The biggest feature of Maya 8.5 is Nucleus technology and the first implementation is Maya nCloth, which allows artists to create believable cloth-on-cloth simulations more easily. All images courtesy of Autodesk.

The stated purpose of a recent Autodesk Summit at its Media & Ent. (M&E) headquarters in Montreal was to allow journalists a peek into its roadmap for digital imaging and visualization, as well as to provide a more comprehensive overview of the division’s activities. A secondary -- dare we say discreet -- intention might have been to imprint the Autodesk brand firmly over iconic post-production tools such as Flame and Smoke.

The former main Discreet building (still owned by Discreet Logic founder Richard Szalwinski) in old Montreal is being refurbed in a manner, according to former staff, which will replace the “ultra cool” of its original identity with a more corporate look and feel. Flame and Smoke are now Autodesk Flame and Smoke. It’s the final phase in a lengthy integration that began after Discreet’s $410 million acquisition by the CAD giant in 1999. The company clearly hopes to make Autodesk as much of a leading name in film and videogames as it already is in technical design for manufacturing and architecture.

Executives had healthy third quarter figures to demonstrate that being part of a $1.8 billion software firm (of which the M&E division accounts for 18%) is benefiting not only internal growth but also addressing a changing set of customer needs.

Overall revenues rose 21% to $457 million of which M&E contributed $64 million: a 50% leap from the previous quarter. 3ds Max continues to perform well, rising 28%, but it was the record (33% growth) quarterly revenues for Maya (now Autodesk Maya) with which executives were particularly pleased and served to justify the $197 million price tag it paid for Alias.

Speaking of which, Autodesk has just released Maya 8.5, with the chief innovation being the introduction of Nucleus, the company’s unified dynamics simulation framework. This is a new solver designed by award-winning scientist Jos Stam to simulate the actions of any type of matter from rigid bodies to cloth and liquids. Although the focus of the solver is on Maya, Autodesk expects to port the technology to other products.

The first implementation of this Nucleus technology is called Maya nCloth, which allows artists to create believable cloth-on-cloth simulations with complex cloth collisions, such as a cape over a jacket, more easily. nCloth also features a unique air-pressure model that enables artists to create more than just clothing simulations. Artists can use any geometry (whether a closed, sealed volume such as an inner tube, or an open one such as a balloon) to create an inflatable object with internal and external pressure. They can also simulate other materials, including deformable plastics and metals, which can be pulled, sheared, dented and stretched.

Marc Petit proudly claims that less than nine months after Autodesk’s acquisition of Alias, value had been added to the company. The goal he says is to create a large company that can have a significant impact on the market.

“Less than nine months after acquisition, we’re able to show we can add value to the business,” said divisional vp Marc Petit. “Our aim is to create a large company that is not some 800-pound gorilla, but one which can have a significant impact on the market.”

However, its systems business, encompassing Lustre, Inferno and Toxik, grew just 5% in “a year of dramatic change” outlined by marketing head Maurice Patel. “We’ve undergone a major transition in our systems business. We introduced Flame on Linux at the end of 2005 and this year [2006] all of our products have transferred over from SGI. As a result, the cost of those products has reduced, we’ve been able to drive new applications and our sales are up. Systems used to be driven by proprietary hardware and turnkey solutions to derive realtime performance. We’re adapting to a different business model based on PC components rather than SGI and moving to a new, agile development model.”

As part of that adaptation, Bill Roberts, former director of systems product management, and Pierre Bouchard, director of systems R&D, have left the company along with 30 other R&D and support staff. According to Petit, “It’s a process of streamlining. We were a heavy functionally-oriented organization and need to offer a faster, more product oriented approach.” More than 80% of its systems’ product revenue in the last quarter was Linux-based.

Autodesk Outlines Key Market Drivers
Autodesk attributed its improved animation sales to sweeping demand for 3D. “We’ve predicted 15% annual growth over the next couple years and the driver is 3D,” said Patel. “Autodesk is present at both the conceptual design and production stage and increasingly that means 3D tools. Our customers use 3D models for manufacturing, civil engineering, terrain simulation or architecture. It’s visually informed design where clients can make more decisions earlier in the process to save costs and plan efficiently.”