Storm in 3D Computer Graphics industry

3DS Max 8 and Maya 7 were separately announced at the recently concluded Siggraph 2005. Nobody could have guessed that both these competing products could soon be part of one family.

Autodesk, the developers of AutoCAD, Revit Building and 3DS Max software, are now the proud owners of Maya and Alias Motionbuilder. After acquiring Alias, Autodesk has taken complete control of the high-end 3D design, modeling and animation software market.

Maya and 3DS Max are considered the defacto standards of the gaming, movie and entertainment industry (Maya even won an Oscar last year). Since Autodesk owns both these products, there is virtually no competition now. The likely outcome could be that software gets even more expensive which in turn will raise the prices of products and services that use these products for their design.

3D Studio Max is currently available only on the Windows platform while Maya is available for Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Autodesk could use the Alias expertise and Maya codebase to finally develop their product line for other platforms or could even decide to end the development of Alias products on OSX and Linux? Maya is well known in the 3D industry for powerful scripting language MEL and the creative interface. We could see some of these innovative things in future 3DS Max release.

Softimage(Avid), Lighwave(Newtek), Houdini(Side Effects) and Rhino 3D are other commercial players in the 3D Software market but most of them are very small in comparison with Alias or Autodesk. [There’s an open source Blender 3D software also]

The year 2005 has already witnessed two very big software deals - Adobe acquiring Macromedia and Ebay buying Skype. This third Alias-Discreet deal is valued at a meagre US$182 million in cash. The product release schedule for both products will continue into the foreseeable future without modification. The two companies will continue to exist and market and sell both Maya and 3D Studio Max for the near future.

Read Official Announcement • Press Release • Fact Sheet • General FAQ

The acquisition of Alias allows Autodesk to offer a front-end design extension to its concept-to-manufacture product lifecycle management solution. It will enable design collaboration professionals to conceptualize and present their ideas with StudioTools’ photo-realistic, studio-quality 3-D visualization and simulation technology, and engineers can complement the software with Autodesk’s Inventor software to model solids and product functionality.

StudioTools also gives Autodesk footing in the automotive and consumer goods markets. Alias manufactures software for nearly all automotive manufacturers and consumer products manufacturers, including Kodak, Mattel, Sharp, Timex and Trek Bicycle, according to the press release.