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Autodesk Acquires Alias
eggegg is one of many readers to write to tell us that "Autodesk, of AutoCAD and 3dsmax fame, is reporting that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias, makers of Maya and MotionBuilder. Will Autodesk use the inherited expertise and codebase to finally develop their product line for the platforms most of their customer base would prefer, or does this mean the end of development of Alias products on OSX and Linux?"
to get built for Linux. The whole product embeds every microsoft technology possible, including basing core functionality on IE6. The most likely outcome will be that Alias products will become Windows-only. I give Linux and MacOS Alias products one more rev before it goes strictly Windows.
Background on Alias's history can be obtained here, and background on Autodesk, here.
/dev/null.
Hope for the future of Maya on Linux, can be found at
Maya Linux has been a long time coming. Alias has proof that not only do regular customers want Linux, high-end studios demand it. OSX is in an even better position. The architeture of Maya (a scripting language called MEL on top of a "kernel" of sorts) makes it quite portable I would think.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
When you're dealing with niche tools (like 3D and CAD), and you rely on licenses from very expensive software, the licensing stuff is expected.
Mayas is slightly less intrusive than 3DSM, but the real winner (in my eyes) is Cinema 4D, who's network rendering has the most painless licensing terms.
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From: Alias
To: bryn
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 00:49:17 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Autodesk Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Alias
Dear Alias Customer,
Today Autodesk and Alias announced the signing of a definitive agreement for Autodesk to acquire Alias.
Alias is a leading developer of 3D graphics technology, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Alias develops and delivers software and services for film and video, interactive games, media and the Web. It also develops software and services for consumer products, industrial design, automotive, architecture and visualization customers.
With more than six million users, Autodesk is the world's leading software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, digital media and wireless data services fields. Autodesk's solutions help customers to create, manage and share their digital assets more effectively. The acquisition of Alias will continue to round out our product lines across industry segments.
As many of you are aware, in the media and entertainment industry, most leading film studios, game developers and high-end visual effects companies use Alias' Maya®, MotionBuilder® and FBX® software. Most also use Autodesk's complementary Inferno®, Flame®, Lustre® and 3ds Max® products. The most demanding industrial designers in the world use Alias' StudioTools(TM), primarily in the automotive and consumer products segments. Bringing this technology to Autodesk will strengthen the manufacturing business by integrating conceptual design as a front-end to Inventor Series and the PLM solution.
The acquisition also brings to Autodesk a highly talented group of individuals, a wealth of technologies and a great set of products. By combining the technology and talents of two successful, financially healthy companies, we will be better able to continue delivering solutions that address your ever-changing and increasingly complex needs. And yes, Autodesk plans to continue to support and develop Alias products as well as utilize the strength of the combined organization to provide customers with continued innovation and technology development.
The transaction is expected to close in the next four to six months. Until that time, Autodesk and Alias will continue operating as independent companies and will remain focused on our current customer needs. We do not anticipate any changes with respect to planned product releases for either company. Please continue using your existing contacts for sales, services and support. We will update you on the progress of this acquisition, both directly and online at http://www.autodesk.com/autodeskandalias.
On behalf of Autodesk and Alias, we would like to thank you for your business and reiterate our commitment to ensuring that this event which is exciting for both our companies will prove even more so for you.
Sincerely,
Carol Bartz
Chairman and CEO
Autodesk, Inc.
Doug Walker
President and CEO
Alias
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
From this info, it looks like they consider Maya and 3DS Max to be in separate market segments - which indeed they are. For cryin' out loud, Pixar uses parts of Maya in their workflow. Who would want to kill that? Maya's the crown jewel of Alias. You can't compare this to the Macromedia acquisition. This would be more akin to Macromedia buying out Adobe to get Photoshop.
The threads on this board are silly. Maya is not going to die on Linux or otherwise. There is too much money to be made. While Max and Maya have some overlap, Max cannot do what Maya does or serve all of Maya's customers. Autodesk doesn't have competition for our AutoStudio product so that is going to stay too. They will keep Alias products around if only because we have a *very* developed services business that is based around Maya and Studio with some *very* large companies.
It would be reckless of me to speculate further what is exactly going to happen, but Maya in particular is quite beautiful under the hood and has a bunch of life left in it. It is very platform independent. It is flexible enough to turn into almost anything that you need it to be. It's not going anywhere.
I'm happy about this. The near term impact is that we will have a more complete pipeline to sell in design, film and games. I bet some really nice Maya-Max translation tools pop up as well.
[QUOTE]But my question is: How does the open source Blender [blender3d.org] modeling and animation package compare to Maya and Max for creating content for movies, animations and games. What is it missing, what does it not do as well, what would it need to be able to compete? Is Blender even a worthy substitute for Maya or Max?[/QUOTE]
Depends on the studio, developer costs, and what type of animation you want to do. For high end photoreal Blender isn't there yet (render isn't 'high end' enough). For simulation based particle effects (fire, smoke, complex physics, crowd simulations, certain other fluid effects) Blender doesn't have those capabilities or are extremely limited (no volumetric shaders and no simulation system for smoke and flame, crowd dynamics could come shortly after the next release though). For most other TV quality animation, game animation, and small scale movie cinematics Blender is very much a possible consideration. Blender lacks some modeling tools but has a very solid core for subdivision surface modeling and has the truely neccessary tools (additional tools could improve speed and workflow). With much less than half a year of developer time, it could probably be brought to Silo equivalency for modeling, and with a full developer year could challenge Modo or ZBrush in modeling. With a half a year of dev time on texturing it could likely become ZBrush or Modo equivalent. Animation wise the next release will put it mostly on par with other character animation tools (but will still have a serious short coming in that it doesn't have motion capture capabilities). For game developers I noted above the limitations Blender has - again 6 months of developer time.
So in short it isn't a serious contender today for what major animation studios currently do with Maya or 3dsmax, but with a bit of funding could easily be there within a years time.
LetterRip
Indeed. People who have never used Maya probably can't appreciate what it can do, but Blender doesn't even come close.
Modelling and animation is only part of a visual effects or animation pipeline. Maya's strength is not the fabulous modelling tools (certainly Lightwave's modelling tools are better), but the way that it is customisable. Any part of Maya is customisable. Maya can be whatever you want it to be, and can integrate seamlessly with whatever you want it to integrate with.
This is a much harder problem than it sounds. Consider a simple Newtonian physics simulation engine. The location and orientation of some object might depend on the simulation (e.g. an object might be moving under gravity). On the other hand, the simulation depends on the location and orientation of objects (e.g. objects can collide). This is a circular dependency. Most animation systems handle this in one of two ways: couple the animation system and the physics simulator, or run the simulation as a post-pass between animation and rendering. Maya (even though it does have a simulator in the base product) can handle it as a plug-in, and the circular dependency is no problem at all. Moreover, you can have multiple special-purpose solvers (fluid solvers, cloth solvers etc), and they all work together automatically, with no coupling with the Maya core.
It goes deeper.
Maya has its own shader model. If you don't like it, such as if it's not the model that your renderer uses, you can implement your own as a plugin. No change to the core. It Just Works(tm).
Unlike 3DS, which requires plug-ins to conform to a fixed set of interfaces (subclass THIS C++ class if you want to implement a shader, subclass THIS if you want to implement a type of geometry, subclass THIS if you want to implement a renderer), in Maya, it's completely generic. You can even implement your own "things" which the Maya core has no concept of (e.g. it's not a shader, it's not geometry, it's not a user control), and everything will just work. Try doing that with Blender.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});