Contemplating software rot today, or I guess feature rot or technique rot. The idea is this, as new pieces of software take over the market, we gain new abilities but lose older abilities. Sometimes this can be a good thing, like for example, some older techniques are no longer necessary, and so seeing them go isnt a big deal. But sometimes losing those old features can be a real pain. A few example: 1) To get the realtime rendering of keyshot, you lose the ability to use a lot of procedural shading techniques. End result is people now use keyshot, but have to add all their dirt by hand in photoshop in 2d after the fact, losing the ability to see the model in 3d (Ive tried mitigating this issue with my new software SAL to some extent). 2) You want the realtime of vrayRT, but then you lose compatibility with almost all 3rd party plugins. 3) Programs like substance designer or dDO give you amazing procedural texturing capabilities, but they require you to make a normal map, ie, it only works for games and not for situations where youre rendering highres objects. 4) Or the simplest example, you want to upgrade to the latest copy of 3dsmax, but the 5 plugins you rely on probably wont get updated because their developers left the 3d industry and are no longer updating the plugins. This dance of new features pulling the user forward, but older features pulling the user backwards can get quite tiring. Whats some of your favorite examples of features or techniques that got left behind?
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 20:38:02 +0000