Softimage

» see autodesk.com/softimage as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2000 i was sixteen, on a modem, running whatever would fit on a home PC. Softimage cost more than the computer i was using and generally wanted a Silicon Graphics workstation underneath it. this is one of those products i only ever met through its output, which is a reasonable way to meet it, because its output was the reason the 1990s looked the way they did.

Daniel Langlois founded Softimage in Montreal in 1986. he was a filmmaker rather than an engineer, and the thing he wanted was software an animator could operate without a computer science degree standing behind them. Softimage Creative Environment came out of that, and within a few years it was what the effects houses used. the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were animated in it. so were pieces of Titanic and The Matrix, and a long run of games afterward.

the company listed on NASDAQ in 1992 and Microsoft bought it in 1994 for around a hundred and thirty million dollars. that purchase reads strangely now and read strangely then. Microsoft wanted Windows NT taken seriously as a workstation platform, and owning the software that Hollywood used was a way to argue the point. it was never really about animation.

by June 1998 Microsoft had made its point and was done. Avid Technology bought Softimage, and the product entered the second half of its life as an asset on somebody's balance sheet rather than a company with its own plans.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Softimage 3D was the 1990s product. what replaced it was Softimage XSI, released in August 2000, and XSI is the version people mean when they get sentimental about this. it rebuilt the whole application around a non-destructive history of operations, so you could go back and change something early without losing everything you had done since. that idea is ordinary now. it was not ordinary then.

the feature XSI users still bring up is ICE, which arrived in 2008. it was a node graph for building effects behavior, particles and deformations, without writing code. artists who had spent years being told to go ask a technical director could build the thing themselves. plenty of people who moved to other packages afterward spent the next decade complaining that nothing they were given matched it.

~ the decline ~

Autodesk bought the Softimage brand and assets from Avid on 23 October 2008 for about thirty five million dollars. the number is the story. Microsoft had paid a hundred and thirty million for it fourteen years earlier, and this was a fire sale.

it was also a purchase by a company that already owned Maya and 3ds Max, which were the two products Softimage competed against. Autodesk said the right things about continued development and shipped several more releases. every user did the arithmetic anyway. a company with three animation packages is a company that is eventually going to have fewer than three.

~ the actual end ~

on 4 March 2014 Autodesk announced that Softimage 2015 would be the final release. the version shipped on 14 April that year and maintenance continued for two more, ending on 30 April 2016. existing licenses were not switched off, which matters, because unlike a website this is software that keeps running as long as it has a machine that will host it.

the transition offer was a discounted move to Maya or 3ds Max, and for a lot of studios that was the end of the argument. for the artists it was not. there is a particular anger reserved for having your tools retired by the company that bought them, and the Softimage community carried it for years. a petition circulated. it changed nothing, as petitions to Autodesk generally do not.

~ what got buried with it ~

some of it did survive. Autodesk moved pieces of the ICE approach and other Softimage ideas into Maya over the following releases, and a number of the people went too. that is the usual consolation and it is usually only half true, because a package is not a list of features, it is the specific way those features sit next to each other.

Softimage still runs. people have kept installations alive well past the end of support, on locked-down machines, for pipelines nobody wants to rebuild. it is the same afterlife every serious piece of professional software gets: not deleted, just gradually stranded on older hardware until the last person who knows it retires. thirty years and three owners later, the dinosaurs still hold up.

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