Three years ago, 15 Dec 2008 was my first day in the Autodesk offices. Officially, I’d been an Autodesk employee since sometime in November, but 15 Dec was the first day I reported to work at Autodesk.

I’m cool working at Autodesk and I still enjoy what I do, but I kinda miss our old offices, in the old Reitmans factory building on St Laurent boulevard. After the acquisition, the Max/Maya support guys came up to visit and do lunch, and their jaws literally dropped when they saw the offices where me, Manny, and the other support guys sat.

On the other hand, the Autodesk offices are perfectly located for a cyclist like me. To get to Softimage I had to actually bike into the city, whereas the Autodesk is down at the Old Port, practically right at the end of the bike path along the Lachine canal.

Here’s some pics of the old Softimage headquarters:

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I’ve pulled out the panorama of Erik’s office so you can get a better look at it. Erik was a “cool dude” on the Softimage support team, and his office was the most fun. He had one Hot Wheels toy car pinned to wall for each month he worked at Softimage.

The still-beating Softimage heart. This animated GIF was on the home page of the Softimage intranet, back in the Avid days before the Autodesk acquisition.

Didn’t Softimage have a marketing tag line like “from the heart” at one point? I seem to remember that, but I can’t find any reference to it.

Ah! It was “From the soul” that I was thinking of…

Here’s a few shots of the old SOFTIMAGE|3D UI:

pulled from this “Jurassic Park – ILM – CGI before & after” video:

Thanks to Alan Fregtman for sending this in.

This is a scan of a photocopy of an article that appeared in the November 1997 issue of Digital Magic magazine. If you didn’t know already, now you know where XSI got its UI 😉

November 1997 First Look: SOFTIMAGE|DS

SOFTIMAGE|DS is not like anything else out there–it’s the next step. Because of its nature and $100,000 price point, customers say the decision to purchase DS was a “no brainer”.

This is a huge, feature rich application–its full install consists of 1.9 million lines of code.

The interface has a beautiful, organic look. The ransport controls, although a conventional layout, look like little pillows, quite an inviting metaphor that begs you to dive in. The overall impression is one of friendly, all natural comfort.

Softimage does say that Sumatra, the code name for the company’s next-generation 3D animation system, will not only be available as a stand-alone system, but will also be built as an integral component of the final, shipping version of Softimage|DS.

Softimage users will recognize the “Rooms” concept of the interface, now carried foward with DS. On the left are buttons for NLE, Paint, Compositing, Audio, and Media I/O.

When I interviewed at Softimage back in 94, they gave me a media packet. I finally found dug up that packet recently, and found that it included a set of slides!

I guess I could have borrowed my parent’s slide projector, but instead I borrowed a scanner and transferred them to my computer.

MGM Lion – Boss Film Studio

Fruity Pebbles – Topix C Graphics Anim

Asterix in America – 94 Les Ed. A. Rene – Goscinny/Uderzo

Rain Forest – Zival, Houdek &Kurek

After last Friday’s flashback post, Len Krenzler posted a link to the Def Leppard “Let’s get rocked” video, which was done in 1992 with Softimage|3D:

Came across this old Def Leppard piece, it was on the Softimage3D demo
reel the first time I saw it. Modeling has come a long way since then
but it was quite impressive at the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Jch_a1o5M

Luc-Eric pointed out that at 1:14 of the vid, you can see Softimage Eddie (click through the screenshot below to see an animated gif of a node connection operation):

At other points in the video, you can see Softimage|3D:

Googling “def leppard” and “softimage” quickly led me to the Reboot series from MainFrame, where I found this bit of info:

Ian Pearson flew out to Los Angeles, spending the next year sleeping on Chris Brough’s couch during which time Pearson, assisted by a couple of demo animators from Softimage, put together the Def Leppard promo ‘Let’s Get Rocked’. Not only did the video serve as a test of the new Softimage animation software and SGI hardware but the kid in the promo served as a prototype for Enzo.

There’s also a few interesting mentions of Softimage in the history of the Reboot series:

In bringing the series to life technical issues dogged them every step of the way. Although the systems were sound, a combination of Silicon Graphics, Onyx and Indigo hardware, the software was not. Despite being open-ended, allowing them to add to existing programs and write their own programs in-house, the main package Softimage was tempermental and not designed to handle the information being thrown at it, unpredicably crashing at random intervals. During the first year of production ReBoot animators were hit with over 15,000 software bugs, sometimes losing entire profiles or erasing over three weeks’ worth of rendering. “We made every mistake possible,” says Dan Didio, who at the time was a programming executive for ABC and later, ReBoot’s story editor. “That’s the only way you’re going to learn, and we wound up thriving for it. We were charting new territory, which made it kind of fun. We didn’t understand the production problems at the time. ‘ReBoot Inc.’ were pushing programs further than ever before. We became pretty much a beta test site for computer software that was applied later on down the line.”

“When we started out, nobody had done what we were doing so there was nobody else’s lessons to learn from.”, says former Director of Communications Mairi Welman, “We were inventing the wheel. We made our mistakes, people worked obscene 18 hours days and slept under desks.” Some even slept in front of their workstations in sleeping bags to maximize time, “While things were rendering, they you would wake up, animate a little more, sleep some more.” Blair recalls. At the same time they had to keep their ABC liason sweet, “I started at ABC Childrens Television and the first show that I was assigned was ReBoot,” says Didio, “Nobody knows what’s going on, nobody knows how it’s been done. I remember stepping in on the first day, seeing the tests and how incredible it was and getting swept up in a lot of what happened.” Gavin Blair now freely admits that for the most part, “We were making it up as we went along.”

Back in 1994, the Softimage|3D product was known as “Creative Environment”.
Here’s something from a Creative Environment marketing brochure that was based on the phrase “Creating the 3D World”. Note the big Softimage/little Microsoft logo.

Click the image to get a more legible version…

Thanks to Hirazi Blue for suggesting this flashback.

The initial goal of project MoonDust was to develop a new particle simulation system for XSI. The existing particle system, which had been in XSI since v1.0, had reached its limits. It was a monolithic system that wasn’t flexible or customizable enough (eg available events and attributes hard coded into the system).

I never had to learn the old particle system. There weren’t that many support cases about it, and MoonDust was always just around the corner. I just remember the old particles as a jumbled forest of PPGs and parameters. See for yourself…here’s some screenshots of the old particle system:

It’s interesting to compare how things worked before:

and after:

However, the scope of the project eventually grew into the development of a procedural graph system.

Code names for Softimage release through the years.
Thanks to Luc-Eric for the suggestion and the information.

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Hubble (reference models), Big Bang (handling large number of objects), Spliff (new shader IDE authoring environment) were projects that were developed independently of any release and then merged into a release when they were ready.

Moondust was the node-based particles project that grew into ICE.

Stardust and Apollo were projects that never came to fruition or were folded into other work.

Text version of the codename listing:
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