For Marc Petit of Autodesk, the alliance was formed when customers talked about the complementary aspects of the two companies’ packages and their lack of motivation to switch from one to the next.

BD: What about handling redundancies?

MP: From a global perspective, there are bound to be redundancies on the operational side. It’s hard to quantify at this moment. But you can see that Alias has a global presence with subsidiaries in every country and Autodesk has the same global presence, so right there we can see some possible consolidation of offices and efficiencies.

DW: Certainly one of the things that both sides are working on right now is building integration teams. So a big part of the role for those teams will be to help develop a strategy that’s going to carry the combined organization forward. And organizational strategy will follow business strategies. So we’ll expect that part of that work can be done prior to the close [four to six months depending on final regulatory approvals], and there’s work that will have to be done after the close.

BD: And after the close?

DW: There will be the benefits of bringing the organization into the Autodesk family and being part of a much larger organization. Obviously our customers come first, so they will be a key part of our business strategy.

BD: What regions will now be strengthened as a result of the alliance?

DW: If you take a look at the total reach that Autodesk has, it is one of the things that I think can significantly impact how to bring our product to market. Today, Autodesk has over 1,200 resellers and so that will certainly be beneficial in bringing new value to our customers. And I’d say specifically in Asia Pacific Autodesk has a much more significant presence than what we have at this time, so in that area of the world we can expect to benefit.

MP: Well, there are certainly opportunities to build new solutions and new functions within the industry. By further investing in FBX and products like MotionBuilder, we have a good chance as well to get these products to new markets or new issues within the market like work flow management.

BD: What are the benefits on the design side?

Carl Bass, coo of Autodesk, is excited about the connection between his company’s manufacturing portfolio and Alias’ products. Customers will now have better interoperability among the tools in their pipeline.

Carl Bass: The design side is really important because up until now most industrial design, whether it’s automotive or coffee pots or whatever, there’s this big discontinuity between design and engineering. It goes into a tool and then it often gets turned into a clay model or physical prototype. And then when they start engineering it, they start all over again. There’s no good reason with today’s technology that you shouldn’t be able to use that information and move it back and forth between the designers and engineers. So we think it’s important to have the conceptual and industrial design at the beginning of the process. Almost every major automotive company, aerospace company and lots of consumer product companies use Studio Tools and we’re excited about the connection we can make to the rest of our manufacturing portfolio. [One] thing that we like [on the entertainment side] is that Maya runs on more platforms than ours — Max is a Windows application — and so being able to have the Mac and Linux is important to us. We think this broadens the market and helps our customers solve problems by having better interoperability among the tools in their pipeline.

Another important thing we’ve done on the design side of the business is we introduce products for data and asset management, and we have a product called The Vault [that’s been introduced to 3ds Max 8], and the same thing will be true for Maya. We did it because we thought it would be a future thing for our customers, but it’s gotten a much bigger response. As I’ve talked to large studios, one of their big problems is managing their data and assets — this is another area of cross-pollination between the two sides of the business — and Vault is definitely in our plan [to address this].

BD: What else do you see happening in the 3D world?

CB: Over the next couple of years, we believe two things are going to happen in the convergence of design and entertainment. More and more content is going to be created with design tools — you know, the typical CAD tools. Because they become so specialized, you can make a machine or model a building much quicker using purpose built tools than you can in the generic modelers like Max and Maya. So, increasingly, we’re seeing car bodies or buildings created with design tools and then being used in entertainment, in animation. Sometimes it’s for pure entertainment like a movie or a cityscape in a game. Other times, we see people who want to take their designs and animate them, put people in them, put crowds in them, [add] visual effects — the wind blowing across the pond as the water drops — in a much more realistic way to present an architectural environment to a client rather than just a static image.

I can’t tell you the number of young architectural clients that want to navigate through 3D space like in their Xbox. So I think there’s a fair amount of overlap and convergence that will happen over the next couple of years, where the technology on one side of the business is already desired and will become a realistic part of how these people work on the other side of the business.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.