From the “Manta issue” of CGWorld magazine (SEP 2001), here’s “Chinny on Modelling Manta’s ship”.
I didn’t know Chinny was once an out-of-work actor!

Back when I was a programmer-writer on the SDK team, I’d never heard of a dongle and I’d never had to deal with any licensing stuff (I just installed the overnight build and it ran). Those were the days.

Then in late 2005 I was moved to the Support team and I found out all about dongles and licensing.

Dongles were always a hassle: getting the OS to recognize the dongle, getting the driver installed, verifying whether or not the dongle was bad/defective,… For awhile my xsibase account sig included the phrase “I hate dongles”.

Dongles often got damaged or lost, for various reasons, including but not limited to:

• It just stopped working…
• My sister kicked it
• The dog got under my desk and broke off the dongle
• Some student stole it (probably thought it was a USB key)
• It broke when I tried to chain it to the computer
• Stopped working when I tried to replace the battery (to which I would reply “that was no battery, that was the iButton itself!!!”)
  
• Our building burned down (not funny because it was true…they sent me a photo)
  

Softimage used various types of dongles over the years, but I really only had experience with the blue iButton dongles.
Here’s some of the other dongles…

SOFTIMAGE|3D

Softimage XSI 1.5

Softimage XSI 3.0 and later

A look back at the last six years of the XSI mailing list, from 2006 to 2011.

• 12,354 different topics
• 81,458 posts in total
• 9,784 topics with at least one reply or follow-up
• 1,241 different posters

Top 10 posters (2006 to 2011):

The top 50 posters accounted for 54% of all posts on the XSI mailing list. Scroll down to see the list of the top 50.

Word cloud for Subject lines of all posts (2006 to 2011):

To put the relative size of the words in context, here’s some word counts:

• ICE = 7685
• python = 1686
• rendering = 1339, render = 2461
• scripting = 1427, script = 1112
• maya = 1265
• lagoa = 597

Top 10 topics

Top 50 posters (2006-2011)

The top 50 posters accounted for 54% of all posts on the XSI mailing list.
Continue reading →

From Dec 2003, an end-of-the-year, once-in-a-lifetime promotion!

From softimage.com back in 2001.
Joyeux Noél / Merry Christmas everbody

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.