Marc Petit.

BD: So, for instance, Face Robot could be very complementary to what Mudbox offers?

MP: That's a great example, even though we cannot comment on that. There's also a lot of HumanIK stuff when you look at ICE, from a run-time and interactive 3D perspective, there is a lot of complementary aspects there.

MS: What we're really trying to do is bridge the gap between the run-time world and the asset creation world and allow a lot more stuff to be done interactively, get more into the game authoring side of things. If you look at game making, the portion of the pipeline that DCC takes up is a very small piece. We just feel we have so much technology and talent that we can bring better solutions doing this type of authoring in an interactive world.

BD: And talk about working together in stereoscopic 3-D production.

MS: For us it's been a question of priorities, and I think what will be interesting, now that it ties into a whole bigger pipeline workflow that Autodesk has obviously been working on, is it's going to be a much more compelling thing for us to get that stuff in there.

BD: Talk about working together in future development of your products.

MP: What some people don't realize is how much common history both teams have together here in Montreal. Just because of proximity, we'll see much faster integration and much more synergy. We know people don't like to change their tools and how attached they are to them. They are also attached to who owns their tools, as we witnessed with the Alias acquisition. It's one of the characteristics of this market. With this and by having the teams working more closely together and by having the products under one roof, we can really bring a lot of the best from each product to other products.

MS: By focusing on a really datacentric pipeline, you're not going to force people to make choices anymore but allow them to more easily bring in one product that they want to use. Even if they're a Max or a Maya user, they're going to see how XSI does something really well.

BD: Can you talk more about where your focus will be in terms of interactive entertainment?

Marc Stevens.

MP: Initially we'll be focused on characters because this is where a lot of the complexities are in conveying emotion realistically and managing tons of characters. You'll see a lot of focus on character-centric interactive solutions. And we know what the problem is: it requires tight integration of animation, AI and physics. We think of it as the holy trinity of the run-time components. And that's where we see this whole agenda and investment accelerate. I think when we can give the industry good, intelligent character solutions, it will open the door to a lot of new applications. And I think there is a race going on now across several big companies to make this happen.

MS: I think Marc is spot-on. You're trying to make a more holistic process across the whole pipeline. Right now people go from one tool to change things into a format that another tool can swallow [and so on] to eventually down to a format that can run in run-time. And I think what we want to do is to be able to go further along in the process with the kind of rich creation tools that we have in giving people a lot of that interactive experience and saving all the nitty-gritty optimization until the very end.

BD: What can you say about staffing plans at this point?

MP: These are the early days of integration and this acquisition is no different from any other one. There are going to be some redundancies in the process but, as I said, I think our strategy is clear about offering choice and interoperability on one end and breaking new ground in interactive 3D on the other. And I would expect that the way we are going to approach the organization is going to be fully aligned with this strategy. Again, not everything has been figured out.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.com.