Autodesk seems to follow a strategy to go deeper into the "real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools" market.
The acquisition of Softimage was completed before yesterday (18th Nov.). In a public FAQ it says the following (emphasis added):
[..] It is hoped that this acquisition will promote Autodesk’s growth in the fastgrowing games market, and accelerate its strategy to deliver real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools for games, film and television. As well, it is hoped that the acquisition will broaden the appeal of Autodesk products into the hobbyist/game ‘modder’ segment. […]
[…] it is hoped that the acquisition will accelerate Autodesk’s effort to build the next-generation of real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools.[…]
One of the key competitors is Dassault Systemes. But also the overall evolution is that interactive 3D becomes part of other products – as seen in Photoshop or Microsofts XAML/WPF. Autodesk clearly mention this in that FAQ too:
[…] The 3D competitive landscape is fast evolving. Relatively new competitors, from Google to Adobe, are entering the 3D market, and others such as Dassault Systèmes are reinforcing their position. The production pipeline is rapidly expanding beyond simple digital content creation (DCC) tools. […]
A bit strange is this statement:
The Softimage product line will benefit from Autodesk’s scale and research and development (R&D) investment capabilities, providing new opportunities for innovation and interoperability
It is said that XSI 7 with it's new ICE technology, was a nice release. Do they really need the R&D teams of 3ds max and Maya? They probably wanted to say that they can now do a big remix with the hope of heavy synergies.
So we have some big key players going into interactive 3D, but what about the smaller ones? Gamebryo expands to the casual game market … and tiny Unity3D expands to the MMO market. CryEngine2 goes into architecture and public viewing. Interesting times, everybody expands to other market-segments.
Well, I sure hope you're right. I've always wondered why autodesk hasn't got a realtime product in its line-up. Sometimes I wished that virtools had been bought by autodesk instead of dassault. It would have resulted in a much better interchange with max and maya. (which are by far the most popular dcc tools in the virtools comunity) Things like attribute export for instance, or support for mask materials.
very interesting I think Autodesk is the best "player" at this time to build a complete 3D pipeline from CAD to real time for video games. They also acquired company like "Kynogon" and perhaps other I do not know. Why they did not acquired virtools 🙁
Autodesk have a tiny foot in interactive 3D authoing tools already with "motion builder" and more accurately "mocap" (the motion builder extension using motion capture). It is done to animate characters, basically, but you can use them as realtime engine (very poor performances….) to setup a virtual puppets shows or things like that… There is a graph programming language, and you can use python too. But constraints are so huge compared to Virtools. But you can have quite good results.
Yes, that's true. We've done live character projects with motionbuilder, mainly because it has live lip-syncing. The graphic scripting looks like virtools, but its based on a continuous-processing paradigm. This is very handy if you're doing things which are driven by motion capture input (like aiming the eyes of the character at the camera). But its tricky to do triggered actions. This makes it very different from virtools !
Anyone have an opinion on http://www.esperient.com? Also, about 7 years ago, Alias had plans for a "Maya Real Time SDK" from http://www.design-engine.com/alias/history.html: Maya Real Time SDK: A visual simulator that ran on Windows NT. It let game artists see what their scene would look like on a particular game platform such as Sony Playstation by simulating the display properties of that hardware. This was a joint venture with an outside company that soured due to different goals and politics.
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