BD: Talk more about the importance of bridging the gap between 2D and 3D, which was so vital, for instance, to the aesthetic of Speed Racer.

MP: Exactly -- we are seeing some fundamental changes in the way movies, television programs and games are produced. Being able to gather 3D data from 2D material can help at many stages of the production process. We see it in pre-visualization, where it's easy to build 3D environments or virtual sets by stitching pictures together or derive 3D models very quickly from set photos using image-based modeling. Games now require a lot of facial animation. Animators can rough out facial animations using a webcam and optical motion capture. Adding assist cameras on location to capture scenes from multiple points of view is a good insurance policy for post-production. Of course, you can extract camera moves to enrich the post-production process but you can also rebuild sets in 3D from these multiple points of view. Multiple cameras enable optical motion capture of actors in non-intrusive ways without the need for suits or dedicated stages. The performance of an actor can then be modified or augmented during the post-production process using regular 3D tools such as Maya or Flame. Moreover, combining all of these technologies with spatial image-based lighting allows for highly realistic integration of CG elements with live action. We believe that weaving these technologies and products more tightly into our existing portfolio should lead to some interesting new capabilities and will provide for a more efficient production environment.

For customers in many industries that Autodesk serves, it is about being able to factor the "real" into the virtual. So, for example, with ImageModeler, when you do renovation projects, architects can take a few shots and extract measurements and even 3D models from photos of existing building facades to inform their designs. Realviz technologies can also be used to assemble or stitch together multiple images to create immersive environments with 3D views. Photographers use this technique when they need to shoot closed confined environments or very large panoramas. These tools are also a good entrée into 3D for digital artists and photographers accustomed to working in 2D.

For Autodesk, the main draw to Realviz was the Stitcher, ImageModeler and Movimento (above) products, which all simplify the transition from 2D to 3D.

BD: So will you be integrating Realviz technologies into other Autodesk products?

MP: We anticipate that certain elements will be equally appealing to customers of 3ds Max and Maya as they would be to Revit and Autocad customers, so, yes, most definitely.

BD: And, with Kynogon's Kynapse, you now have another middleware solution to offer Autodesk customers.

MP: This is very exciting to our games customers and since we announced this acquisition back at the Game Developers Conference in February, we've had many inquiries from top game studios because they're seeing the value of integrating these core middleware building blocks with their own technology. How a character evolves and interacts with its environment is a critical part of game play across many genres, so there is a lot of interest around our solutions.

We entered the games middleware market over a year ago with the introduction of HumanIK. HumanIK is a realtime full body IK system that helps breathe life into digital characters, including the athletes in EA's sports lineup, as well as into Altair, the horses and other characters in Assassin's Creed from Ubisoft.

One of the things we have observed is the importance of tightly integrating AI and animation to produce believable characters that can interact realistically with their environments. Kynapse is a very sophisticated AI solution; one of the things it does is bring spatial awareness to characters so they can find their way around the large scale, dynamic environments that exist in current games. This is essential for game play. Path-finding and line of sight analysis used to be relatively easy but with the scale of current game levels and destructible worlds, using an advanced off-the-shelf solution like Kynapse helps developers focus on what makes their game unique, and that's why it has been so successful.

BD: Are there synergies between asset creation and middleware or are developers looking at these as very different problems?