fire until 13 service packs later with 2.65J. By then, Softimage was mired in many lawsuits. They lost the case against Animal Logic over the ownership of Eddie, and in Canada court, loser pays ($200 M). Many of the outsourced developers who built plugins for Softimage|3D were suing over patent infringements which lead to the demise of the character module. When Microsoft acquired Softimage, they paid off all the litigants to make them go away. Microsoft saved Softimage.
When Microsoft ported Softimage to NT, it exposed the problems of the Softimage architecture, and that's why Sumatra (XSI) was started. That too had it's problems using Microsoft code at it's core which gave them development advantages to get up and running fast, but also limited them in the kinds of features and performance they could achieve. They tried over ambitious projects such as building the Sumatra around mental ray at the core ("Twister"). When it became clear it wasn't going to work long term, Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid, and from that point on Softimage was essentially playing out the string as there was too much ground to make up vs. Maya.
yes, SI probably would have gone belly up if we didn’t get bought .. just meeting payroll costs every month, was always a worry in the beginning.
DS was being re-written all the time, always starting from scratch when they realized dead ends.
but obviously significant enough development there in NLE for AVID to buy them.
M$ really just wanted something. anything. to run on NT that would convince other markets to migrate to NT.
but when a company buys you and doesn’t really care about the core of what you do .. sigh.
same with AVID, same with AD.
yeah, people started to leave.
too many cooks. too many client directions.
M$ just figured you can throw $ at any problem.
no so. there are drones, and there are creative deep thinkers. not too many thinkers out there to hire. especially in the early 90s.
Character module .. was pretty esoteric, it was never clear to me why that evaporated, but honestly you needed to be a savant to animate that way and no one in our industry knew how to push that forward into the world. many things we developed were just way too ahead of the curve.
key low level issues of modeling held everything back due to the coder that made it.
he was a genius, but he didn’t know how to resolve those issues. he also wanted to retain his monopoly on the empire. we all did.
there was no way to rectify that and still have everything else function .. which was the XSI project. a total re-write.
plus continued 1.x, 2.x, 3.x development.
I couldn’t see how 4.0 would ever happen so I decided to bail before my dreams got realized with the potential of the tool.
never got a chance to use that. resigned. moved on, with my own boutique development in retouching and near real-time emulsion technology, since most everything can be done in 2.5D .. every frame the user sees is nothing more than flat 2D pixels in the end, so that was my path forward since mid 1995.
always miss SI|3D tho. that was my baby.
what I have created as a cinematographers tool since 2010 .. keeps me pretty happy tho.
thx for the video!
Autodesk is evil. You could make a 1h long video just talking about how many softwares they bought. That's all they do, buying the competence instead of creating quality products to compete with.
As animator, every time I have to work with animation layers, NLA, or synoptic views (they now call them pickers) I can't help it on feeling disgusted for using an original idea from Softimage that was ripped off and pasted to the inferior Maya. I'm sure modellers, node programmers or uv unwrappers would feel the same.
Softimage was present in the pipeline at Digital Domain, but it was never a dominant DCC there. The initial purchase when DD was first starting up in 1993 was a more or less naive choice following the pattern set by ILM with Softimage for animation and Alias for modeling, with Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman for shading. Problem is, without a mature software department and a ton of custom glue and support code, these two DCCs didn't talk to each other, or to Renderman, particularly fluidly. Neither had strong particle systems either, or particularly good renderers. So on our first film project we had a "Come to Jesus" meeting where we spelled it out that the effects for this picture were not going to be possible with these tools. And so, from True Lies forward, DD became a SESI-Prisms house, possibly the first major studio in SoCal to base their effects pipeline around SESI's DCC, depending on when VI/FX transitioned away from Symbolics. And then we made the natural progression to Houdini, eventually.
Some of the noteworthy Softimage uses in the 1990s at DD was for the T-1000000, animated by Daniel Robichaud for T2-3D, the crowd animations used on the decks of the Titanic and I'm pretty sure it was also used for Michael Jackson's "Ghosts" which was a short film and music video directed by Stan Winston. And then there was also likely several animation-centric commercials that it may have been used on. It was exceedingly rare on the features side though.
Thanks for providing this inside scoop - how did you like PRISMS/Houdini? Was it as capable in character animation as Soft3D?
@@SiliconClassics I have some character animation in my background but I've almost always been focused on VFX. Soft3D wasn't a true VFX platform until XSI got ICE. As for Prisms + Houdini for character animation, I know it can work but most animators have long preferred the interaction for animation with Soft or Maya. Couldn't really say all the specifics why. Some are very valid I'm sure and then some of that has to do with how they were taught.
I'm reading about more inroads now with Houdini, Solaris, USD and KineFX into more pure animation, and tangential industries that haven't, historically, been big SESI customers. But I wouldn't expect a major paradigm shift. Something shiny and new can be enticing but when you've got work to do, no end in sight and no appreciable downtime, you're going to be sticking to what works for you most of the time.
Someone should find a way to liberate Softimage's source code so that development can continue as a possible open-source project. Not only would this bring modernization to Softimage, it'd also light a bit of a fire under Blender to innovate even more.
Softimage like every commercial softwares must include patented libraries and the like. They could not just put it out there as open source. Some libraries can’t just be used for open sourcing. You pay licence fees in order to commercialize your products with them. Removing and replacing all that libraries dependencies would be too much work in order to put a software like Softimage available as open source. I don’t see that happening soon.
Can I ask to make a video about the history of Foundry Modo like this one?
I will keep this in mind, thanks for the suggestion!
@@InspirationTuts You're most welcome ❤❤
Great videos as usual!
Can you possibly do a history of 3D sculpting? I know you’ve done the first GUI software (Sketchpad) and I’m always curious when sculpting began dominating the industry with Zbrush.
I know clay models would be sculpted, but at one point, Mudbox during King Kong by Peter Jackson, Zbrush with 2.5D and then sculpting, as well as Maya’s primitive sculpting Artisan, all came out.
I’d be curious at to what was first? I think Artisan seems likely. There’s like 2 videos about it on UA-cam from the 1998 1.0 version of Maya and they talk about how it was good for wrinkles on skin and clothing(obviously what sculpting still is important for to this day)
So it’d be curious to me definitely when sculpting began substituting for character creation.
Hearing "softimajj" while reading "soft image" definitely does something to my brain
That is how its pronounced. Developed in Montreal.
Do people still remember Softimage?? I am not Alone??? Softimage was Blender back on its day, at one point it was retailed for $500, and was on Fire, but then comes big Bully Autodesk and buys it to put it 6 feet under...
great history of a great product. the sound is so muddy in places though i can't make out the words
Great video.
Simply put, I HATE AUTODESK for life for buying and killing Softimage. I've made point of donating and using to Blender.
I like Blender a lot but its main issue is its over-dependence (or mine I guess, arguably) on addons to really get the most out of it. I couldn't use it without HardOps. Heck I couldn't use it without Machin3Tools either. And a few others, like SpeedRetopo probly. I'm going to try XSI for the modeling and for the hotkeys.
Autodesk will NEVER EVER get a single dime from me. I might user their shit, but I am not gonna pay them and there will always be 2Gig space on my computer reserved for XSI.
Vitaly Bulgarov still uses SoftImage, and from what I've seen, it's still more capable than Blender in many modelling aspects, like tweaking vertices on the fly without losing your selection, selecting adjacent edges (with no addons required)...
i still watch those old softimage vids on classic computer it stil great to watch those wireframe previews lightwave went in this direction they were realy great cg days i heard softimage cost 60,000 dollars with xsi
No. XSI did not cost 60K. You're thinking of XSI's predecessor Softimage|3D (aka Softimage Creative Environment). The original Softimage only ran on SGI IRIX workstations until the latter 1990s when Microsoft funded the port to Windows NT. SGI workstations were notoriously expensive, and yes, Softimage|3D on an SGI Indigo workstation could easily run $60K US.
it used to be 120K for the whole package (this was the common price point in the industry @ that point in time .. circa 1990), or lowend was around 60K .. as far as I know we were one of the first companies to let the user buy buttons +/- modules ala cart, as well as have a dev kit to let the user created their own tools within ours.
i.e., you could buy just certain modules, like have a few modeling only stations, .. then create a cheaper render farm with the cheaper NT boxes of the day.
you really needed a serious SGI for DCC tho - geometry engines. you couldn’t do much on NT for a long time.
when M$ bought us .. they dropped the price 88% over night and that screwed up the entire world market.
M$ didn’t know what to do with it, but .. honestly the only reason they bought us was that no companies wanted to code for NT .. so they kept buying companies to force them to.
I remember the company meeting about it.
everyone thought they were nuts to even try.
i.e., no graphic card support.
no I/O support
no editing support
etc.
oh .. no problem.
we will force the industry to create those things.
uh huh. sure. how long will that take.
lots of us left that sinking ship.
so many good people in all aspects of the company bailed .. and that splintered development.
the 88% off thing was a weird gamble to increase market share, cannibalized the highend. made a really weird lowend market to try and compete against the big companies. + loads of companies went bankrupt, or filed for chapter 11 (Disney, DD, etc.)
thanks for nothing M$.
it was a very flexible art tool, that was used for DCC in all kinds of different markets. most of the core clients tho used it for :15s and :30s commercials, until the likes of Disney / ILM / Pixar started to think way outside the box of what is possible in the early 90s.
everyone expected everyone to have in-house development.
not everyone tho has the $$ or staff to do that, but that constrained what you could do, and which projects you could bid on.
the only limit was your imagination. we wanted to offer a robust tool for a single boutique artist to shred, and the demo artists we had back then did incredible stuff in front of a new client. in mins. from scratch.
sold a lot of systems.
but many ways to skin a cat as they say.
there is no ‘ best ‘ tool, but we sure tried to make it.
Great vid. Used this software a lot. Sad is right. You should do s bid about Lightwave.
Thank you for content
MS already killed SI before Autodesk bought it. No one wanted to buy it, and it was merely sold at $30 million. The guy who killed SI is at Epic now.
softimage still decent than most of software, may be in one day we will see rebuild of this software because no one not know what s going inside AD
I still dont know why it shout down, because of code? i dont know but its still working like a charm even in 2022
Autodesk bought Softimage to kill it, because it was starting to compete with Maya/Max, they also wanted to take the ICE system from xsi and apply it in Maya (Bifrost).
CAT - character animation toolkit was developed by a third party as a Max plugin long before the Autodesk Softimage acquisition. The CAT developer later went on to work for Softimage and sold the software to them at that time, but I don't believe CAT was ever available for use in Softimage. It was always a Max product only. Autodesk acquired the rights to CAT as part of the Softimage buyout, and then integrated it into Max.
Thanks for the feedback Paul.
CAT found its way into a lot of ICE compounds that did the very similar things to max only way WAY faster.
Who is better maya or softimage
Best 3d software ever existed priod.
Great video. But please be aware that 50% of the images on screen especially from some latest productions are not created with Softimage.
XSI though me that FUCK ANY UI that has a shit ton of meaningless icons. Back in the day XSI's main competitor was EXACTLY that, pretty sure nothing changed since then.
You seemed to have missed the fact the SoftImage developed "Studio" (I think it was called.) Which could do everything the Avid could do but for $15k instead of $150k. So, Avid bought SoftImage and killed that program. Then they totally neglected SoftImage3D and it basically died. SoftImage3D was so great and I never did learn another 3D package as well.
Great video, criminal what happened to Softimage. So many company's could have bought it like ILM or Valve Corp? Imagine having Softimage on Steam for FREE?
I helped refine the UI + UX of it from 1990-95, and was dismayed that ILM ‘ only ‘ used the animation segment of SOFTIMAGE|3D, because we had deep deep deep function curve editing tools (thanks to my bézier curve editing experience since 1988) in all aspects of typography and graphics.
I needed a toolset that had zero limitations, so that’s what i helped create back then .. we could render out as many pixels in an image as you had hard drive space to save, even tho the best monitors could only display what we now call 720p.
we could (in-house) output to a film recorder.
I did tests at 1K, 2K, 4K and 8K.
this was in 1990.
how long did it take for the industry to have broadcast HD .. sigh. everyone bitching about the cost. the first trade show I attended in the summer of 1990, Nikon showed a real-time HD camera stand for production graphics. it took eons for the broadcast world to output stuff in HD, let alone 4K.
Japan had broadcast 4K tho way way back, and were already working on 8K.
one of my early clients needed a single source texture map that filled the largest drive you could get. 2GB. wow. okay. it is only money. most of our clients didn’t have even 1 GB of space. system drives were probably smaller than a CD. that contained the OS, AND 200MB of virtual memory. and .. then you needed to build a scene, and render out frames on the same drive.
+ why most projects were :30s or less.
u didn’t have space for more frames. or the time to render them.
so .. yeah. ILM had all kinds of tools, developed their own rendering ... and needed to build a way to get the animation data IN/OUT of our package. of course they did.
at the trade shows tho, patrons came up to me and wondered how come they were seeing ‘ the same ‘ Jurassic Park ‘ and T2 footage at our competitors booths too. well .. no one is lying (as they were inferring). it took multi millions of dollars & teams of dedicated people to pull off the 6m of scenes shown.
I knew M$ had zero vision for what our software could do, so resigned in mid 1995 and returned to coding my own stuff again to advance real-time and near real-time graphics. have never looked back. no one else has my toolset, but they can book time on my systems.
the coders I worked with were über geniuses, ILM would not have known what to do with it (the code base).
maybe one day, I will buy it back, and develop it further .. but many of my coding friends have since died. my fav version was 1.65 ... then they kinda ruined it with 2.0 and later. too many cooks in the kitchen. every client wanted us to go in a different direction. sigh.
oh well. we tried our hardest to create the deepest and most intuitive, shredding system we could fathom. that lifted the bar of everything across the planet.
@@DeviatingVapors Wow thanks so much for this, sad the source code was never released.
I tried my hardest. Found some investors to talk to Autodesk but they zero interested in selling. 5 years prior it was bought by Adsk to be killed. Avid was struggling financially and needed some fast cash to have something positive to say on the earnings call.
@@DeviatingVapors It makes me happy to read what you write. Using XSI since 2004 til now. Tryd to switch to blender several times but even drawing a simple linear curve, click click click is not possible...
8:01 holy shit this looks cool!
what's going on here? it looks like some sort of fluid sim visualised with all the particles as spheres
I owned Microsoft Softimage, loved it... was the greatest software until Autodesk bought it and killed it... inside there was a software that could do amazing morphs... Avid had it, Microsoft had it and Autodesk killed it.
Does anyone know where you can download or buy Softimage?
please make a video on modo vs blender
If you were studying CG in the early 2000s XSI was the primary tool being taught with the belief that all the studios using Softimage 3D for vfx work would naturally take up XSI as its primary tool. But they didn't. They all switched over to Maya instead and the writing was on the wall for poor XSI even though it was arguably better software. Its material node system was vastly superior to Maya's as was its rendering and modeling tools. Once Autodesk bought it we all knew it was just to eliminate it as competition for Max and Maya.
XSI was not the primary tool taught in 2000s. Maya was because it made it to market first by a full 2 years. XSI was playing catch up the entire time, but had a lot of momentum for the reasons you mentioned with regards to features. However, the watershed moment was in early 2002 when just before the release of XSI v3.0 Softimage announced they were raising the price of XSI from $5,995 US (essentials) and $11,995 US (advanced) to $7,995 and $13,995 respectively. 2 months later, Alias|Wavefront announced they were dropping the price of Maya from $7,995 to $2,995 for the base package in order to grow the user base, and also made the educational version free (XSI educational was $500 US per year at the time). Softimage did not counter. I was running an XSI training center at the time and literally overnight my phone stopped ringing, and never recovered.
@@avidsiman hmmm. that was quite the chess move (if those time stamps + price points are accurate).
very difficult decisions.
everyone thinks s/w shouldn’t cost anything because it is just electronic. but those developments take a crazy amount of thought, effort, and everyone has rent to pay.
dropping the price .. that just hurts the industry, and gives the impression there is no value to that code.
i don’t know .. I saw first hand what kinds of things were being developed. proprietary. + off the shelf solutions. in all kinds of labs. absolutely incredible stuff.
so .. I ended up going proprietary.
no one else is gonna create work like mine. because they don’t have the same tools.
1990-1995.
wow .. what a lot of cutting edge stuff was developed in that era. compared to 1985-1989 no contest. mostly.
companies that figured hardware was the way forward (Quantel, Symbolics) eventually got eclipsed by software peeps, as hardware comes out all the time. every season there is better stuff.
Quantel paint was done with hardware.
and PS .. did it better. quicker. cheaper.
bye bye dinosaurs.
in broadcast u need it NOW (!!).
but how many years are you gonna be enamoured by that 1M box, when every year there are companies around the globe constantly making and showing new bags of tricks.
depends how incredible your hardware is.
or isn’t.
but I like an old quote from Steve Jobs .. always sticks in my mind. software is just code you haven’t quite got right [yet]. u always want it to be hardware tho. no latency.
u have to be able to think that way tho.
how can you make a chip. that does something.
when a building worth of coders are feverishly writing every day, gezzus. even pressing a CD. it is literally obsolete as soon as tomorrow arrives. but .. but .. but the glass master we made. and the 1,000 min pressing. what about that.
sigh.
that is why we moved to a downloads model.
it might have been ILM .. the suits wanted us to send the software by modem. not a 9-track tape cart. otherwise no deal buying into our stuff.
so we did it.
took eons.
they didn’t care.
wanted the proof of concept.
and .. that it could be done.
wouldn’t have to count on FedEx.
knew they could pay for a T1 connection.
not have to wait for dialup speeds.
showed we wanted to support the industry.
do you remember how many floppies things came on?
insert disc 9 of 13. oh crap. floppy #8 has a read error.
ugh.
except .. I don’t want a constant development streamed piece of software.
usually.
being bleeding edge is great until it makes you bleed everything out. it worked fine yesterday. now it is busted.
I need a tool. that is stable.
hard wired. to use for a decade if I want.
bugs and all. I know what not to touch.
don’t go changing it.
I like it. just the way u sold it to me.
but .. Adobe .. they want people current.
and .. want a constant trickle revenue stream to keep the lights on. I thought that would be the death knell (of them). but they are still here. and I still don’t wanna subscribe to that business model. so I don’t.
many better tools to retouch with vs PS.
am I missing out on the next great thing, or saving myself a lot of grief. prob both.
sure. I get all the sides to it.
but.
no thanks.
I need to be offline.
and use the same version.
til I wrap the production.
that’s what industry people need.
.. but also one of the reasons I left the coding adventure.
couldn’t stand that clients wouldn’t upgrade.
they didn’t see the ginormous drain it had on development, but how could they.
they just needed to be able to rely on a great tool.
seems like a simple request.
it ain’t simple.
but seems like it. from the end user perspective.
2:25 Blender did exist, sorta, it was called Traces, and it evolved into Blender, starting life on the Amiga.
The death of softimage is sad, because it is a very good and advanced software, it is like destroying maya because blender gets better every day, it is absurd, today many things can still be done with the latest version of softimage and the interface it is much better than for example 3d studio.
sad ( but I still use 2015 for modeling, the rest is in the blender
RIP Softimage, and thank you Autodesk for driving me into the arms of Houdini, because I like it even more than Softimage.
Same here. ICE became essential to my workflow, so after EOL, Houdini it was!
Bro can you comment a laptop for animation and VFX purpose under 2200 dollars
One of the best software in the CG industry. Father of them all!
Killed!
i miss it
fun fact: C.A.T in 3ds max is actually Softimage's creation.
Is there any source code publicly available for Softimage..
Sadly no, but after 8 years if Autodesk had any real programming and development of their own (and balls) they could make it public domain without being worried.
All that "really" lives on is the dwindling perpetual license holders.
the first time that meet softimage i use the mood tool version to learn it :( I just for this end
R.I.P. XSI(((
its very sad that softimage was overtaken by maya, it was a better program than maya; houdini actually exists still, im glad it made it out alive and wasn't robbed by autodesk.
I hope that blender and houdini find some mutual ground like how unreal is trying to join with houdini, as those two programs are clearly the best ones out right now.
Looks like I'm the last person in the world still using Softimage for work.
I bought XSI 7.0 just a couple of weeks before version 7.5, this one by Autodesk. I was then supposed to BUY that "update". CROOKS !!! My hatred forever !
I did exactly the same thing. My legit 4 figure purchase was toast when they pulled the online license server. That's right kids, they actually stopped the license server, nuking all our legitimate purchases... until we, ahem, un-nuked them.
in my time there, a license was always that.
you paid 120K per license to use it. for 365 days.
you didn’t get to own it.
or use it for a day past that negotiation price.
if you bought 2 or 10 licenses, it was never full price for each. whatever the sales guys and your boss worked out.
we owned it.
we need to keep the lights on.
you’re just renting it.
08:48 what that terms for do that?
What would you like to know, I made that demo. :)
@@markschoennagel5076 from particle to human how i search tutorial for that sir?
@@mathajar9563 Are you using XSI? I was quite easy with ICE. Im away from home until after the game dev conference, i might still have the project files i could send.
@@markschoennagel5076 no im not using XSI im using blender and unreal engine
@@mathajar9563 I work for Unity now :) and never learned blender so not much I can do to help ya.
Ona Estates
i remember it being really expensive
Early versions of Softimage 3D were 40k, the SGI you needed was 40k and if you wanted 32 MEGS of ram it set you back a cool 30k. Megs, not gigs.
@@markschoennagel5076 that's pretty high price, not really aiming at main stream users with 40k to spend
@@kkgenk7007 This was way back in the day, it was only a couple years earlier that you could even spin a 3d model around on a windows NT workstation. Software like Softimage didn't sell that many because the only market was film vfx and some video games. As the need increased the price decreased.
fuck autodesk may softimage rest in peace
Now Blender is quickly coming close to becoming the next standard.
If you want to have standardized, sterilized, stagnant pipeline with incremental updates for all your creatives, choose Maya.
Great video without the usual anti-Autodesk jihaddist, rethoric we see when discussing Softimage.
Can't reverse the space time continuim.
Time to accept reality and move on.
I think Blender 3 has the best unified toolset today.
Certainly better than Maxon C4D.
Blender is great but C4D has a many presets.
@@gonzogorf7019 What good are presets when you have to buy an Xparticles subscription from Insydium to get modern particle Dynamics.
C4D has no native fluid sovler and a single threaded"cloth' system
that is only useful for draping table cloths,bedsheets and window curtains
And lets not even broach the subject of Character animation.
@@Animotions01 Ya'll know a bunch of us Softimage and Lightwave refugees have moved to Houdini? And we are mostly not a cult..... on Thursdays....
@@pogo575 Of course , Houdini Rules!!!...all the more reason to look forward and leave the Softimage era in the past.
@Morten Bartholdy Of course Autodesk cannibalized Softimage and discarded it like some old carcass.
However people need to get over it and move on and enjoy all of the great options we have here in the age of GPU veiwport displays, Free tools like UE5, Blender, unity. Davinci resolve etc.
Softimage was 3D software..not some fundamental human right .
Autodesk killing programs? I'm so surprised! /S
As someone who uses their products as part of my job, they're an awful company with half baked, buggy programs.
Autode$k is a graveyard. Whatever gets there it's slaughtered! Only the devil I hate more than this $hit company.
Damn
Softimage was multithreaded but Maya still isn't? wtf.
softimage was not multi-threaded other than the envelope operator. XSI had a multi-tasking interface, but it was not multi-threaded. ICE was developed later and bolted on with it's own architecture plugged inside of XSI. ICE was multithreaded via parallel computing.
ICE was fully multithreaded. I used to piss the hell out of the Maya and Max people in the office by building a deformer out of ICE nodes that were literally 50x faster then native code. That was my goal internally at Autodesk, show up max and maya whenever possible. :) muhahahha Annnddddd then I got fired. lololol
Marc killed Softimage. Guess where he is now.
Autodead
Years of learning XSI, only to have it rendered obsolete.
I hope 3DS Max users jump ship to Blender in droves !
"SoftIMAASH" ok bye
The way you are pronouncing image is a struggle.
That's how Softimage was pronounced, though.
That is how the French Canadians that developed it pronounced and named it.
That is exacttttly how its pronounced.
Sorry man disliked the video for the way you pronounced Softimage
What do you mean? He pronounced it correctly.
Sorry man, disliked your dislike for not knowing that he pronounced it correctly.
@@jeffs.4854 That's what I was thinking. Not only that...like 3 or 4 industry professionals (one standing next to Bill Gates) said it throughout the video itself LOL
@@johntnguyen1976 Yep thats Brad next to Bill. He is saying it exactly right.
Dude, no offense but how many people mispronounce your name?? That is the correct pronunciation.
R.i.P Daniel Langlois the creator
Soft emaads
Actually, CAT started in 3dsmax, and was ported to XSI. I remember using it in Max as a 3rd party plugin.