From a Softimage Lead Developer

Softimage isn’t really the Superior application, each of the three apps have different sets of compromises. It’s different, and I would say a smaller world; you have to be happy with what’s in the box to do everything you need. Whatever app you start with, you accept those compromise and they become your vision of the world.

Some of these compromises have crippled its ability to gain significant traction. For example, being built on 1990s windows API that are now legacy, and having no SDK strategy from day 1. There would need to be years of re-write just to get it on track, it’s something that’s deeply ingrained in what defines the product. While you would do this catch-up, the world would not be staying still.

Softimage has a full development team in place, and plans for the future. But let’s not look at the market with rose-colored glasses and pretend Softimage is on equal footing with the other two, that people just see a demo of it to see the light, and can switch anytime. The facts are that 80% of the market is using either Maya or Max, and the rest is everyone else including Softimage. It’s a very distant third (although still ahead of Houdini, I think). You have to use Softimage for what it does, enjoy it, and not fantasize about a “big three” reality that really has been “a big two” since the late 1990s.

New users or student do not have an equal choice to pick Max, Maya and Softmage. For one thing, it cannot be known what is going to be Softimage’s position in the market in a few years, but you can rest assure the other two will still be titans. Best case, I think, Softimage will retain about the same position it has now. It hinges on whether Maya or Max would get a ICE equivalent and if there are things you can only do in Softimage.

LucEric

To those who say not – who you getting info from AutoLie… haha.

RIP Softimage DEAD.

laughable. Maya is the chosen one, and it is based on its extensible architecture. Granted, great expense is being put into it to improve it, but that is not architecture failure, as much as competition. Houdini slapped Autodesk, and to fight back, they made the decision to arm Maya… why? Well, we would never know for sure, as it has greater market share than Softimage, but it would be interesting if it didn’t, would they still have chosen the open architecture and data handling hooks of Maya? I think they would have to.