If you wanted an example of how quickly the commercial landscape can change, you’d be hard pushed to find a better one than Autodesk’s domination of the 3D modelling, animation and painting tools used by game developers. After all, three short years ago, its only product in the games market was 3DS Max. Granted, it was the market leader – at least in terms of volume – but 36 months and several hundreds of millions of acquisition dollars later, the Media & Entertainment division of the world’s largest design software company is in an almost monopolistic position thanks to its ownership of 3DS Max and Maya, not to mention realtime animation package MotionBuilder and 3D sculpting tool Mudbox. Of course, you can buy other packages – Softimage’s XSI, Luxology’s modo and Pixologic’s ZBrush, for instance – but Autodesk’s combined firepower, and sales team, is pretty much dominant.

Still, it takes time to get the different development teams moving in sync: for one thing, 3DS Max is developed out of Montreal while the Maya and MotionBuilder teams remain in Toronto, which is where Autodesk’s one-time game rival Alias was based. Equally, most recent acquisition Mudbox is split with half its staff in Toronto and an outsourced team (actually the original developers) in eastern Europe.

At least the marketeers are on thecase, with each of the packages now sporting a 2009 moniker, although 3DS Max 2009 was released during spring 2008 and has had a summer Creativity Extension release. The others have followed the more traditional post- SIGGRAPH autumn rollout.

Yet, behind the scenes, the interoperability between all four is slowly being ramped up. It doesn’t always get the headlines, but for artists, animators and the technical directors who increasingly make the buying decisions in the big development houses, these relatively minor improvements can have a large effect when spread over the 24-plus months that a 50-strong art team will be committed to a major release.

For example, MotionBuilder 2009 now works better with both 3DS Max’s Biped or Maya’s Full Body Inverse Kinematics rig, while it can also seamlessly handle normal maps created in Maya, 3DS Max or Mudbox; the slight inconsistencies in the ways 3DS Max and Maya handle normal maps having been a notorious issue in the past.



Indeed, Dave Cardwell, one of the creators of Mudbox, points to such interoperability as being one of the advantages of joining Autodesk. “Previously we had to try and guess how the 3DS Max guys and the Maya guys were going to handle features, and then write our code accordingly,” he says. “Now we get to see their roadmaps, which makes everything much easier for us and for Mudbox users too.”