Autodesk + Alias News

[John Montgomery]

Any thoughts out there regarding the acquisition? It could prove to be a really great thing for exchange of data between the current Autodesk effects products (flame, fire, toxiK) and Maya. Seems like a win for those products. I think the development of 3DS has been great over the last several years as well and this could improve both 3D products. At the same time, competition is great for the marketplace and its a shame to see one less player driving innovation.

Again, though, more questions than answers….

1. Should they just drop either 3DS or Maya eventually and concentrate on one really solid prodcut?

2. What will it mean for integration with flame and toxik?

3. Should they just go ahead and drop the Alias name now (at least for the Maya product) and get it over with?

4. There was a lot of talk about integration and workflow, but what about new and more powerful 3D creative tools?

5. I’m not a 3D artist, but I’ve been told (and it seems as though) the 3DS development pace has been much greater than Maya — could this stand to improve Maya?

No answers…but just a few of the many thoughts going through my mind.

[Ajax]

You should see the reactions on the CGtalk & Highend sites! Most seem very disappointed. It’s kind of hard to imagine Autodesk Maya®! I can’t believe probably the most powerful, robust, intuitive, MEL scripting peace of genius 3D program get purchased! Obviously it would mean new tools, intergration between Autodesk products and Maya, and maybe a solution between file formats. But my jaw is still on the ground with this announcement. 😯 😯 😯

[sidewalksurfing]

hi john

not sure this is such great news. flame has been owned by autodesk for quite some time and i think that flame r&d has fallen behind the rest of the world. what improvements have we seen in flame thanks to 3DS? where is mental ray? seems like it will just be more of a quagmire.

tim

[Martincito]

I agree, Flame R&D has fallen behind the rest of the galaxy. Seven years ago Flame was kicking ass, it was far better than any other software an killed Quantel. Now my aunt can do the same effects with a fraction of the money that we spend in updates.
All the 3D environments (Lights, particles, 3D tracking, textures) are lame.
I hope with the purchase of Maya we can access to better things.

[pgill]

i reckon this is the way to further address the shake market…alot of people using maya comp in shake…if they could integrate the pipeline between maya and toxik/flame then they can attack that market.

also the issue of r&d…i think that apart from people like debevec, there has been a saturation point in what defines the highend simply because of the technology advances in recent times have rendered highend as less essential, how much r&d can you do to differentiate from the lower end market?

i think now its more about usability and workflow rather than big new features…this seems to be the same in alot of the technology industries at the moment…

just my twopennies

paul

[sidewalksurfing]

how much r&d can you do to differentiate from the lower end market?

well, workflow is certainly a factor, but if you look at some of the killer new tools coming out of the foundry (furnace v3) i think there is plenty of R&D to be done. flame should be the place where these new tools debut, and then trickle down to the rest of the world. right now, it’s the other way around!!!!! from new tools comes new work flow also! to say that there really isn’t much r&d left to do is like saying you have no imagination.

[pgill]

hi

i’m certainly not saying there is no r&d left to do…but simple economics dictate what autodesk can do. As you say you can get things like furnace made by smaller companies with smaller r&d outlay and it will run on desktops eg furnace for after effects for 10% of the cost of the discreet spark!!!! so autodesk throwing big sums of money at r&d is harder to justify as previously the hardware is what kept tools like this exclusive to highend workstations but now this isn’t the case. Even if they come up with a new technology, chances are this technology will be able to perform just as well on a desktop machine and so someone somewhere will release a rival product at a much lower cost.

At the end of the day, unless they improve the hardware to a point where again it is years ahead of the desktops, they are not going to have the chance to make exclusive tools. You said it yourself…it’s the otherway round and thats down to simple economics, price per unit of computing power!

anyway its all just my opinion.

[eltopo]

So what will happen with 3DS Max and Maya, will they be integrated?

And what will happen with Mac support on Maya, will Autodesk kill it, is no secret that they have a ona plattform policy, then againg Mac OS X represents over 25% of Maya sales…

[TurboWidget]

I don’t know how valid that “one platform policy” statement is considering there are Autodesk products on Windows, IRIX, Linux and Mac platforms, and the only product they’ve “killed” in the past couple of years was edit* on Windows.
I just wonder about the direction they are heading in. It seems to me that Autodesk is trying to service all aspects of the post industry from grading, editing, animation, vfx, infrastrucutre, pipelines, collaborative workflows etc, and I think it’s a pretty brave move to try and be at the forefront of all these technologies. I think what I’m trying to say in my usual messy way is, what are the priorities for Autodesk in R & D ? More IFF features ? Developing Toxik ? Integrating max & maya toolsets ? porting IFF to Linux ? etc etc. To try and address all this R&D at the same time requires a team the size of a small army, and more importantly, a small army who are all working together to ensure seamless integration of all these products into an effective production pipeline.

[worldofmaya_vb]

Autodesk now gets Studiotools… I belive this is the main thing they’re interested in. And with an side effect they now get access into nearly all major studios… I personally hope that they don’t touch maya, but this is just a dream where alias isn’t part of autodesk and they have their real name back (alias|wavefront). alias itself didn’t improve much in the last year… real features in version 7 are rare.
By the way, a lot of the patents that are part of alias can now be build into Max… now they don’t need to implement this fake stuff 🙂
It was a logical step that alias was bought by someone big after they were dropped by SGI. I’m sorry for all the alias|wavefront guys… they made a great job in the past, but I think the “real” Maya died when they left CA and changed their name. Because it was more…

eltopo wrote:

that they have a ona plattform policy

Their one plattform policy was a result of their architecture. It’s not economically possible to port max. The maya architecture is something really different… and Maya was implement for Irix with an eye on Windows. have a look at the first version… the first real Maya for Windows was version 2…
-Klaus

[kalthans]

first of all, in response to the posts about how Flame/Inferno R&D has suffered at the hands of Autodesk…

i don’t think there has been enough time under the Autodesk banner to make that claim. it has not even been a year since Autodesk acquired Discreet. there just simply isn’t enough evidence to support an analysis. all of the technology demos we’ve seen so far have been fairly impressive, pointing to increasingly higher levels of optical flow integration. and judging by their marketing presence (and $$$ spent) at NAB they are definitely in it for the long haul.

second, as for all the people freaking out about the possiblity of Autodesk killing off the Linux platform just because their CAD/CAM stuff and 3DS are Wintel…..

i really don’t see that as being an issue. the only reason 3DS is still wintel-only is because that is how it came to them in the acquisition of Discreet. discreet’s other product lines (smoke/flint/burn) all have Linux-based versions that are up and running strong and will be around for a long time if you believe the technology gurus at discreet who are all but shunning the big-iron boxes of sgi. even if inferno gets an update it will most likely be on a Prism box running some variant of linux. so i really don’t think Maya guys need to worry about losing the stablity and robustness of the linux platform.

as for the coexistence of two 3D products in the same company: that is the million dollar question. if any product suffers it will most likely be Max because it represents the smaller capital investment made by Autodesk. the most likely scenario would be a marketing-driven one: return Max to it’s roots as game-developer-centric product while continuing to position Maya at the high end. i think this would be unfortunate because of how fast Max has grown in the past few years as a ready-for-prime-time player, but when big $$$ are at stake hard decisions are often made.
k

[Deke]

kalthans wrote:

i don’t think there has been enough time under the Autodesk banner to make that claim. it has not even been a year since Autodesk acquired Discreet. there just simply isn’t enough evidence to support an analysis. all of the technology demos we’ve seen so far have been fairly impressive, pointing to increasingly higher levels of optical flow integration. and judging by their marketing presence (and $$$ spent) at NAB they are definitely in it for the long haul.

Huh?

Autodesk has bought Discreet Logic back in 1998. They renamed it to “Discreet” and two years later folded their 3d entertainment product division “Kinetix” into it. Last year all they did was get rid of the Discreet name and fold everything into the Autodesk banner.

Damn I feel old now. 🙂
-deke

[kalthans]

i stand corrected. thanks, deke

it has been only a year since they have rebranded most of the discreet products with the autodesk label

[patdawg]

kalthans wrote:

i stand corrected. thanks, deke

it has been only a year since they have rebranded most of the discreet products with the autodesk label

More importantly though is the fact that Autodesk’s considerable R&D resources weren’t really shared with discreet until the name changed to Autodesk Media & Entertainment. This new mony is going to have a HUGE impact on the image science research going on up in Montreal.

[eltopo]

patdawg wrote:

kalthans wrote:

i stand corrected. thanks, deke

it has been only a year since they have rebranded most of the discreet products with the autodesk label

More importantly though is the fact that Autodesk’s considerable R&D resources weren’t really shared with discreet until the name changed to Autodesk Media & Entertainment. This new mony is going to have a HUGE impact on the image science research going on up in Montreal.

I honestly think they are going to move everything to Toronto

BTW. Where is the development center of 3DS Max?

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