In this topic I think my experience of when I worked at the mill, the only people who could be bothered to get involved in the beta/feedback were me, @andy_dill and @randy. So is it representative? I think it’s representative of those who get involved. And anyone can.
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What is your strategy for winning back market share from Nuke and regaining the stereotype that flame is good with CG that nuke holds over all CG artists?
Earlier this year @fredwarren posted here on the forum looking for customers that would like to take part in discussions with the flame team. I’m not sure how many sessions there were, but it was open to anyone, anywhere. I was part of one, and spoke about the needs of someone working in commercial VFX. I was on with another fellow who only did shot-based work. It was a fabulous session. Reminded me of when the dev team would visit our office once every couple of years to hear from customers (ah, the pre-pandemic days).
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Since Luster seems like a rather small user base why not roll that functionality into flame as another tab and utilize that as one software package?
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As a longtime Lustre user, they basically have. The change cut functionality is still not there, and it’s slower than Lustre because of all the overhead the flexibility an Action-derived grading environment brings, but it’s close enough for short form work. We dropped Lustre as a company maybe 18 months ago? I’m about to grade my first feature in it, so I may have…thoughts in a month or so.
I guess Flame can’t livestream to an iPad out of the box?
why are certain tools not unified across the software, ie gmask and could you please make the masks inclusive or exclusive in every module of the software . also an easy ROI like the old gmask would be great, when you have more than one shape.
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If they have and all the functionality is there why not retire Luster to avoid confusion to users and adopt more flame people?
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ive got another one;
why is smoke still around if it isnt upgraded anymore, whats the point of smoke in 2022?
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I briefly saw that when it came through. I would have loved to participate, but sadly at the time I was already struggling to stay above water with the project I was working on and didn’t have the headspace to chime in. I probably should have tried harder, but sometimes the job just gets in the way.
That definitely isn’t Autodesk’s fault but I think it speaks to a bigger issue within the community about who is able to participate in Flame development and feedback.
There are outsized personalities within our community. People who care a lot and show it. These people are rightly looked to for advice and direction on a range of issues. I’m not sure what if any priority these people’s voices are given within the development team, but I often wonder whether because they are omnipresent and easily accessible they also have an outsized impact on development.
I recently saw a discussion of the animation button that appears outside of a node with keyframes. Joel Osis is a flame legend and he was invited to Montreal to work with the team at which point he was allowed to make a feature request. Its an amazing feature, but he was only given the opportunity to shape the direction of Flame because of who he is. For every Joel Osis there are dozens of anonymous Flame artists who will never get to visit Montreal and make personal appeals to the dev team.
If you go through the feedback portal and search for issues by user you can see that a very small number of people are contributing the vast majority of requests. Again, good on them. Someone needs to do the work, but self-selection doesn’t necessarily yield the best results. In fact I would argue at times that it yields highly undesirable results.
The development of Flame would be best served not by hearing only from a self-selecting group of voices but from a wider range of artists in the community with a greater diversity of demands. Imagine what nuggets of inspiration are sitting undiscovered in the minds of artists out there who don’t know how to access the beta or that the feedback request forum exists.
Its great for Fred to be soliciting feedback on the forum, but I would point out that this is also a self-selecting group of individuals so if this was the only place he was asking its kind of bunk to say it was open to anyone, anywhere. Those groups may have been advertised elsewhere, but not that I’ve seen or heard. If you don’t know about it you can’t really participate can you?
Last year I decided that I was fed up enough with Flame that I would try and become a more active participant in the community. Thats part of why I’m sitting here during some time off posting away on the forum. Until I joined the forum though, I didn’t even know that the feedback request system existed. I suppose I could have actively sought it out prior, but its hard to know to look for something you don’t know exists.
Most Flame artists I know don’t come here. In the discussions I’ve had with many of them, they don’t know it exists. I’m in favor of more users, but nobody should have to come here in order to participate in the development of Flame. This forum is an extracurricular, not a requirement of the job. So its wonderful that this community is being solicited for feedback, but what about everyone else?
Regarding participation in the beta, I’ve never worked anywhere that it was available. Sysdev’s are probably reluctant to deploy it for good reason. That means if I want to participate I have to do it in my own time. Maybe I’m just not invested enough in Flame, but the idea of trying to find bugs in the software without direct access to the kind of working environment that will push Flame to its limits and reveal issues in the program after working a 60 hour week is a tough pill to swallow.
Ultimately its just a fact that development on the user side is being driven by english speaking men in their 40’s and 50’s. Thats why I’m interested to hear how the development team thinks about these issues and if they are at all concerned that they’re only hearing the voices of a small subset of Flame users.
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That’s quite a list. Many of your questions likely can’t be answered directly due to financial/corporate disclosure laws.
These are product management questions, not product development.
Product Management = business, strategy, vision, portfolio, etc.
Product Development = Turning these items into features.
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Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing them. I’ll try to be as concise as possible in my answer.
You start by saying that you couldn’t participate in the Zoom sessions we offered because you were too busy and this is the exact reason why your idea of a committee of users being involved in defining the strategy and vision couldn’t work. We would be hit with “can’t make it this time” and “under the water at the moment” all the time. Defining the strategy, vision, priorities, etc. take a lot of time and most users can’t afford it.
On your concern about some people having a voice and some other not I would say that I understand your concern. All I can say about it is this:
- All is in place for everyone to participate. We are reading forums, we are looking at Flame Feedback, we are looking into every CER reports, we are looking into every issues reported to support, we are going to trade shows, attending user group meetings, etc. What do you want us to do if users do not participate? I mean, going to the Flame Feedback website and entering your most beloved feature request probably takes less than 5 minutes…
- As for users not knowing about Flame Feedback, there’s a link to it inside the application, a page about it in the Welcome Screen, and it is mentioned in the What’s New pages of the online user guide. If you have any more idea how we can present it to users who are not on this forum please let me know.
- It is our job to determine what feedback is best for the majority of users and what is not. We are using all the different tools to do so. If somebody tells me to get rid of a tool because it is ancient and nobody uses it I will ask the community, run an analytic research on its usage, etc. Kind of a stupid example, but if Joel asked us to put a cat icon on every nodes because he loves cats so much we wouldn’t have done it. We did the Animation indicators because we knew it would benefit the majority of users.
- “Ultimately it’s just a fact that development on the user side is being driven by english speaking men in their 40’s and 50’s”. I confirm it is much harder for us to get feedback from users located outside of bigger markets (US and UK). But I can assure you we are trying. It is just not that easy. I understand why one might think only the most vocal users are driving the development but it is not true. Their feedback is heard and considered but it has the same weight as feedback we get from different sources. We will never implement something because user X as requested it.
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I can actually answer that one… The end-of-sale of Smoke has been announced to people still using it.
And NO that doesn’t mean the Smoke keyboard shortcuts are going away.
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No more smoke.
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@fredwarren knows us so well
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thanks for the clarification, go Bills!
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Same. I spent a large part of my six years at the Mill trying to get the other 60-something worldwide artists involved in any sort of constructive conversation with Autodesk, most could not be bothered.
I’d send out emails like, “I am going to sit down with the dev team next week, what would you like me to discuss with them?” and get back maybe two emails asking to bring back the old Keyer in Action and that’s it.
As incomplete as the self-selected group is, it’s the best we can do.
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Yeah. That’s the whole issue, and it’s hard to solve. I got the Mill to build a standalone beta machine but only a handful of us ever used it, and only sparingly as we were booked solid.
So it has to be either in the gaps between jobs or on your own time, and neither of those is ideal. Outside of some weird, highly insured, Autodesk owned beta post facility that can beat on the software at a high level over sustained periods, it is always going to rely on users donating their time, and it’s frankly impressive how many do that.
(Note to Autodesk Corporate: I will gladly run this beta company for you.)
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The end result of this is that the most current release is effectively the Beta. Thats why most facilities are usually running a year or two behind the most current release and always running an updated version, usually a .2 or .3 update.
I asked about upgrading to 2023 at work the other day and the answer that came back was, “Why deal with the headache?” There is a general level of distrust within the community because people have been burned so many times by upgrading to the most current release that they’ve stopped doing it.
Autodesk needs to heal its relationship with the users in order for more people to begin participating in the development process. That trust needs to be rebuilt so that people can start to feel like making feature requests is worth their time. I think most people would prefer a completely stable version of Flame without any new features to one which is wildly tempermental but chock full new toys.
Thats why I’m particularly interested in what the division of labor is between fixes and new features.
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