I just want to give a bit of context on innovation at Autodesk because I know it is not always easy to understand how the organization works and it would not be fair on the talented and very hardworking engineers (that spend their days (and sometimes nights) trying to innovate and improve their products) if I did not try.
While it is fair to feel frustration with the business decisions of Autodesk, I do believe that the Maya and 3ds Max engineers are as passionate about what they do as the Softimage engineers. They care deeply about innovation and making their products better for users. Before I continue I want to stress that I do not mean to detract from the fact that Softimage was an innovative product - it was. But I want to share my view on innovation in general, in May/3ds Max in particular and its challenges in both In general most attempts at innovation fail because, almost by definition, innovation means taking high risks with little or no guarantee of return. Does that mean we should stop trying? No, because occasionally you will succeed at that success is worth it. One thing that probably cannot be said about Autodesk is fear of failure. We have invested significant resources into building new technologies from the ground up: These include Toxik and Skyline and although these projects did not pan out exactly as planned we truly believed they were worth the risk. The whole database aspect of Toxik was a massive innovation attempt. It is easy to look back in hindsight and laugh at these projects, but they all had avant-garde ideas underlying them (collaboration and data management in Toxik - run-time authoring in Skyline); and they were risks that appeared imminently worth taking because we believed they could change the way visual effects and games were created for the better. And then again, we also had some great success with innovation in such areas as virtual production, reality capture and simulation. And although we bought Naiad, Bifrost is a new and innovative technology that simply leverages the expertise of the creators of Naiad. Talented people like Marcus and Duncan always have new ideas on how to do things better, and they have some great ideas about the future of procedural effects technology. Also, there is nothing wrong with buying production-proven technology and making it into a feature or a product. The Foundry have built a great portfolio doing just that. But production technology such as XGen while very powerful is often deeply tied into a specific pipeline and typically not that user-friendly - requiring significant development work to make usable by a broader audience of artists. Does that mean we should not invest in doing these kind of things - just because it doesn't seem cool? That is not really our criteria. The main question is whether the end result will give our users a better product and better capabilities. Plug-in developers (as many here have pointed out) are a very essential part of any product's development - they can focus on areas that they are expert in and do things we might not think of doing (or have time to do). If they succeed it would be cutting of our nose to spite our face not to consider integrating them where makes sense for the product. But it is not all we do, it is just part of the story. As has been discussed Maya and 3ds Max are mature products and we are now investing resources redesigning key areas of these products. The viewport was one such example: building a new high performance interactive viewport was always going to be a multi-year effort. And at first people though it was a joke - because like most v1s (as some may remember from the first XSI) it did not do half of what the old tech did - but what it did do it did 100 times better. Now that it has matured this is more obvious but there were a lot of skeptics at the time. The industry is going through massive change and we need to do more faster. But we cannot do that across three applications. We have to choose the ones that will benefit the greatest number of our users. None of this alters the fact that Softimage is an innovative product that you care passionately about and that is not my point. The point is that we are continuing to take the risks we take because we are trying to do the best we can to innovate. And will we have failures in the future - probably - but we will probably have some great successes too. maurice Maurice Patel Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134 What is confusing me is that AD says that they need to continue work on inventions, they need devs to focus more on that. But lets be honest here, if you look Maya development in last few releases, they did not invent much (except Duncan work on nucleus and Viewport 2.0) but they were just buying technologies, like Naiad, Nex (modeling toolset), now they added Unfold.... Were are those AD inventions at all, Skyline? AFAIK same situation is with 3dsMax, entire Graphite modeling toolset is some 3dsMax plugin (do not know name) they bought. If they started something like Fabric, well I would understand that.
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