Thought Monday might have come around again, but I am going to have to agree with Luceric even if its from a slightly different angle.
a) Autodesk is in a position where it is being out maneuvered on pretty much every front. Thats pretty much obvious to everyone. b) They cant release any long term plans because they will Osborne effect themselves out of the industry. So what can they do ? they can start releasing functionality that is to quote from below, scalable, distributed, out-of-core simulation that's also platform agnostic Ie Code that they can do two things with. 1) Keep the legacy apps limping along while occasionally showing cool stuff to keep people excited. Lets be honest of all 3 of their apps Maya does make the most sense to be the first in line. Both Max and Soft image are far too specific in the way they are put together to make changes like this easy to bolt on. Maya is pretty much platform agnostic as it stands. 2) And this is what they need to be doing. They need to be redoing either all 3 apps from the ground up to enable plug and play equally into all. Or they will be combining all 3 into one app which as much as I love Softimage makes better business and technical sense. This having to spread your resources over 3 apps that overlap to large extents is just not sustainable long term. particularly when products like blender are catching them up very quickly. Its only going to take a few people to realize that for a fraction of their ADSK license cost they can pay (donation) the blender devs to implement the exact functionality that they need. So yes they are playing defense to try and hit the end whistle. They have just defined the end whistle as when they are ready to announce they next gen. To me thats the only thing that makes sense with the current actions of their upper management. Admittedly that is working on the basis that they are not being deliberately Stupid. which wouldn't be the first time for Corporate USA ;) Kind regards Angus ________________________________________ From: Luc-Eric Rousseau [[email protected]] Sent: 25 July 2013 04:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Future of Naiad On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 6:33 AM, adrian wyer <[email protected]> wrote: > lets face it, if the AD higher ups can't see that houdini is trousering them > in the vfx dept, and that their best hope for a procedural approach to vfx, > is to hit the ground running with ICE, then they deserve to be buried by the > competition Autodesk is doing the right thing in that context. What they have done with Naiad is add expertise about scalable, distributed, out-of-core simulation that's also platform agnostic, which ICE is not. ICE is a module built deep into XSI that does threaded operations on block of data that reside in XSI's RAM and that's it. At the user group, they did a tech preview of something called Bifrost with its GUI running in Maya, which is the standard linux studio platform, and that's a totally a reasonable thing to do given also its extensive SDK. Things might make more sense if you understand that Naiad was not just a fluid solver, it was meant to be a complete simulation framework, like Houdini. It's not something you plug into ICE, it's an alternative to it. = <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width:100%;"> <tr> <td align="left" style="text-align:justify;"><font face="arial,sans-serif" size="1" color="#999999"><span style="font-size:11px;">This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. </span></font></td> </tr> </table>
