Yes… there are several obvious holes waiting to be filled in the EIAS character pipeline. FBX was implemented, I believe, as a stop gap measure. One to fill the need for character tools indirectly and two to open up EIAS to the rest of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I think its a great addition and truly helps EIAS overall value. Can’t wait for export capabilties in r3.
A lot depends on how EITG wishes to position EIAS in the 3D community. We all know EIAS is known for its rendering power. That’s what it was designed for. Poly crunching. Does EITG focus on what its good at or does it try to add more character tools and try to become something else? My guess is the folks at EITG will stick to the first one.
My general conclusion is EIAS will never evolve into a character animation powerhouse like Maya unless they are bought out by another company with deep pockets. This is a little difficult to swallow because its seems to be so essential to the marketing engine now-a-days. I think EIAS’ character tools will continue to evolve, but at a slower pace than rendering and hard surface animation technologies. (Of course this is my opinion and could be entirely wrong. I’m only looking at trends…plus there’s only so much money available. It must be spent where they know it will bring an immediate return.) If EITG can create a solid and effective bridge linking EIAS to other packages through FBX, then EIAS becomes a super rendering platorm with a huge amount of additional animation tools that programs like Turtle, Maxwell and other renderers don’t possess. I think its smart. Hopefully that will increase sales, which inturn will drive development of new character animation technologies.
If this is EITG’s intended route, which is ok, then instead of adding tons of internal character animation tools, work on expanding the infrastructure of the program with a more robust plugin API and methods of getting into the guts of Animator and Camera itself. Though my desire…of course… is to have my cake and eat it too.
