<quote> I think you're pretty off on the games figures Raff - I'd say current/last gen was 50/50 (with a lot of Soft still in Japan). However, AD made clear that Maya = Games a long time ago. Skyline was Maya only, and all the middleware stuff has been Maya-first/only. Next-gen pipelines are interesting because the amount and quality of content required is getting close to the problems film faced a decade or more back - how are we going to create and author all of this content? I think this gen is going to be all about game engine content creation tools rather than export pipelines.
On a related note - take a look at the PS4 and XBone architecture, then look at HSA. We're excited :) </quote> I agree. Having working in games on and off since the mid 1990’s, I’ve always worked on titles using proprietary engines. The single biggest hurdle is the iterative turnaround time to make an edit to content and see it in the engine. No 3D application will solve that problem – not even a super-Maya. What is needed is a library that can seamlessly integrate with both the engine and artist content creation tools which acts as a bridge between the two environments and also provide a true 1:1 what you see is what you get workflow. The library needs to be easy to integrate, agnostic to platform, and rich enough to provide all the functions artists expect. Developers need something that is extremely light, easy to manipulate, and doesn’t require them to rework their code to accommodate, but can still be abstracted away from the engine so it doesn’t become a licensing and distribution issue when it comes time to ship the game. Something like Fabric Engine is much closer to the mark, but I think that last point will be a sticking point of contention. Matt
