Attitude Studio used MotionBuilder for the character animation in the game Dead to Rights II, which will be available in early 2005 for PS2 and Xbox. All Death to Rights II images courtesy of Namco Hometek Inc. Studio — Attitude St

It’s been nearly 60 days since Alias shook up SIGGRAPH 2004 with its announcement that it was acquiring Kaydara, the small Montreal-based developer, finalizing its independence from SGI and securing MotionBuilder as the perfect complement to Maya. The name of the Kaydara products will fall under the Alias name, so we can expect the product names will remain the same. “That way we can leverage the brand and get more people to see and understand the technology much faster” said Doug Walker, president of Alias. “There was a natural fit with the two companies’ product lines [and] with the acquisition of Kaydara we can reach far more users than we could hope.”

In the meantime, Kaydara announced the new version 6.0 of MotionBuilder, which will start shipping this month. MotionBuilder, specifically designed to create 3D character animation and based on its previous incarnation Filmbox and the FBX file format developed by Kaydara, are widely used in computer graphics around the globe. VFXWorld spoke to Walker about the significance of the Kaydara acquisition for Alias and for the vfx industry as a whole.

Doug Walker, president of Alias, received an enthusiastic reaction when he announced the acquisition of Kaydera at SIGGRAPH this year.

Tulay Tetiker: What does the acquisition of Kaydara mean for Maya and for Alias’ industry presence worldwide, and what are the global market ramifications for the MotionBuilder purchase?

DW: We are doing what we said we would do from the beginning, and that is to be an independent company. Since we grew independent from SGI and we’ve had investors who believe in our vision of creating more value to our customers. The purchase of Kaydara is a very early indicator of that value creation. We had been out from under SGI for only about six weeks when we announced the Kaydara acquisition. We are very strong in the entertainment business, our customers are accepting the technology well and we wanted to go further to create more value for our customers and this is an example of it.

TT: Will MotionBuilder stay a separate offering and will it continue to offer the same flexibility to work with other packages, or will it be integrated in Maya 7?

DW: The product will remain stand-alone and that’s also because it’s what the customers want. Kaydara customers have Maya pipelines but also our competitors’ pipelines. The last thing you want to do is to change that by integrating a technology in Maya only. That way the customers will get what they need.