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Interview first
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Okino Computer Graphics
Sales
Phone: (905) 672-9328 (888) 3D-OKINO (Toll Free) Fax: (905) 672-2706
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Robert Lansdale heads up Okino Computer Graphics, a company that specializes in translation in both the CAD and rendering worlds. - - - upFront.eZine: How did you get started in what you do? Mr. Lansdale: 1988 was the time of Alias
1.0, CAD-3D on the Atari, Caligari, and the forerunners
of today's major animation packages. Because I couldn't afford Alias
or RenderMan, I decided to drop everything and write NuGraf
as a clone of the best of what was the market at that time.
upFront.eZine: So that's the rendering market. What's the CAD connection for you? Mr. Lansdale: In short, NuGraf is marketed to CAD
world, and PolyTrans to rest of 3D world. They are identical
packages at the core level.
upFront.eZine: How does your PolyTrans product fit into all this? Mr. Lansdale: Back in the summer 1996, people
at Siggraph wanted us to make a data translation product,
so I renamed NuGraf to the PolyTrans name, stripped out rendering,
material editing, texture editing, complex UI, simplified the manuals,
and a new product was born. By October 1996 sales zipped up and
within a year we had sold to almost every game developer (although
game developers are now a tiny portion of our user base).
upFront.eZine: Tell me a little bit more about your company. Mr. Lansdale: I am not "Mr Okino" and
I don't sit in a small room answering phone calls, eating beer and
pizza, responding to email and shipping products (although some
customers initially assume so). We're a private Canadian corporation,
located in Toronto with 11 to 12 employees. Okino was named after
Professor Okino in a book by Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and Daniel
Thalmann. We are not a Japanese company. Back in 1992, the president of NeoVisuals told me, "Solve
people's problems and they will beat a path to your door."
What we offer are solutions to major problems encountered by our
users. Most of the emails I get each day usually start with, "I
have a problem. Can you help?" Our converters are the hammer
and nails; my hands-on tech support tells people how to solve their
problems. One of many hidden uses of our software is as a stepping stone. Complex CAD files are imported into NuGraf/PolyTrans, simplified in part count, and then fed to other formats in a clean state. This is particularly important for moving CAD data to MAX, Maya and Lightwave these days. Few people consider this when purchasing our software, but come to realize its power in production conditions. Look at all major 3D animation/modeling/CAD packages, take off the top 10%, and ask: "How serious are they about data translation?" Most are not. This hasn't changed much in over 10 years. That's where my outright love of supporting data translation software development has helped the 3D community. Our focus has been to "be a universal hub for data translation in a 3D world where companies do not wish to exchange their data with competing packages. We want to create an open market for data translation, instead of using politics and other tactics to prevent data translation. Such politics occur as "data inter-operability" that is usually only to the advantage to a company when data can be imported into their proprietary package, and not exported. Data translation was not been taken seriously for a large part of the 1990s. I have lobbied to make people aware that conversion software actually "does work" (the kinks in the pipeline are usually the source/destination programs). And this is a statement I keep hammering to people indirectly: the converters we write take months or years to write, even though some people mention that their cousin or son in high school can do it in an afternoon. Creating a converter is like raising a child (see my comments at http://www.okino.com/conv/filefrmt.htm . Writing a converter is not about importing a mesh dataset from a file, but rather dealing with all the got-chas that befall end-users.
And my final point is the one that is the hardest to overcome on a daily basis. I purchase software for my company. When I purchase a package, I rarely consider what the company must be like, who writes the software, or what support they can provide. In my dream world, however, every 3D package would come with a history and hands-on account about how the software was developed. I know some history of programs -- like 3DStudio, Lightwave, Caligari, Maya/Alias, and SoftImage -- were developed, and I feel much closer to those packages and can respect the effort that went into them. I respect how some of these developers toiled untold hours over their software. New users to our product come to us as if support is supposed to provide a robotic answer, but they find over time that there are real people here who want to help directly. Support to me is not about answering questions, but about staying awake until the head hits the keyboard solving a problem because the customer has a production deadline the next morning. This form of support has lead to many great email and customer friendships over the years. My point is that our Web site shows NuGraf and PolyTrans with a well- established user list, good set of features, and a stable company. But there is little sense of the back-end humanity that comes with the purchase price.
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