Author Archives: xsisupport

The principles of support

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The Autodesk support organization defines a set of “support principles” that establish a baseline for quality service. The principles are supposed to be straight-forward, common-sense guidelines such as:

  • Provide credible and timely responses
  • Make and honor commitments
  • Confirm resolution
  • Document cases
  • Communicate professionally
  • Escalate immediately

We do weekly review of randomly-selected cases for principle compliance, and the review scores are a lead measure of our success. They’re a lead measure because management considers principle compliance a predictor of success (where success is measured by the quarterly Net Promoter Score aka customer satisfaction).

In practice, you can go around in endless circles discussing what these principles actually mean. I’ve sat through whole meetings where we never got past the first definition of the first principle.

Based on my experience on the front-line, here’s my take on the principles. I’ve reduced the principles to single-sentence bullet points with [I think] plain English words.

  • Respond quickly with either a solution or some questions that clarify the problem.
  • Let the customer know when you’ll get back to them, and do what you promise.
  • Don’t let cases sit inactive for over 2 days: if you’re waiting for information, follow up with the customer; if you’re researching the problem, let the customer know what’s happening.
  • Document cases so that others can understand the problem and the solution.
  • Communicate like a pro: clear, concise, easy to understand, and with the same tone you would expect from others.
  • Don’t delay–when you tell a customer you’re going to escalate or transfer the case, do it right away.

Support case word cloud

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Here’s a word cloud I generated from the summary and description fields of the Softimage support cases that came in so far this year. The word cloud shows the top 50 words (after I manually removed words like “Softimage”, “using”, “hello”, and others). I did about 30 search-and-replaces to get rid of words that weren’t feature-related, but there’s still some, like “attached”, left in the cloud.

Friday Flashback #34

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From 2001, the XSI 2.0 launch ad.

Now where’s that Final Frontier?

SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.2.0 GETS YOU THERE
XSI v.2.0 takes you beyond your boundaries. Imaginary. Or real. The newest version of XSI allows you to explore advanced dynamics with the seamlessly integrated photo realistic hair/fur simulation system. Discover the industry’s only fully-interactive renderer, powered with mental ray® v.3.0. And broadcast artists will find the super sophisticated 3-D text and logo creation tools a dream come true.

Want to fly further still?
How about an awesome new integrated compositor to unite your 2-D and 3-D worlds with
unprecedented speed and elegance. And our revolutionary interactive real-time shaders give artists the power to control game effects. All with mind-numbing performance and stability. Not to mention accelerated ROI.

Want to impress aliens – or even your boss?
Visit http://www.sofitmage.com/v2 where you can order the very hot XSI demo CD, sign up for the XSI newsletter – even arrange for a hands-on demo. Suddenly, that final frontier seems a whole lot closer.

Enabling and disabling satellites

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There was a thread on xsibase the other day about using a batch file to turn satellite rendering on or off by changing the .ray3hosts file.

Instead of overwriting the .ray3hosts file, another way to do would be to have two versions of the .ray3hosts file, and use MI_RAY_HOSTSFILE to switch between them.

For example, you would create a batch file on your desktop that does this:

@echo off
call "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2012.SAP\Application\bin\setenv.bat"

rem Override the default MI_RAY_HOSTSFILE
set MI_RAY_HOSTSFILE=%XSI_USERHOME%\.ray3hosts-disabled

start "" "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2012.SAP\Application\bin\XSI.exe" %*

.ray3hosts-disabled would either not exist, or have different satellites listed. Softimage will try to load the specified file, and would not fall back on the other .ray3hosts file.

Tips for troubleshooting satellite rendering

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So, you’ve set up your .ray3hosts file, got the raysat services running, and ping and telnet show that there’s no connection problems. But satellite still doesn’t seem to be working. What to do?

  • Check that the raysat service running on the master too. (it has to be running on both the master and the slaves)
  • Use the mental ray diagnostics to check whether the satellites are being used. In the mental ray renderer settings, click the Diagnostics tab, and select the Info and Progress checkboxes.
    If satellite is working, you should see something like this:

    // INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    89.8%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.6
// INFO : JOB  0.13 progr:    90.9%    rendered on MTL-MASTER.13
// INFO : JOB  0.6  progr:    91.9%    rendered on MTL-MASTER.6
// INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    92.9%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.7
// INFO : JOB  0.12 progr:    93.9%    rendered on MTL-MASTER.12
// INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    94.9%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.2
// INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    95.9%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.4
// INFO : JOB  0.10 progr:    96.9%    rendered on MTL-MASTER.10
// INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    97.9%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.0
// INFO : JOB  0.n  progr:    98.9%    rendered on MTL-SATELLITE:7020.5
  • Use Process Monitor on the satellite machine to confirm that the master is actually connecting to the satellite.
  • On the master machine, in Softimage, open the script editor (ALT+4) and run this JScript:

    LogMessage( XSIUtils.Environment.Item("MI_RAY_HOSTSFILE") );

    This will log the .ray3hosts file that Softimage is using.
    Is this the same .ray3hosts file that you created?

    On Windows XP, UserTools creates the .ray3hosts file in the “wrong” location
    (UserTools puts it one place, but Softimage reads it from another place).

I got an iPad for work..what am I going to do with it?

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Product Support (PS) Montreal got their iPad last week; every support team is getting one. For the moment we don’t really need it for anything. Sure, there are some consumer apps like Sketchbook Pro, but we (the Maya/Max/Soft team) don’t support those apps. Maybe there’ll eventually be some kind of mobile apps for M&E customers. So for now I loaded it up with some AD apps like 123 Sculpt, Tinkerbox, and SketchBook that we can play with.

Related article: How one app introduced Autodesk to consumers
Read about the story of SketchBook Mobile from the perspective of cnet.com. Learn how the success of the app led to the creation of the consumer products group and the development of additional mobile applications.

The case of the missing registry values

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Problem: On 64-bit Windows 7, 32-bit Softimage 2012 crashes instantly & silently as soon as the UI appears. But xsibatch also crashes instantly, so this is unlikely to be a graphic card problem.

Solution: Import missing HKCR\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8} values from another computer.

Case Notes:

This one had me stumped for awhile.

To repro a customer problem, I installed 32-bit Softimage 2012 SP1 on my 64-bit Windows 7 computer, but 32-bit Softimage won’t run. It just crashed silently after showing the UI, and xsibatch did nothing except print its version number banner (so I knew it wasn’t a graphics driver issue).

I checked things out with Process Monitor and I saw that Softimage was crashing shortly after loading jscript.dll. So I did a runonce, and I re-registered jscript.dll and vbscript.dll, but to no avail. I did, however, get a chance to debug after the next crash, and that showed that XSI.exe was crashing in the scripthost after loading jscript.dll.

I eyeballed the JScript registry entries, but they looked ok to me.

Finally I installed a debug version, and then I got a line number for an assert. And that showed me that Softimage was failing to get the VBscript ProgID. So I checked out the VBScript registry entries under

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}

and sure enough, the values were all missing. So all I had to do was get the missing values from another computer, import them into my registry, and case solved!

http://vimeo.com/28213347