Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

News concerning 3D DCC business
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Mathaeus
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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by Mathaeus » 14 Dec 2017, 22:10

Around ten years ago it was entire list of available game engines, let's say Cry Engine was just one of them. Only a few of free weren't even close to commercial ones. All that perhaps started as garage projects sometime in 90s. So it looked as logical idea to see game engine created by Softimage or Autodesk - even no one of these successful engines in these times, shared the development team with DCC app, if I'm correct.
Today there are two or three big players, others from list are more or less... nowhere.

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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by Bullit » 15 Dec 2017, 03:25

luceric wrote: 14 Dec 2017, 17:22 I've always been baffled as well as to why both softimage and Autodesk M&E wanted to get into the game engine business. But, in Autodesk's defense, they do use stingray inside their own products now for realtime visualization. One of the products is called 3DS Max Interactive.

Because a game engine is much more than game engine.

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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by Draise » 15 Dec 2017, 16:46

Game engines are.. yeah, a concept that you can program 3D stuff (and for real-time interaction). A DCC app is the concept that you can create 3D stuff. Softimage was like a fusion of that in the making, not fully there. Now we are seeing tendencies where programming 3D stuff (for real-time) and creating 3D stuff are merging as one area. Soon conceptual workflows that even software like trueSpace in 2009 envisioned - where you can build right in an interactive real-time viewport and program what you need for real-time directly (and have multiple people create and see it/interact with it online or over LAN and have potential for rendering linear 3D stuff and VFX if necessary) - are starting to be the direction things develop today.

Raytracing is getting an AI boost to get rid of noise, dropping that rendering time and boosting quality to speeds that maybe in a few years, raytracing algorithms might actually become real-time. And.. the whole idea of programming what you create all in the same space... might be more of a thing as software develop. Blender is getting a new real-time viewport; Maya, Modo, Lightwave, Max , Cinema 4D and Fabric Engine have strongish real-time viewports trying to be more interactive. Blender has some visual programming (addons) and game engine (old, yes) abilities already built in, and there are some people trying to integrate realtime GI and a revamped game engine into Blender as we speak, and Max has some form of Stingray built in and others "live" link to external game engines, and sadly (yet logically shut down) used to live link into Stingray. Unreal and Cryengine both have started building creative tools with modeling tools and sculpting, even limited texture/geometry painting for content creation, along with animation tools directly in game engine software and the like, and really the rift between the two worlds.... is narrowing.

Which in turn.. has seen a slaughter of software and talent lately, and direction - but maybe for the better, it is only logical. Development tendencies and creator choice - because it's just that much more fun, quick and creative to create and see what you get live, program what you need, build once, use everywhere: from cinema to mobile applications - will eventually merge the two worlds with the idea of a content creation game engine that can double use for VFX and linear animation, and this will become the new norm, which is where I see Unreal Engine head correctly and where I see the opensource undying Blender somewhat and probably head too.

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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by Bullit » 15 Dec 2017, 17:23

There are simulation tools and special effects in games. Also integrating with real image in Unreal with new media framework and composure


luceric
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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by luceric » 16 Dec 2017, 05:33

The irony is that the game engines are fast in previz because a lot of things are pre-baked before launching, while the Viewport 2.0 tech has slower framerate precisely because it's attempting to do everything real-time. I think Autodesk Showcase was where viewport 2.0 originated from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGeVY9nX3DY

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Re: Autodesk to lay off a further 13% of its workforce

Post by Bellsey » 17 Dec 2017, 17:52

its a shame what's happened to Stingray(ala Bitsquid), but frankly I'm not surprised with what's been happening recently.

I could understand why AD wanted a game engine. At the time we had a some good middleware solutions, but no end product that encapsulated them all. Unity and Unreal may have been acquisition targets, but they would have been expensive and were already mature technologies. Something like Bitsquid was new, kinda fresh and was young enough to be taken further with some investment. At the time I thought it was a smart acquisition, the tech was good, had credibilty with shipped titles, and the having visted the guys in Sweden, I could see there was some good potential.

When I left AD in 2015, I could see there had been alot of good work and progress. At in internal summit, there was some good workflows and interop with both Maya and Max and I think there was alot of positivity around Stingray. Personally I think the problem was how AD launched Stingray. I had left AD by that point but it was planned for GDC Europe in the August. Stingray just seemed to limp onto the market with hardly any big announcements. Considering there we senior team members at GDC there was no talks or keynotes.
The games engine space was (and still is) competitive and yet AD seemed to enter the market by making Stingray all but invisible. Then, there was the idea of a 30 day trial upon which people would have to pay subs to continue Stingray. Crazy really when you could download and use Unity or UE for free. if you want developers to look at technology and consider using it, then you need to make your technology open and easy for them to start doing stuff. AD seemed to do the opposite, imo.

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