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Alias In Acquisition Talks With Private Equity Firm
TeachingMachines writes "Alias, the makers of the venerable Maya 3D animation and effects software, have announced their possible sale to an unnamed 3rd party, described as a 'leading private equity investment firm'. Alias is currently owned by SGI, and the transaction is still considered to be tentative. I, for one, hope that SGI holds onto Alias, as in its current state it is arguably the best 3D modelling and animation suite available, and it is available for Linux. Cross your fingers..."
...says it'll be Apple.
Rumour has it Adobe and Apple are looking to scoop up Avid...
I think Maya is one of the most revolutionary products in software history not just for its tech capabilities, but the way they sell it.
To curb piracy of their full value product, they released a Personal Learn Edition that made all the features of the full product available, but put on a watermark that made the output useless for commercial use and encrypted the saved files so that the commerical version would not open them. Those who designed something and then sold it, however, could send their encrypted file in when they purchase their license to get it converted to a file their full version could open and output without the watermark. They also offered a $20 how-to DVD for those who wanted to learn the program with a minimal outlay of money.
They also made what could be the most dramatic price cut in software history, knocking their entry-level product's price from $7,500 to $1,999 and taking their high-level product from $16,000 to $7000. Clearly, they made it up on volume.
So, not only was this a great technical program, but it became priced so that even moderately-funded producers could afford the program, and therefore made it accessable to the people who needed it. I just hope these unnamed investors don't raise the prices back to where they were...
I've got my money on the 500:1 odds of it being Red Hat. Whoooooooooo!!!
Damn, be back in a bit, gotta run and get some more crack.
Not when they force you to put an ass-ugly watermark on every single frame of your movie unless you pay them for the retail version.
I'd rather some "private investment firm" put the whole thing under a straightforward license instead of pussyfooting around the whole OSS issue.
I have been pwned because my
It's better if Alias separated itself from the sinking ship that is SGI. SGI is really losing its ability to hold onto any market share very quickly, and it's better that Alias avoids getting sucked down with SGI in an implosion.
There were rumors of apple buying 3dStudio back in December 2003. I couldn't see that happen because there is no current OSX Port. For apple to add that software to their Pro apps it would take quite a bit of development before being able to add that feather to their cap. That rumor must have confused 3dstudio with Alias Maya???
> animation suite available, and it is available
> for Linux. Cross your fingers..."
hmmm... I wonder how sales of this program would do on Linux vs. other platforms...
their possible sale to an unnamed 3rd party, described as a 'leading private equity investment firm'. Alias is currently owned by SGI, and the transaction is still considered to be tentative ... SGI announced that they don't know if they'll sell Maya to somebody.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
To curb piracy of their full value product, they released a Personal Learn Edition that made all the features of the full product available
While I think the reasoning behing the Personal Learning Edition was great, they implemented it poorly.
I developed an interest in 3D during uni, and explored 3Dsmax, lightwave, etc.
I was excited when I saw the PLE, so I grabbed it with the intention of learning.
No such luck.
The watermark on any finished product is a fine idea, but they place a huge watermark (and not exactly a subtle, transparent one) across the entire modelling view, which makes using the product for longer than about 20 minutes impossible unless you want a spliting headache.
This actually steered me away from Maya, so I ended up sticking with 3dsmax for my uni subjects.
Someone could be using a false name... :-)
RMS and ESR says so (both said so while entwinded in various positions of the homo Kama Sutra). So there.
buy sgi stock, it is very cheap. sgi may be selling alias because they need the cash. lately, their stock price has been rising and should it rise some more they may reconsider. (don't take stock buying advice from me, IANA Stock Broker.)
no, i don't work for them, but i used to use their computers in 1998 and 1999. when i left that job, i borrowed the manual to the O2.
i bought some of their stock. when i tell people about it, i say that it is was an emotional buy.
andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
control. Apple needs to control a market. They need it to walk away from Windows, and be able to pull it away from OSS. Steve has bought many of the other packages over the last 1.5 years. So yeah, I would agree with the parent that most likely it is Steve.
There is one problem with this. Jobs has been upfront with his buys. With the hiding and slinking going on, I would suspect that it is Gates doing it to make sure that Apple does not control a market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
is Microsoft! W00t.
I, for one, hope that SGI holds onto Alias, as in its current state it is arguably the best 3D modelling and animation suite available
First, the write-up meant Maya. Alias is the company. Back in the days, some people referred to PA as Alias.
Second, Hello!!!! Softimage XSI?????
Actually, I think Softimage's XSI is cooler in the 3.x iteration than Maya. I like the interface better, and they have a free EXP version (for Linux too! PLE is only Windows and Mac) that has fewer restrictions than PLE. Many people think its more powerful in certain areas, especially subdivision surfaces, than Maya.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
HAHA, I hope your kidding, SCO doesnt come close to having the money it would take to buy Alias.
I bet you Apple is the un named third party. This year they are going to have a HUGE presence at SIGGRAPH 04, and I bet you this is one of those reasons. Apple is looking for domintation in markets it currently has an edge in, namely music production and video production. And Apple seems to be doing this job very well. Coupled with Renderman for the G5, and Shake + Final Cut Pro + Maya + Renderman + Logic Pro, and the mac does everything you need for movie production
They should name it "Good for learning how to model, but trying to do anything with lighting or textures is not going to happen". But even on that note, if you can't see a final render of the model, how are you supposed to learn how to even model?
To, like, $150 million per node. That should keep the software out of the hands of most of the idiots now using it to generate and render stunningly crappy movies.
You know, this is a tubgirl troll that I fell for thanks to this stupid hack. I have been working on medical training for about a year now and i have seen some very nasty stuff in all these surgery videos. And this doesn't affect me anymore.
Pontiac of course, in a desperate effort to redesign the Aztek.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You have taken all of the meaning out of the phrase "OMG WTF LOL".
My source is that "SGI's interest in selling was motivated by Alias's user base's shift away from SGI hardware"
SCO's main investor, the Canopy group, is
connected with Ray Noorda's massive Noorda
Family Trust Fund. The money is there for sure.
No offence to SGI, I really loved their products, but sadly, I think they are a sinking ship. A few years ( perhaps even just a year back ) when Alias renamed itself from Alias Wavefront to just alias, and moved prices from 7500$ per unit to like 2000$, it looked like alias was about to follow suit. For years, Maya and before that, Power Animator lead the way in 3d graphics, and they are still an industry leader.
:) It would be a shame to see Alias and their products go away should SGI go the way of the dodo ( which is a very probrable thing to happen ).
I think the best thing that could happen is to seperate themselves away from SGI as much as possible. This has been happenning to some degree already. If you recall a few years back, the URL used to be www.aw.sgi.com , now its www.alias.com... odd that
As to the unnamed suitor, thats a bit hard to guess. Number 1... its most likely not Microsoft... they tried this game once. When NT 4 was new, they were the proud owners of SoftImage... it didnt work too well for them then... cant see them trying again. I cant picture it being Avid or Discreet, as they both already have a vested interest in a direct competitor ( SoftImage and 3d Studios Max respectively ). I cant see it being any linux company as suggested before... it just is to far from the core business of any of them, to make any sense. Their isnt a linux company I can think of, with the money to buy Alias, that has a focus on multimedia.
In my mind, if its a big name company, that leaves just one company that it makes sense to be. Apple. Maya was recently ported to both Mac and Linux... apple is losing its luster as a media empire... and they have the money. I say if its a big name company behind the buyout, it makes the most sense to be Apple. I just pray they keep the wintel ports going, or I will be very pissed off.
For those of you that dont know, Maya is one sweet piece of software, and a shining example of how to pioneer a user interface.
Apple also has a history of CANCELLING ports for any platform other than OSX.
This means Linux Maya goes in the trash... as does Windows and SGI Maya.
Although this "potential" sale wouldn't be as criminal as stealing a public company from the shareholders through inside dealings and voting fraud, the end results could be the same for end users if this is indeed another attempt by an MS-affiliated investment firm to prevent an ISV from supporting Linux. I hope I'm totally wrong here and Microsoft's business practises are not an issue here, although their success with neutralizing Corel might have encouraged them to take on companies and products that dare to support competing platforms, in this current climate of total lack of monopoly controls by US Department of (John Ashcroft's) Justice. MS did strike a deal with Disney just recently though...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Wouldn't surprise me if it's Apple or Microsoft. If it is there's a good chance that the Linux version will be dropped.
It really pissed me off that Apple bought out Emagic and dropped the Windows version of Logic Audio that I've been using and have invested heavily in for years.
Microsoft did a similar thing with SourceSafe when they purchased it from One Tree Software years ago and then dropped all but the Windows version. I believe they may have Unix clients available these days but I've swtiched to CVS anyway.
Not that I'm criticising these guys for doing what makes the most business sense for them, but it does end up burning current users.
Please, no...
Apple seem to be trying to monopolise (yet again) the high-end Audio/Visual market.
I am an Logic Audio user, but now Emagic has been bought out by Apple, there is hardly any chance of another Windows version being released.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
it is apple. For those who don't remember, Microsoft already went down the 3D software route when it bought SoftImage in the 90's. Then it sold if off. I doubt it would be MS again. Plus, with the way Apple has been going, they would gain the most. It would compliment Final Cut Pro nicely.
I, for one, will welcome Alias' new overlords....
Isn't softimage still owned by MS?
Makes absolutely no sense for them to make a Linux version. Unless it's to be used in a renderfarm.
I've been stupid enough to buy it twice
That was pretty stupid, considering it's free on Alias's site...
Open Source Maya? The source code is huge, probably bigger than several Linux distros.
Probably few could build it. Or even download it. Although you would like a free copy,
open source isn't the answer to everything, especially large mission critical, highly complex applications.
Well only you said it, so go and scream at your own stupidity, *sigh*
i wouldn't be surprised if it isn't microsoft trying to buy this software. they have said that it would have somethign to do with graphics and such this year. something like photoshop. maybe this is thier way of going one step further then photoshop.
Actually, Microsoft got exactly what they wanted out of that deal. You see, at the time NOBODY did 3d in windows. That world was still dominated by SGI. Microsoft bought SoftImage and forced them to port to windows. For a long time SoftImage did nothing but porting. This has set them back by a lot, and cost them a lot of market share. But Microsoft didn't care. They proved that 3d is possible on windows, so everyone else started porting to windows as well. At that point SoftImage was no longer useful to Microsoft, so MS promptly disposed of it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says: Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again."
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
oh, please be canopy!
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Both times they offered it weeks or months earlier if you pay the $20 for the media and shipping.
http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~shane/stasj/pics/humor/di v/bubba.jpg
As someone who uses xsi professionally I can vouch for the sheer speed of the "subdivision surfaces" in xsi. However, it should be clarified that the subdees in xsi are polygons that are rounded with the either the catmull-clark, or the doo-sabin algorithms. Maya has both poly rounding and "real" heirarchial subdees, which are kinda neat. Unfortunately for maya, they're unbelieveably slow when interacting. In xsi I can take a 30k triangle base mesh and increase the subdiv count by 2 steps, which generates roughly 450k highres. Moving points around is quite quick, whereas the same mesh loaded up in maya is quite slow to interact with.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
I would like to try the software but they still won't release a low end demo copy for Linux. They've had Windows versions for a long while.
What's up with that?
...and it is available for Linux.
Too bad the free personal version isn't. I was really hoping to try it out without having to dish out a few thousand bucks.
Buckethead
No offense to the Maya users in the crowd....but Newtek themselves could buy it, and I'd still prefer Lightwave. There's something to be said for the same amount of power, available through an interface you don't NEED to train on. ^_^
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Its owned by Avid now. And it makes great sense for them --- customers want it. Most famously, ILM uses XSI on Linux/Intel for its graphics artists.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
see here
I think that with Apple's 64bit systems, they can give the likes of Sun and SGI a run for their money, hardware wise. StudioTools does run on windows x86, just not as well. Both Maya (then Power Animator) and StudioTools started life in IRIX, which is what made Maya such an easy port to OSX (i think it only took 2 months). Apple would love to enter the 3D workstation market and id love to see them, because StudioTools is the only program that i need to keep a wintel box around for.
there were rumors at the end of summer that Alias was working on a StudioTools port to OSX, but i havent heard anything since.
I want 2D games back.
Y'know, I bet that the Maya source code is far smaller than you imagine.
What's a Linux kernel nowadays? 40MB g'zipped? That's a lot of damn code. That's all code and documentation. Easily compressible stuff.
Honestly, I can't imagine that the core of Maya, it's GUI and render system could be as large as even the source for the Linux kernel.
Most renderers are very small. They're written as small as possible to maintain some level of optimization. A good compiler will of course do what it can to string some of those loops out and make it more efficient. Hell, maybe they've even gone through the effort to optimize it at ASM level.
IMO the biggest part of Maya would have to be it's texture and material library.
And most "mission critical" (I'm thinking software that flys planes, controls RADAR systems, computers in cars, etc.) apps tend to be not so complex in design. They're designed to run on one set of hardware, and can be optimized for that. Even for a fighter jet, and all of it's avionics, 2 million lines (which isn't all that much when it comes down to it) of code (probably in ADA) would be a far stretch for all but the most modern planes.
Canopy Group is a 'keading private equity firm'...
Here comes another lawsuit..
about $0.38 per share. Almost took out a loan. Friend talked me out of it. Rose to nearly $4.00 a short while later..
I would be inclined to buy some anyway today. Bishop has a keen eye on SGIs core market:
Technical computing
IRIX is very good for this, MIPS is holding it back though. Their efforts on Linux will pay off, in my opinion. Linux is reaching the point where it will be possible to build an IRIX like system. Heck, you can today --it is only going to get easier.
SGI is one of the few companies to make a deal with Microsoft while still around to tell about it. (Legal won't, but many SGI folks will, if you catch them in the right mood.)
If that deal hadn't been the death of their 320 / 540 series machines, we would have great Linux technical workstations right now. I am not saying you cannot get a nice Linux workstation, but the SGI plan combined their engineering with custom Linux tweaks that would have made for nice boxes.
320/540 machines could support up to about 800Mb texture memory in a UMA design. Heavy texture models perform best in this configuration, because of the low latency bandwidth it provides to the graphics sub-system.
The Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph '99, I think. Microsoft and SGI had a little tiff shortly after that. Farenheit project --it seemed at the time, win32 was poised to take over that market since it had already made quite a dent. Gates knew about all the UNIX code that had to be rewritten. Direct X got good, thanks to SGI, but not good enough to justify all that work porting to a closed, hard to administer, expensive to cluster system with little ability to script or perform multi-user.
SGI legal scuttled the Linux drivers over win32 contract terms involving the ARC boot loader. It seems Microsoft has an interest in this that prevented SGI from providing machines with choices other than win32, or something like that. (Could never get the entire story.)
The series was canned. Generic PC machines running tweaked nVidia hardware replaced them to keep existing customers trying to leverage Linux happy. Their hardware had considerable advantages over the general purpose PC, so it only made sense for SGI to move away from the whole thing.
Today we see the Altix series machines along with high end SGI hardware on the desktop. The Altix, and high-end IRIX hardware is well positioned, while IRIX struggles at the workstation level. Linux is capturing applications far better than IRIX ever did.
(Which shows just how hard they got fucked over the Microsoft deal.)
Recovering from that and other blunders has taken a while. The new products are hitting their targets nicely. It is tough for them now, being late in the game. An SGI Linux workstation likely will not happen right away because of this. (We would have had them in '01, otherwise.)
SGI systems engineering is top notch, I hope they continue to improve and continue to develop their high bandwidth, single image designs. (They are the best, if you want a single OS image instead of a cluster.)
As for Alias, the organization beats to a different drum. The Maya side of things has been handled well. Can't say the same for their Studio product. Still high priced and no Linux --yet.
Maya is a hit in the entertainment business for obvious reasons. Their other product, Studio struggles in a niche status. Good for high end product design and styling, but poor at more mainstream applications. Traditional MCAD packages continue to consume many new potential Studio sales, while also chipping away at the established base of users.
I would not count the Linux version of Maya out. Alias knows better than that. There is no way the Studios are going to be pried back to win32. Going down that road proved expensive and problematic. Linux is the perfect fit. Alias would not be where they are today without having done that port.
OSS lets them (the studios) keep control of their tools an
Blogging because I can...
That the Linux port would get dropped, considering the mainline players running
it on Linux... ILM - Weta and others, the pressure would be somewhat intense....
(Unless of course it is M$ Attempting more rool da world tactics)
-:
While Apple is a good bet, I'm thinking Adobe. Adobe has had a MAJOR gap when it comes to 3D, and they have been trying to fill it for ages. Last SIGGRAPH Adobe and Alias were hand in hand. I had quite a few AE friends from Alias that were in the Adobe booth performing demos.
As far as Alias goes, I used to sell Maya and Studio for 3 years. I have / had (layoffs) many friends that worked with and for Alias.
I'm really unsure how to classify this announcement. Doug Walker and James Christopher are probably (In my opinion) some of the worst people out there. It was a real shame to see these two take the helm as president and senior VP of customer support. I saw the attitude of the people go from "happy to come in" to "OMG I hate my job" once they moved in. After many Reseller and other private Alias events, I decided that these guys only cared about one thing, the bottom line. I knew this meant that the company was becoming just like the rest. Shortly before the price drop that I knew was coming, I left.
Also, keep in mind that when Maya 1.0 (with all the plug-ins, before unlimited) came out, it was around $100,000. The sales price of Maya dropped 93% over the past 5 years. Now that's AMAZING!
In summary, I think SGI is selling Alias because they know that it isn't going to keep making them money due to the drop in price. Also, I think that it's pretty clear that SGI either needs to get back to their core business or they are going to lose what little they have left.
Or... I'll go out on a limb here and say that ATI is going to purchase them.
Either way, this is going to be interesting.
She makes me feel kinda funny. Like when we used to climb the rope in gym class. *
will stay.
The big studios want it too much. Using Maya on OS X is as sweet, or sweeter than either win32 or Linux, but I think Linux will scale farther for back end tasks, at a lower cost, than OS X ever will.
Scaling is one of the top drivers for the big boys in this game. Linux has both win32 and OS X beat in the price / performance area cold.
Besides a lot of what the studios want is custom. SGI used to offer this under NDA, but it cost a lot. With Linux, they can do it far cheaper, on their time schedule, and share the bits that benefit everyone without having to repurchase and pay support on their own tech!
Blogging because I can...
Doubtful. Red 7.3 consisted of 30 million lines of code. Fedora is probably closer to 50 million. Debian is likely several times that. There is no way Maya is that large. That would make it larger than Windows!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...does anyone else remember when Apple bought E-Magic, makers of Logic Audio (the only true competitor of Cubase no matter what Cakewalk fanboys scream and shout), that same day E-Magic announced they were promptly dropping the wintel version of Logic. That sucked bigtime, if you were a logic user on pc, luckily I use cubase and am still happily using my expensive custom made audio machine (with nice expensive soundcard), otherwise I would have had to junk it, salvage what I could and buy a mac.
I am NaN
Oh wait. We're not talking about the tv show?
I can't lose my Jennifer Garner! She is teh hotness! What happened to Sydney's two missing years? AAAH!
Oh, *that* Alias. Heh.
P.S. Wasn't it Alias|Wavefront?
At the time, Microsoft owned Softimage. Microsoft, having achieved their goal of moving 3D graphics onto Windows, sold off Softimage to Avid. Avid was the leader in 2D editing, but was starting to feel price pressure from below and was threatened by Softimage's move into that area. So they really bought Softimage to get the Softimage 2D editing package, and didn't really know what to do with the 3D product. Avid also had the problem that they were a high-end hardware vendor in a market where the high end was about to be eaten by the low end. As a result, the new Softimage 3D product, XSI, was years late.
So Maya took over. But it didn't help SGI sell expensive hardware. The low-end graphics boards were gaining on SGI. Maya was a software-only product, and didn't require SGI hardware. Maya is still available for Irix, but nobody buys SGI workstations to run it anymore. In fact, nobody buys SGI workstations for much of anything any more.
So it makes sense for SGI to sell off Maya. Of course, SGI doesn't have much of a core business left ("We're a graphics company! No, we're a workstation company! No, we're a server company! No, we're a Linux company!"). Their core business is selling expensive hardware, and that's not a good business to be in.
This actually steered me away from Maya, so I ended up sticking with 3dsmax for my uni subjects.
Being that Maya Complete is THOUSANDS less than any non-academic version of 3D Studio MAX, and about the same as the academic version, what made you choose 3dsmax?
Is it the fact that 3dsmax is one of the most widely pirated 3D applications, and therefore more available (and cheaper)?
The personal learning edition is intended for kids who want to make models for Quake and Half-Life. Anyone who will consider buying it only needs about 20 minutes to decide, to kick the tires and look under the hood.
While it seems ridiculous in light of the more recent pricing, the big price drop for Maya was around 1999, when it dropped from $10,000 a module to $2000. It has/had five modules for a total of $50,000 for one seat of the full Maya software. Support contracts were around $4000 a year. When it dropped to a grand total of $10K for the whole deal, we thought the world had come to an end. I know people who paid the $50,000. Now it's $7000. Oi.
I do find it funny that everyone starts assuming that Apple is behind the sale of Alias. If you look at the past, Apple has typically only bought applications when there was no other chance of a port. Maya's been running on OSX for a while now (not with full parity to the Windows version, but hey).
Also, there is a very limited business case for buying Alias. When they dropped the price of Maya to $2K, they sold it to everyone who hadn't bought it at the previous price points. The market is COMPLETELY saturated. Just about every VFX shop has numerous Maya seats at this point. Game studios kept it afloat a while longer, but Softimage XSI is finally starting to edge it out in that market. Alias was even dumping licenses for free to compete with Softimage. With revenue just about tapped out, R&D is slowing ( a la Maya 5). The only viable financial future I see would be for Alias to refocus on Studio, which is still very popular in industrial design. There just ain't any money in making "high end" 3D (or 2D) tools anymore. Ford almost bought Alias a few years ago for ~$175M, if I remember correctly. I doubt it will go for nearly that much, now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on Softimage. Avid is notorious for shafting their own products, so we'll see what they do to Soft.
An Alias rep made a post regarding the sale on the Highend3D Buzz Board, second post down.
It looks like some of the Alias folks are working a deal where the investment firm will purchase the assets from SGI and then the Alias person(s) will then purchase those assets from the investment firm. The Alias folks break free of SGI and SGI gets some badly-needed cash.
I've since confirmed this via a party who Knows Things. So no black helicopters from Cuptertino or Redmond, you conspiracy theorists :)
Either way, they still have to figure out how to pay for R&D (or not) with a fully saturated market. We'll see.
The release quotes a "leading private equity" player. So its likley to go to a financial investor who believes to get a good price for it. It is likely to be sold in two to three years down the road to Apple or Adobe for a multiple of what it will cost now
Good high-end alternatives that are also available on Linux are Softimage XSI and Houdini. Both offer free evaluation/learning versions like Maya PLE, with the exception that they're available for Linux x86 too.
Another interesting commercial 3D suite available for Linux is Realsoft 3D, and it's a lot cheaper than Maya or the programs mentioned before.
Bigger than all the source code for all the programs in a Linux distro put together ? I sincerely doupt that.
You can build and download pretty much anything on any modern machine. It might simply take some time.
Such as the kernel, X server, Web Browser / Server and core utils ? Yes, we all know how sucky Open Source versions of those tend to be compared to their glorious nonopen counterparts.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Mod parent up!
Nowadays with the majority of Maya rendering done on PC hardware (workstations or clusters), owning Alias|Wawefront must be a bit of an inconvenience to SGI. This is a classic case where spinning it (back) off would be the better choice.
My hunch says this is Apple because it would full the niche in their digital media creation software where they are as yet not present and where Apple is sorely lacking: 3D. While there are really nice alternative packages for OSX, such as Cinema 4D, I can see Apple wanting to have some control on where the market in 3D on OSX goes.
From that standpoint, much as Apple's purchase of Logic made sense in that Apple could have a presence in pro Audio, this being Apple would really make sense.
BUt there is something else that I can see Apple really wanting: Alias Sketch. That TabletPC painting software. It has a unique interesting interface, and I am sure Jobs would love to have something like this so as to fill that gap as well.
Good guess, except that, since the files are stored in an encrypted format, you can't export anything to Quake or Half-Life. As a professional who has used Softimage and LightWave for years now, I found the implementation of Maya PLE pathetic. Marketing paranoia ruined what would have otherwise been a great idea.
If your file format is encrypted and you have a big, fat watermark on everything else, why on earth do you have to shove it in your (potential) customer's face that they have not, in fact, plunked down the money yet? It's not only visually distracting, it's insulting.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I was in on a conversation with Alias guys when they were building the first OS X ports.
The biggest difficulty was getting the compiler and linker to handle its size and changes were
made to the tools to handle it. Remember that there's lots of legacy code in there and
it was added to being only concerned with making IRIX happy. Portability was not a
primary concern. They said GCC was overcome at the time. That delayed release and
also caused a great deal of tension at the time between the old school SGI guys and
the upstart OS X unix box proponents.
Alias's revenue in 2003 was more than in the previous two years combined. And profits in 2003 were equal to the previous two years combined.
So in spite of their revenue stream being "just about tapped out", they seem to be raking in more money than ever.
-deane
maya complete - $2000
maya unlimited - $7000
3ds max - $3500
character studio - $1000
maya complete doesn't have all of the features of 3ds max. in order to get it all, you need to get maya unlimited, which is thousands more than max, even if you add in character studio. also, they have different strengths, weaknesses and workflows. people should get whatever suits them. any person who prefers one program can point out the feature their package has or what's lacking in another.
if someone's going to pirate one, it is just as easy to pirate the other, so that argument doesn't really mean much. discreet makes gmax, which can be used to make models for game mods.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
So there was a post below that linked to Highend3d where someone named 'bob' spoke about Alias becoming independant. I feel that this has quite a bit of potential as well. The more I think about it, the more the pieces of the puzzle come together. Every event I ever went to showed the products on every type of hardware, EXCEPT SGI. One year is was HP, the next IBM... pretty much whoever wanted to pony up the money to be the big hardware sponser.
But for some reason, having Maya on SGI NT equipment was like the plauge!
Also, if I'm not mistaken, all of the offices that used to be co-located with the SGI offices are now closed, with the majority of this folks being let go.
Anyway....the above is just me trying to open up the floor for further conversation....
Comments have been posted over Adobe or Apple or ATI (wow think it'll have to be an A* company?) but after the San Diego SIGGraph last year, I'm wondering about nVidia as a purchaser. I saw Alias playing the buddy with several companies, but I have a feeling the nVidia is wanting to get a foothold on some of the more popular products that use their software. As far as Apple, I could maybe see it as with the port to Apple, Alias did not port the Unlimited version, but only the lower trim level Complete verstion. Either way, if nothing happens within a month, I'll be asking questions as I have the good fortune of going to Canada for over 3 weeks of training at their facility.
They should have kept going.
The O2 design is good even today. For texture related tasks, the machine still performs. I own one.
Also own a 320 series machine. To say the O2 would blow the 320 series machine away is not correct. Price / performance on the 320 machines was better than just about every other PC of the time.
At the time the 320 series machines were released, lots of folks had the same thoughts you did regarding SGI and profit margins. Many of them wanted to continue with SGI, the 320 let them do this.
Funny thing about those machines. Sold lots of them. Every last customer wanted more when the line was retired. None of them came back. Most of them were in use until just a year or so ago.
Had they been able to put Linux on those machines, things would be different today. Most of the MIPS crowd thought they were a joke. Understandable given the level of engineering and performance they are used to seeing.
Lots of other people clearly saw value in the machines. People came into the building to run the machines and often bought them. The same was not true for O2 and Octane.
I thought the same thing when I saw lost in space. Also hated the cheezy use of the Intel Inside audio logo...
Water under the bridge now, I guess...
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Sure, lots of shops are running those two OSes. The bigger studios are leveraging Linux as hard as they can. They are not going to move.
Smaller operations do not see the economy of scale, so win32 / Mac makes perfect sense. Alias knows this, which is exactly why there are three ports of Maya.
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You are right about the fill rate. The O2 has just enough to be able to make good use of its graphics engine. The 320 was a bit better.
Fill rates aside, these machines both have big texture attributes hard to match today with any video card. Having an 800Mb image local to, even a dated graphics engine, makes quite a difference in frame rate.
SGI has a demo where the image is mapped to a plane in OpenGL. Moving scaling, filtering happens realtime in hardware. You can move, rotate, scale very large images in real time with very little effort.
This also allows the machine to overlay video onto surfaces and manupulate them in real time as well. Clearly a niche capability, but one not well matched by the PC design we see today, AGP 8x or not.
The O2 machine is still being used for various aspects of the video production process. The specific attributes that hardware has makes it well suited to the task today because they are I/O bound graphics tasks. Not much compute required.
Too bad the fill rate was not higher though. There are things the chipset can do, that are limited by the low fillrates...
I like the CD flap too. On the O2, I like the shape. It's a cool machine to have around.
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