It’’s a subconscious effect, but it most certainly added some stature to the Softimage brand. Most people think Maya Maya Maya.

And now people are turning their heads.

Everyne needs also to remember that FR is a v1.0 beta product. It has not been publivly release and it is ceratainlty not finished in that regard. it wil lcontinue to develop and having seen it up close, I am convincd thre is nothing out there publicly available that does the same thing - not by a long shot.

It cost Softimage a lot of money to develop face Robt. They need to sell it for a lot of money to recoup the costs of development while they can. Someone will eventually create a similar tool and sell it for cheaper. At that time SI will have to cut their price to match the other tool IF the other tool is on par with what SI has. This is what happened with Behaviour.

>>If there were similar technologies on the market, Softimage wouldn’t have had the guts to be cocky
>>about FR… they just take advantage, shamelessly, of a gap in 3D, a gap that seriously needs to be
>>filled ASAP.

This is a ridiculous statement. Because there are no similar technologies on the market it gives SI the well deserved right to brag about FR. They created a solution for a gap that seriously needs to be filled and are recouping their cost. If no one buys FR at the current price the price will go down. I think there will be companies that are willing to buy FR at this price because it is a tool they need.

Eventually all the research done on FR will find it’’s way back into XSI and XSI will be that much better for it.

I”m not a “long time user”, in fact I”ve been using it less than a year. The thought and innovation in XSI has really inspired me and has made me both a better animator and a better modeler. Coming from near 10 years experience in lightwave, I can honestly say that lightwave can”t touch this program. I tried out both MAX and Maya, but they don”t have the feel or workflow that XSI has.

I can”t say for certain, but I”m going to guess that all the time SI spends on these special projects (such as face robot) have a big part in how the current version of XSI works. Has anyone thought about where the Max and Maya support for 5.1 came from?

>>Pay me a very large commission if they follow the advice and profit because of it.

And how much will you pay them if they follow your advice and lose a lot of money from it? Softimage has been in business for a long time and seem to be doing a very good job at the moment. How long have you been running a similar business.

>>It’s easy to say it’s innovative, but you can also say it’s unproven, and new and different doesn’t >>always mean better.

Again with the ignorance. Face robot has been used on several projects already and has received some rave reviews. How often must something be used successfully to be considered proven?

>>Please don’t take this the wrong way, but when I hear marketing spin like “Face Robot is an entirely
>>different product to XSI”, I can’t help but roll my eyes.

Why? It’’s not part of XSI. It is not sold as part of XSI. It is not advertised as part of XSI. Does it contain code that was in XSI? Sure. They”d be fools to rewrite every bit of the code they need when they already have a lot of it in XSI. Could they plug this into XSI fairly easily? Probably. Does that make it part of XSI? No!

I keep seeing one or two people mentioning (over and over) that XSI is in trouble. As a new user, I”ve been surprised by the number of other new users that have been showing up on CGtalk. To me it looks like XSI is growing fairly rapidly. Development definitely doesn”t seem to be slowing down.

With all the people leaving other packages such as lightwave (currently struggling to add features that other packages have had for years, yet still sticking with a horribly dated interface) or Max/Maya (unhappy with the merge) this looks like it could be a great time for XSI. There are free demos available, there’’s Foundation for low budget users or people who want to experiment with it more before buying essentials/advanced and there are tons of excellent video tutorials available from various 3rd parties.

So, basically what I see going on with face robot are a bunch of people who can”t afford it trying to make things seem bad for softimage because somehow they think it will make face robot cheaper. And then these people expect Softimage to take business advice from them? I don”t think so.

2) Get more in-tune with the overall 3D market and how the market views their products (not how Softimage or it’’s long time users view their products). This means Softimage has to focus on people not familiar with their products and resolve why those people are not buying them. they also have to get out of the 1990′’s way of thinking.

1) Stop sending mixed signals by making up their minds once and for all as to who their target consumer is, then structure the entire company and product line to go after them. This is related to #2 in that Softimage may want a particular type of consumer, but will have to face the music and realize that their desired consumer is not their most likely consumer. If joe freelancer is the one asking for their product, then Softimage has to stop trying to appease the big studios and start appeasing joe freelancer (or vice versa if that’’s the case). In other words, find the path of least resistance until the marketshare improves dramatically. When they have marketshare, THEN they can start using that as leverage to get the clients they want. Can”t put the cart before the horse.

3) Pay me a very large commission if they follow the advice and profit because of it. ;-)

In short, Softimage has an identity problem. They don”t see themselves in the same light as everybody else sees them. until that’’s resolved, they”re not gonna improve their market position.

I”ve been discussing this with a few colleagues over lunch with consensus agreement. If I were running a studio, I wouldn”t plunk 95K on Face Robot. Why? because for that price per seat, I could hire my own development team to develop a facial animation application that works to my needs, not some canned system developed for a different studio whose way of working is different from mine. Even if it takes longer to develop and doesn”t mimick the full feature set of Face Robot, an in-house developed application has several advantages that make it much more cost effective:

1) I own the source code
2) I can distribute it to any number of nodes at no extra cost.
3) I can make any changes I want per #1
4) I don”t have to wait 12 months for the next release to get a bug fixed or feature implemented, again per #1.
5) I retain competitive advantage.

so, looking at the market, who is Softimage selling to? It’’s already been stated that there are few film studios. Very few post houses will invest other than the upper echelon houses that have a lot of jobs involving facial animation. That leaves games studios. Having worked for several games studios myself which often had deep pockets, I can honestly say none of them would buy Face Robot because games studios are more tightfisted with money than film studios or post houses. Games studios also take great pride in developing their own tools. So more likely than not, they”ll look at Face Robot with the same criteria I outline above. So the question remains - who is Softimage selling to at 95K?

>>>
And also, you suggest using Face Robot as leverage for the success of XSI. Isn’t Face Robot intended as a standalone product? Then, what would be proper “bundle” strategy? Just pricing? And what pricing?
>>>

I think the mistake is making Face Robot a standalone product. If it were tied into XSI then it would help XSI’’s cause and also gain from it’’s availble features. Granted, not every application under the sun can or should be integrated into a single application, but integrating Face Robot makes sense. XSI is tauted as being the best 3D animation package - why screw that up by making the pipeline disjointed?

Softimage’’s problem is that they confuse the market with their intentions. They roll out XSI and say they are only going to support a few select clients who want that support relationship - sound familiar? Yet today the product sells at a basement level price because they shot themselves in the foot not understanding the direction the market was heading. Talk about brand identity problems.

If softimage is going to sell Face Robot at 95K, then they”ll have to roll out another brand to do so because they can”t sell a product at an entry level price like XSI and sell a highend priced product at the same time. That’’s why Honda and Toyota have Acura and Lexus respectively. They make the NSX or whatever sports/luxury cars they want and put them under a different label so they hvae their own identity which the consumer identifies with. If they flop, then the flagship brand isn”t affected. If the spinoff brand succeeds, then the company has two successful product lines. Brand identity lies in the mind of the consumer, not the seller. Softimage hasn”t learned that yet.

As for all the arguments about having to charge a high price to justify the expense of developing the Face Robot product - that’’s entirely softimage’’s problem, not the consumer’’s. Softimage has to learn that too by taking a more long term approach to recouping costs. To do that requires getting the product into as many hands as possible and as soon as possible. If that means simplifying the feature set, then so be it. When other products start appearing on the market, Softimage needs to have an existing user base locked up. they need to make competing products work harder to get users by not only forcing them to make a better product at a better price point, but also a product that is good enough to justify switching a pipeline from one product to another. that’’s exactly what Alias does to Softimage with Maya - and look how successful it is. XSI does a lot of things better than Maya, but not by a big enough margin to justify a pipeline switch. Softimage has to learn that game too…..boy have they got a lot to learn ;-)

that is why the software costs 95k you have to build a team to deal with face robot. the special prjects devision is not going to be doing fr forever it is not what they are there for. you also should not rob XSI of it’’s development staff. you therfore have to hire and train more people. you also want them to be capable of dealing with high end customers as FR is a specialist tool and an extreemely complex one at that. you therfore want to make sure that the team has experience with dealing ith the various problems of developing the software before opening it up to the mass market. thus you want to limit the userebase and display the software at the same time hence the high price, and if you thin i am beeing silly soft was advertising that they were hireing people a couple of month ago.

you cannot release a mass market product effectively if you have not developed a staff who can deal with the logistics. the price will come down but when it does softimage will hopefully have a killer FR teamrather than a rushed mess

We seem to keep going in circles here.

Zamolxes, you mention that FR shouldn”t be more expensive than Maya or XSI. Why is this so? Because you can”t afford to spend $95,000? Did Softimage include people like you and me in their research to fill the need that big corporations need? The key words here are “corporate” and “needs”.

I think a big problem with the general public viewing the FR situation is that we seem to be focusing on the way [we] see it. [We] see it as an absurdly priced product that [we] can”t afford. I think [we] need to finally understand that FR is a) a seperate entity apart from xsi, and that b) it is developed, (and as a result, geared towards) corporations.. not the general 3d users.
Yes, it is awefully tempting to imagine that FR can be nicely integrated into xsi (and I do see this happening perhaps many years down the road, a-la Behavior), and yes, this would most likely add to the xsi userbase. But [we] seem to keep having problems wrapping our heads around the simple fact that Softimage has a different game plan for FR than [we] would like. There are perhaps countless business factors that [we] are not aware of. I don”t think Softimage would go ahead and develop / spend tons of money on a product that might only sell 1 or 2 seats. Is it not possible that perhaps Soft has conducted alot of research with big corporate players who have expressed (in one form or another) a need for such a product?
I think it’’s time that [we] stop and think about it from a larger corporate standpoint instead of our own (very limited) view of things. There are perhaps tons of business factors that [we] are not aware of. The cost of FR is peanuts from a standpoint of corporate dollars, which is spent more heavily on employee salaries and R&D. So if such a product can save corporations alot of time down the road, then perhaps FR sounds like a very good investment at $95,000 (+animator seats). Corporate pockets are much, much deeper than ours (something [we] seem to lose sight of). Don”t worry. They wont go bankrupt buying FR. As I said before.. Employee salaries cary a much heftier price tag than FR does..
As far as I see it.. once the demand has been met, and the sales of FR have tappered off… Im sure that Softimage will not let this great innovative technology go to waste.. I think it’’s a very safe bet that it will make its way into xsi advanced. We just have to wait awhile.. thats all.

What companies are paying for right now (which we just established as peanuts) is just what Patrick Boucher mentioned in his original post.. innovation and exclusivity (for now). Companies understand this. It is the nature of new technologies. Perhaps thinking about the much bigger picture (that [we] have very little insight into) might shed some light as to why FR is currently not for us (at this time). This may be all for the better for Soft’’s bottom line instead of executing FR our way.

-NRG

I hope Softimage will be able to “support the software properly” [Tim Miller] ASAP and make it available to the 3D comunity. FR has to be a soft for everybody, and I”m sure it will be, especially as similar technologies get developed in parallel. but I just hope they bring down the price this year, not in the years to come. FR shouldn”t be more expensive than Maya or XSI, and then it would bring tons of money to Softimage. I mean, how can you make money if you don”t sell your product???

“[...] In my opinion, this is Softimage’s last chance to get XSI on the map where it belongs. They should be using Face Robot as a wedge to get into studio pipelines. [...] The answer is to spread the cost out over time with a lower intro price or else you kill the product’s marketability. [...] Drop the price and you make it less possible for the competitors to jump into the ring because they’ll run the numbers several times and realize there’s no way they can justify the cost of doing business with a shrunken revenue pool. [...] the solution to the problem is not overprice Face Robot in the beginning. [...]”

But you did not answer the question. So the question is: how much would pay for such a product? That, imho, is a *much* more important question.

And also, you suggest using Face Robot as leverage for the success of XSI. Isn”t Face Robot intended as a standalone product? Then, what would be proper “bundle” strategy? Just pricing? And what pricing?