Last week, Autodesk surprised everyone with its acquisition of Alias for $182 million in cash. Find out what this partnership will mean for them and the 3D industry, as VFXWorld’s editor Bill Desowitz speaks with Autodesk’s Marc Petit (vp of product development and operations at the Media & Ent. division) and Alias’ Doug Walker (president/ceo), and then separately with Autodesk’s Carl Bass (coo).

Bill Desowitz: How did the acquisition come about and why?

Marc Petit: At Autodesk, we’re always on the lookout for a good acquisition to grow our business. And Alias is very close to our core when it comes to product and talented teams. More specifically, the rebranding back in February signaled the commitment of Autodesk to the media and entertainment space. When we looked at the market, we were approaching the end of the retooling of the games pipeline and the market position had not changed. And that speaks to some level of entrenchment, and the fact that the customers pick up the different packages for very good reasons… installed bases and trained personnel, so we saw the opportunity to start leveraging the actual complementary [aspects] of the two packages instead of being in full-frontal competition. So that’s where the market was pointing and how we came to initiate this alliance. It was really rooted in what we heard from our customers about the complementary packages and lack of motivation to switch from one to the next.

Alias’ Doug Walker was looking for an acquirer and found that Autodesk offered complementary technologies and marketplaces.

Doug Walker: Certainly from our perspective at Alias, we were not in the process of looking for an acquirer. That said, when Autodesk approached us, obviously they were very serious and the kinds of things that Marc talked about in terms of complementary technologies, complementary marketplaces, really led us to a position where we believed that by combining operations we could offer more value to customers, And so on the design side of things, Alias has a set of products called Studio Tools, which are used for conceptual design, aesthetic design… every car company in the world uses these two tools to design their cars and many of the major consumer products companies. That overlaps very nicely with Autodesk’s products in solids modeling, specifically AutoCAD but also Inventor for solids 3D modeling. So now customers really have an opportunity — and this has actually never happened in the history of the industry — to build products right from conceptual design through to the solids modeling and factory floor types of applications and have an integrated pipeline. So on the design side of the business a tremendous amount of ability to share technology. Also, in design, designers are looking for visualization in a number of different kinds of applications that can create value for them, specifically in the marketing area, where they’re taking their 3D designs that are built in our software or in Inventor and repurposing them for magazines or animations for commercials or for interactive experiences and we have a suite of technology that can help with that.

On the entertainment side, we got very excited because, of course, Autodesk has a series of editing, compositing and effects tools that we think we can integrate nicely with Maya over time, and, with Max, we’re committed to both products for a very long time, but we’re also committed, as a part of this transaction, to building a bridge between those products so that the customers that actually use both in the same pipeline — and this happens mostly in games — can use them together more effectively.

BD: Do you see them all becoming one large package in the future?

DW: Right now our commitment to the marketplace categorically is to keep the products separate. What’s interesting is that Maya is growing very rapidly but so is Max, so there is a group of customers that has chosen each set of technology, and it would be kind of crazy from a pure business perspective to say that we wanted to bring those technologies together. The other thing is that they offer two different value sets. Certainly, where we see the products overlap the most, which is in the games marketplace, Max is very strong at level editing and at world building, whereas Maya is positioned more in the character modeling animation side of things and previsualization, so we’re certainly not going to bring the products together, but we certainly will build bridges between the products to make them interoperate more effectively. And I would add MotionBuilder as being a part of this bridge.

BD: And there is great opportunity for visual effects.

MP: Everywhere you turn in the high-end [visual effects] industry, you are very likely to see Maya. And, of course, having Flame, Lustre, Smoke, Toxik and Maya work together as an integrated pipeline will bring tremendous value to [those customers]. When we introduced Toxik [the collaborative compositing suite] at NAB, we saw a lot of opportunities for people to actually adopt a Maya/Toxik pipeline as their core production tools. And we can solve some hard production problems like color space management. A lot of our Flame and Lustre customers are Maya users and being able to help them drive a lot more efficiencies out of those systems is a winning proposition for us.