Autodesk Signs Agreement with Avid Technology to Acquire Softimage

[RobertoOrtiz]

My apologizes!!

Dont apologize man,

I just take WWII quite seriously.
-R

[DuttyFoot]

Maybe someone needs to come at this issue from a different angle.

1 - Technical knowhow is so widespread, new players can come from so many places and changes can occurr so rapidly in today’s world that building a stable monopoly and maintaining it over a long period of time is much more difficult than people think.

Owning Maya + 3DMAX + XSI doesn’t mean much when a new 3D software can be developed with relatively low capital investment in any country where there is a good pool of tech graduates. And there are many countries that have people capable of creating new 3D tools now.

2 - None of the 3D packages Autodesk owns are super-efficient “I imagined it and arrived at a reasonably high quality representation of my idea in 15 minutes” tools. The design thinking behind these tools is a decade old or older. Its difficult to make radical changes to the way they function without alienating the user bases trained on these tools.

A freshly developed software, no matter how primitive it starts out, faces none of these constraints. Workflow and user interface can be radically different. It may not use the standard splines, NURBS, polygons technology at all. Everything can be different, everything can be NEW. The resulting software may not resemble 3D packages designed in the 80s and 90s at all. Not in workflow and not even in the terminology used for its commands and functions.

It may be more efficient by a factor of 3 times or maybe 6 or 10 times on certain tasks because all the old thinking and assumptions about how stuff is done in 3D have been discarded and replaced with newer thinking and newer ideas.

3 - The era of “play it safe, create N number of sequels, recycle as many concepts and ideas as you can, throw 150 specialized people and lots of money at each creative project” is over. It takes a high flying global economy to feed such “creativity factories” and “uncreativity factories” and sell repetitive crap to consumers who have a lot of free time and money to spend.

That high flying global economy was built on HOT AIR and HUBRIS. And no amount of “maybe governments will fix it with xyz intervention package” can or will fix that.

In the next 5 years consumers will spend less, investors will invest less, banks will give less credit and there will be a lot more hard questions asked before any expensive creative projects that use 3D or CG are financed.

It will be harder to sell unsattisfying films to moviegoers. Harder to flog a 5th sequel to a tired game franchise. Harder to justify intrusive DRM and copy protection schemes to a consumer who already feels guilt at having spent so liberally on hardware and games during the “boom years”.

The playing field will change. And it will change heavily in favor of individuals and small teams of creatives who can DO A LOT WITH A LITTLE, have the guts to create something truly original and don’t try to serve consumers soup in a can as a gourmet meal.

To do a lot with a little you need a) good ideas, b) the ability to create something good semi-spontaneously without months of advance planning and c) quick, unproblematic tools that really don’t get in your way.

Now the question is how many of Autodesk’s big, expensive tools are compatible with this landscape?

It doesn’t matter much that you have the best $1.5m piece of construction equipment in your catalogue when people doing the actual constructing want a smaller machine that costs only $150,000 and can turn in a smaller space and be parked under a standard height roof.

It doesn’t matter that the car you make can reach 0 - 100km/h in 3 secs when people are looking for something fuel efficient that just “gets them from A to B without breaking the bank”.

It doesn’t matter that you try to get an iron grip on a file standard when a new one can be constructed from scratch in a matter of month by people in different parts of the world who’ve never even met face to face.

I’m sorry for XSI users who have lost their “independence”. Its tragic that people who don’t want to be AD customers now have to be AD customers.

But this is hardly the end of competition in 3D.

In fact you could argue that the lousy global economy will give everyone from Intel to Nvidia to Microsoft a good kick in the pants and any innovation that was surpressed in the last few years or kept on a shelf for “bad times” (UIs, CPU technology, GPU technology, new coding tools) will have to be brought to market much faster and at a lower price than before.

If any of these companies have a piece of super hardware or software (like a truly nextgen GPU or a new code compiler) on the shelf that they were planning to withhold until 2010-11 they will have to bring it to market TOMORROW to keep their sales from going in the toilet.

That includes Autodesk as well, btw. Things are going to get slow in construction, engineering, archviz, manufacturing and a lot of other sectors that use CADCAM and 3D visualization tools. Nobody is going to beg Autodesk during this period to please sell them “another update”.

People who see companies like Autodesk as “invulnerable giants that buy everything in their path” may be in for a rude surprise. The tools these companies sell sell only when there is a lot of economic activity that requires these tools to be used and a lot of people who are employed on the basis of being able to use these tools to create economic produce. Games. TV ads. Print ads. Films. Engineering and product designs.

When that activity slows to a crawl, so do tool sales for even the biggest tool vendors. Adobe. Autodesk. Microsoft. You name it.

Bad economic times cause some players to cut down on activity or withdraw from markets completely.

And they spur some people and corporate players to exploit the shaken up landscape.

If someone with deep pockets has been thinking about entering the 3D or CAD fray for a long time, this may be the precise time they do it.

It helps that an economic crisis causes people to rethink everything. The way they work. The output they create. The tools they use. Their loyalty to a particular provider of tools and so forth.

Interesting times may be ahead. Even if companies like Autodesk and Electronic Arts look like they are swallowing everything and everyone, it takes a lot of money and really good sales to finance all those divisions and aquisitions. When all economic activity slows… well…

//end_of_rant

now this is a very solid response, it really gives a very different look on how things could eventually turn out, especailly with the way the global economy is going right now.

[Locutus]

Government intervention is direly needed with regards to AD’s corporate behavior.

Riff

The LAST thing we need is government intervention.

[Spin99]

Give it 5 years for the economy to bounce back and maybe someone else will
buy SoftImage off Autodesk’s hands. Or they’ll buy themselves out if they’re not happy?
Or they’ll leave and start another 3D suite even?

Face it 3D apps change hands quite often it seems.
It’s Autodesk’s turn to own everything.
Who knows for how long?

It’s possibly quite insensitive to joke about something as ugly as WW2 nazism point made.

[xsitar]

It’s possibly quite insensitive to joke about something as ugly as WW2 nazism point made.

Jeez. Some people lighten up a bit. As if we can’t make fun of serious things like WW2 or Hitler sometimes? You never seen Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”?

This youtube mashup has been going on for ages and is still funny.

[ThE_JacO]

i agree too, but when the perception that xsi is 3rd in sales one has to reply even with
old data to put into perspective the market share it occupies/occupied

the pie seems to get resliced pulling lightwave, cinema users over to xsi and maya
some of those xsi foundation seats were just people who were interested in taking a cheap
option to look at xsi…myself and 3 students i taught did that way back in xsi4 foundation
in 2004-2005 none of use actually changed to xsi…we took a look and bought xsi foundation to add to our options but didn’t take up xsi
as a used tool in the long run…we stayed with 3dsmax or lightwave as our tools of choice.

If you take into consideration zombie licenses, then sure, LW might still be up there, but if you take into consideration the two parameters that are really indicative of a package’s health, sales, adoption and rate of growth, the picture painted is very different.

Also the numbers you posted must be quite a few years old.
I know for sure at least two of those numbers are -incredibly- wrong.

I’m not going to go into what I think about a lot of the lw centric posts here, as that is off topic and potentially flammable, but for the sake of this discussion I have to say I find most of it alienated from the reality of the market context most of this discussion is made into.
Other than the usual two lighthouse names people always throw in the fray when defending the application’s adoption (zoic and whatnot) I honestly don’t remember the last time I saw a succesful studio migrating TO LW, or not in the process of abandoning it.

Doesn’t make it any less healthy if sales to individuals and small studios configure a sustainable market, but sorry, the comparison with maya, max and xsi simply does not apply when it comes to markets.

The same I have to say for the list of 3Dapps you put up to show there’s no monopoly, I find it highly artificial when you include commercial plops like hexagon or specialistic apps like poser and bryce. I’m sure you have a coherent line of thought and posting you are following, but if those are the foundations I have to strongly disagree with the validity of it.

I dont find it funny AT ALL.

Sorry Roberto, but I found it quite ****ing funny and apt to the thread
If Mel Brooks has no problems joking about it, I can’t see why we can’t have a good laugh about the captioning of a movie that is, after all, about the defeat of Hitler.

I actually wish for a second and more refined redub, ala bluray VS HD-DVD v3, when this will be all over.

[AdemoS]

And people wonder why I bother with open source software.

Rather then worrying about price or stock value, I can look forward to how often Blender updates.

Good luck with your 3D packages guys, but ever since I jumped from 3DS Max/Maya to Blender, I’ve been happy.

[UrbanFuturistic]

nah… companies have too much on their plate as it is let alone supporting a fledgling product like Blender.

You realise the major FX houses still program a large amount of their own software? Apparently not. I mean, indeed, why would they take a code base that they can extend instead of rewriting from scratch?

[aesnakes]

So I guess now we can start calling it Soft Image like back when Microsoft owned it. It has now lost the smooth title of Softimage (soft-im-auge) I cant really figure out the sound but Im sure you get the point lol.

[cresshead]

If you take into consideration zombie licenses, then sure, LW might still be up there, but if you take into consideration the two parameters that are really indicative of a package’s health, sales, adoption and rate of growth, the picture painted is very different.

Also the numbers you posted must be quite a few years old.
I know for sure at least two of those numbers are -incredibly- wrong.

.

i think many apps have the zombie licence number issue…a i’ve said before of the 5 people from college [rich dj, rob b, keith, louise and myself] who bought xsi foundation only 1 uses it now…everyone else either gave up on learning xsi and 3d totally or moved back to 3dsmax or lightwave…xsi foundation at the time was ‘so tempting’ to add because of it’s low price…yet it was still a steep learning curve for many once they had bought it…
much more so than lightwave or 3dsmax.

anyway we’re going off tangent totally…

xsi will continue to grow and i believe it’s in better hands to grow it’s userbase now that it’s in the same company [well soon will be…nothing is signed and sealed yet] as 3dsmax and maya.

[gsuhy]

It’s going to suck. Maya has gotten less and less stable since getting eaten by the conglomerate and so will XSI. Big companies are big on features / upgrades and not so big on stability.

[MadMax]

Dont apologize man,

I just take WWII quite seriously.
-R

you must have really hated Hogan’s Heroes.

[MadMax]

It’s going to suck. Maya has gotten less and less stable since getting eaten by the conglomerate and so will XSI.

That hasn’t been my experience with Maya at all.

I use it 12+ hours a day and I can’t recall the last time I screamed at the monitor and threatened destruction over a crash or bug.

[ThE_JacO]

You realise the major FX houses still program a large amount of their own software? Apparently not. I mean, indeed, why would they take a code base that they can extend instead of rewriting from scratch?

And the moment you base your propietary fluid simulation on some of that codebase and compile against it, boom, it’s under full GPL and anybody can walk away with it on a laptop.
That is precisely what Blender is meant to work like, the principle behind gpl is reciprocation, but it doesn’t really fly with the major fx houses, not for a platform app the way maya is used. Not unless the shop is also a major believer in OSS and quality of work through people and not through propietary research, but I don’t know how many studios work that way on such a large scale like the whole 3d pipe.

Of course blender is used already in several of those large houses for bits and bobs, but you have to be careful when you tread around it, and many legal departments don’t like it very much, to the point that I’ve worked for one that had blender in several launchpads but not in the RnD one.

[R10k]

It’s going to suck. Maya has gotten less and less stable since getting eaten by the conglomerate and so will XSI.

Depending on what it is you’re doing, XSI7 is incredibly buggy right now. I haven’t used it once without it crashing on me. That said, it’s scene recovery has actually worked quite well, but considering the amount of Mental ray errors and other program ending bugs, I doubt it’ll fare much worse under AD.

[lukep]

And the moment you base your propietary fluid simulation on some of that codebase and compile against it, boom, it’s under full GPL and anybody can walk away with it on a laptop.
That is precisely what Blender is meant to work like, the principle behind gpl is reciprocation, but it doesn’t really fly with the major fx houses, not for a platform app the way maya is used. Not unless the shop is also a major believer in OSS and quality of work through people and not through propietary research, but I don’t know how many studios work that way on such a large scale like the whole 3d pipe.

This is untrue. Reciprocation governed by GPL is about distributed/published works. Giving to employees is not distribution (work for hire, owned by the company). So the combined work is legally not under GPL (the GPL kick in when distribution occur), but simple copyright and going away with it on a laptop is theft.

However furnishing to contractors and/or subsidiaries is distribution, and even if special provisions may allow giving to contractors without making a distribution, depending of the copyrights laws of the country, it is not generally the case.

The GPL FAQ is quite clear on this. From it :

Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?
No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.

However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.

[Strang]

Depending on what it is you’re doing, XSI7 is incredibly buggy right now. I haven’t used it once without it crashing on me. That said, it’s scene recovery has actually worked quite well, but considering the amount of Mental ray errors and other program ending bugs, I doubt it’ll fare much worse under AD.

its was a big release, softimage always tightens it up with a point release. will this change under autodesk? i can’t say…

[Kabab]

You realise the major FX houses still program a large amount of their own software? Apparently not. I mean, indeed, why would they take a code base that they can extend instead of rewriting from scratch?

Yeah but they are the only the customer who really do that and only a small portion of the market…

Every other customer is to busy using the tools to make money doing what is their core business which is 3d content creation, not application development.

[R10k]

its was a big release, softimage always tightens it up with a point release. will this change under autodesk? i can’t say…

This is true. I submitted a number of showstopers, but as someone who wasn’t on maintenance I’ll be interested to see if a ‘point release’ for XSI (if there is one) will be available to me.

[Climax]

When Autodesk aquired maya lots of pusilanimus jerks where crying like the world was going to end, but maya has gotten even better same as 3ds max, mudbox and motion builder,
So please, if u dont have the money to buy avid and autodesk does, dont act like little girls and keep your good job, 'cuz autodesk will never buy your brain they will only try to give u something to keep it working