Carl Bass (left), President and CEO of Autodesk, and Mark Petit (right), senior vice president of Media & Entertainment, as they addressed Summit audiences. All images © 2012 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

What was the take away from last week's Autodesk summit in San Francisco, where the software giant introduced its 2013 digital content suites? Further interoperability and cloud computing.

Indeed, chief executive Carl Bass stressed over and over again the importance of Autodesk 360 (formerly known as Autodesk Cloud), which now provides even more cloud benefits to subscription customers, including additional storage and the ability to access cloud services for rendering, simulation, design optimization and energy analysis. Subscription customers now have up to 25 GB of storage and between 100 and 500 cloud units per user, based on the suite edition they purchased, providing a competitive edge to respond to changing business requirements.

Bass suggested that with such an "infinitely scalable resource," this game-changer is akin to dry cleaning: "How much do I want to pay?" He maintained that cloud computing is the future of how simulation will be done, among other highly complex tasks, and part of a new eco-system in which "you're the center of computing, community and collaboration." He termed it "mobile cloud and social all in one place," and predicted that the iPad will replace the PC.

Not surprisingly, the concept of cloud rendering is being aggressively adopted in the entertainment industry by, among others, Atomic Fiction, the spinoff VFX boutique from Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital. In fact, Atomic Fiction is currently using a workable and efficient cloud rendering system on a project by project basis, and is in the midst of doing the VFX for Zemeckis' return to live action, Flight. Co-founders Kevin Baillie and Ryan Tudhope were present at the summit.

Click on images for larger view.  With the addition of high-quality depth sorting, together with support for  image planes and animation  ghosting,  Viewport  2.0  now  offers  a  more  functionally  complete  high-performance,  high-quality  viewport.  With  Viewport  2.0,  artists  can  evaluate  their  work  in  a higher  fidelity  interactive environment  in  order  to  make  better  creative  decisions.  In  addition,  the  same  hardware  rendering technology  can  be  used  to  batch  render  larger-than-screen-size  frames,  producing  high-quality animatics and previsualizations in less time.