Marc Petit, SVP, Autodesk Media & Ent. Unless noted, all images courtesy of Autodesk.

VFXWorld gets an exclusive Q&A with Marc Petit, Autodesk Media & Ent.'s SVP, to explain the strategy behind this week's acquisitions of Realviz and Kynogon. With Realviz, headquartered in Sophia Antipolis, France, Autodesk adds image-based content creation software to its arsenal. And with Paris-based Kynogon, Autodesk additionally gets the Kynapse AI middleware.

Bill Desowitz: You're closing two acquisitions on the same day; why is Autodesk so focused on acquisitions lately?

Marc Petit: Well, the timing is kind of a coincidence. We have a very deliberate and highly selective approach to acquisitions. Believe me; we get a lot of solicitation! We like talented teams, we like top notch technologies that complement our own core technology and we like products that complement our portfolio because our customers are asking for more integrated solutions. This was the case in the past for the Unreal/Character Studio, Colorfront/Lustre and Skymatter/Mudbox acquisitions, and is once again the case for both Kynogon and Realviz. These acquisitions bring Autodesk highly talented teams, best-of-breed technologies applicable across multiple markets and great entrepreneurs with a strong reputation in the industry.

BD: Curious that it's two French companies.

MP: Merely happenstance and nothing to do with the fact that I'm French myself for sure! Seriously, France has a history of producing strong innovators and there are many very interesting companies and projects over there, but this is also true of many other countries.

Realviz Movimento Optical Motion Capture. 

BD: In terms of Realviz, I take it the main draw was Stitcher, ImageModeler and Movimento?

MP: Yes, these are great products. Realviz was created almost 10 years ago as a technology transfer from the French research institute INRIA. It's been built from day one upon a very advanced technology foundation and has led the field of computer vision and image-based modeling ever since. We view this technology and set of products as fundamental as they simplify the transition from 2D to 3D, from the real to the virtual.

Many processes, from entertainment to architecture or graphics to digital photography require tight integration of the virtual and the real. With this technology, it's easy to extract a lot of 3D information from stills and image sequences and that information can be useful to our existing customers in many ways -- from being able to extract measurements from a couple of pictures, building full 3D digital models of cities from satellite imagery to automatically revealing a 3D camera move or capturing motion from a movie shot. Realviz's products are important, mature technologies and we believe that now is the right time to integrate these technologies more deeply into our pipeline solutions. That is why we are getting together to do this.