Hand in Hand

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Exclusive podcast: Autodesk/Alias

Digital Content Producer Senior Contributing Editor Dan Ochiva interviews the newly combined Autodesk and Alias team of Maya Development Manager John Gross, 3ds Max Software Developer Daniel Levesque, and Autodesk's Senior Director of 3D Project Management Michel Besner.

Autodesk''s acquisition of Alias brings two major animation/effects packages under one management; interoperability between programs is a key goal going forward.

When Autodesk completed the final paperwork this past January on its buyout of Alias, a new era began in the highly competitive animation and effects software industry. Now, two of the top packages — Maya and 3ds max — would be under one management and budgeting regime.

Millimeter recently sat down to talk R&D with John Gross, Maya development manager; Daniel Levesque, 3ds max software developer; and Michel Besner, senior director of 3D product management for Autodesk. (This is an edited version of the discussion. For the full interview, visit digitalcontentproducer.com. Visit Autodesk's new community portal, The Area, at www.the-area.com.)

Millimeter: Will you keep two separate teams of programmers, or do you think it makes more sense to combine the efforts?

John Gross: The organizations have been integrated to bring the companies together — it's not like Alias has been hung off to the side. The product teams for Maya and Max pretty much have their heads down working on the next releases. So we're communicating and sharing information, [and] in some specific areas of interoperability, there's been close collaboration.

MM: New versions of each product launched at Siggraph. What are some of the issues you've addressed in Maya 8 and 3ds max 9?

JG: We've been putting a lot of focus on performance, including taking advantage of threading with multicore CPUs, a fair bit of work on interoperability to connect the two apps together through FBX, and some other work to connect Maya to [Autodesk] Toxik.

Michel Besner: After we raised the curtain between the two development teams, we found that we had the same understanding of the market requirements. Our customers have challenges in managing the complexity of projects. They want to be more productive, and they have a lot of challenges in using multiple products. We have more customers than we thought who are using a combination of Max, Maya, and MotionBuilder, plus other custom tools and third-party solutions.

MM: What's the solution for managing these three products?

MB: Interoperability is a key factor. Customers want to use the best solutions in the marketplace, so making our products interoperate as well as possible is one of the highest values our customers are asking us for…The primary vehicle for [that] interoperability will be FBX…The first step for us is making sure that any data files like geometry, cameras, and so on can interchange among Max, Maya, and MotionBuilder successfully.

The Media and Entertainment division of Autodesk is launching a free community portal, The Area (www.the-area.com), focused on artists and developers using Autodesk 3D products (including Maya, 3ds Max, Motion Builder, and VIZ) in games, film, postproduction, and design visualization. The portal''s homepage will include top-featured artist/developer stories, tutorials, blogs, downloads, and discussions. The portal will go live later this month.

MM: Can you give any other examples of the collaboration going on?

Daniel Levesque: We've started collaborating on mental ray [third-party renderer used by both products], and integrating our solutions such as the same [type of] licenses, for example, which you'll see in these next releases. The sharing isn't in full gear yet, but will be over the next year.

JG: As Maya gets better integrated with the 2D products, as Max can already do well, there will be more options to render multiple layers and composite them together, regardless as to where the layers came from. [With the integration of Maya with] Toxik, we render out different layers of your animation, and Maya will generate a Toxik compositing script for you. You can go back and forth and update as you need to. Those different layers don't all have to come from Maya; they can come from different places. So you can choose that this layer comes from Maya, this layer comes from Max, and use Toxik to put it all together.

MM: What long-standing development dreams/goals/pet features did you have for Max and/or Maya that are still on the table? Any new ones since the merger?

DL: Our clients' business needs didn't change because of Autodesk's acquisition of Alias, so we're mainly focused on delivering what was planned, and are also starting to explore the new world of possibilities that the acquisition has opened up.

Since my focus is on rendering, I'm always interested in improving this. Standardizing render presets (shadows, speculars, etc.) to create a common render pipeline would be amazing. My dream is for all Autodesk products to work together easily, to see simplified data exchange between all the products, starting with 3ds max and Maya, [and for] better interoperability at every level in terms of models, animation, textures, cameras. Having standardized camera, light source, and color space models would solve a lot of very basic but very real production problems.

JG: I think that in the coming years our products will be providing solutions to problems that we can't even imagine today. The focus has moved from “feature wars” to a focus on creativity, productivity, and the pipeline. Addressing those needs covers many aspects, from continuing to push the boundaries of photo-real hair, cloth, and natural phenomena in Maya, to making it easier for creative people working in different locations to collaborate effectively using our tools.

A new goal is to streamline the IK solutions across Maya, 3ds Max, and MotionBuilder, so animators can use their tool of choice without any limitations. In terms of interoperability between the products, being able to share geometry caching is a huge first step.

MM: Any parting comments?

DL: On the Max side, we were afraid of hostility from the part of Maya, since they were being absorbed into a greater company, where they might be afraid of losing their jobs. But I didn't get any hostility from them at all.

JG: This is the fourth deal like this [involving mergers and acquisitions] that I've been through. The ones that work are the ones where people get along well, they respect each other, and the cultures are similar. I have a really strong feeling that this is the case this time.