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I’d like to propose another way of dealing with feature suggestions than just posting them here.
There are some (OK a few) well intended people at Autodesk who want to do the right thing and put useful stuff into the next version of Maya to make it a better product, but you have to realize Autodesk hasn’t go anyone on the payroll who has time to track all the wish lists on each and every forum.
If you want a feature request logged, submit it via Help->Suggest a Feature… and make sure all everyone who agrees with you submit duplicates. These SUGs go directly into the bug tracking system. Logging enough duplicates forces the count up to a point where development can no longer ignore it. That will put it on the agenda and then you may see it in, not the next (because what goes in there has already been decided), not the version after that because they have already figured out which areas to look at, but MAYBE the version after that. If you’re lucky.
So, what do I suggest you do then? I think it makes sense to post a note here that you have logged a sug and request that people back up your request by logging a duplicate. If you post the text of your sug, others can copy and paste, so that’s easy.
Convincing people here that your idea is worth persuing is probably easy. I like yours too. The hard part is convincing Autodesk. Autodesk cares about the bottom line, so the way to get them to do what you want is to make a good business case for them. There are two sides to implementing a new feature; 1) sell new seats 2) keep existing customers. Unfortunately 1) typically results in “marketing” features. Stuff that sounds good in theory, but doesn’t really help us (think of the viewcube). 2) is where the useful stuff is, but it’s a hard sell, even withing Autodesk because it does not add revenue, it merely keeps the existing revenue stream (subscription) going.
You can make a case to Autodesk by explaining how a feature that you want would, for example: keep you from migrating to another product, make you buy more seats, keep you on subscription.
You could try embarrassing them by saying things like “everybody else has quaternion skinning”, but that’s essentially the same thing as threatening to abandon Maya. And if you’re not serious about that, the threat is pretty empty. But if you said, “Hey, we’d like to get more seats of Maya but we can’t because we need to write our own lighting tool which is costing us the equivalent of n Maya seats”, you actually have a point that might persuade them.
So why don’t we use this thread to figure out how to get Autodesk to listen, organize ourselves and coordinate efforts and learn how to build good business cases.
And if this is any consolation; Autodesk knows about “light”. Well, I did, when I was there, so one might assume that…
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