MotionBuilder is still heavily used for onset capture. Sony Pictures Imageworks utilized it on Beowulf, and it's being tapped for Avatar's realtime cinematography and lighting elements. Courtesy of Autodesk.

BD: And what about Autodesk's involvement in stereoscopic moviemaking?

MP: When you think about a pure post-production world, stereoscopy is a big thing. So we have more going on in 3ds Max and Maya to do the production of stereo.

BD: And what are the production needs?

MP: There are two things. One is to create stereoscopic images in 3-D, so we've done a lot of work for some of our customers with new features. That aspect is to ease the process of stereoscopic creation. Now the manipulation of the stereo as a concept -- how you design the depth or add depth to your design or how you actually edit and make all your corrections in the context of a 3-D movie -- that's further out. Everybody's starting to understand the problem and not even think about the solution. But we've developed this concept of stereo grading, because, we believe, when you can start manipulating the depth early in the pipeline process and use the depth as an element of the story, just like color, then you have to carry those decisions all the way through and be able to grade and fine tune. And we're looking at this process holistically. We're starting to understand what we need to deliver as a set of tools for people to do stereo management.

So stereoscopy hits all of our products: Lustre, Smoke and Flame. You know, some of the tricks of camera mapping that we used to rely heavily on, don't work anymore. So there are a myriad of projects and features going on right now to actually address all of those problems.

The Mudbox customer is looking for added texturing in the popular modeling package.

BD: What about making animation better and easier and improving workflow?

MP: This is another overarching theme. In the film pipeline, whether it's to put animation in the hands of people who are not animators, like architects, or story development people, we have many reasons to make animation easier. And easier doesn't mean simplistic. They want few controls, pre-defined behavior but still a pretty fine level of reality. The high-end people want more control; the other people want less control. So this is the way we approach it in terms of levels of controls. One way to make 3D easy is to make it understandable and one way to make 3D understandable is to make it behave more like the real world. And this is where our assimilation technology comes in with our [Maya] Nucleus unified simulation framework and the introduction of the first module, nCloth. So we are driving a lot more simulation and Nucleus is one example when it comes to cloth or hair or fluids. But we also do a lot of light simulation for people doing lighting previs or architects doing shadow-casting studies. You basically tell the software where you are in the world and what time of season and we take care of realistic lighting.

And we have a lot going on in the backend of the pipeline in terms of sharing the same color management system, sharing 3D geometries through FBX, sharing media, of course, and we're driving a lot of integration between Maya and Toxik because those two products go hand-in-hand in CG pipelines.

BD: And what about Mudbox 3D? There was a lot of concern when the Skymatter acquisition was announced last year about it remaining a standalone product.

MP: Although we can't get into any details yet, we can say that, yes, it will be a standalone and that we are also looking at better integration with Max and Maya. What the Mudbox customer is looking for is to add texturing into the package. Not only to do with the shape but also the color. So we have a good history for these things with our customers, and there is a lot of hardware acceleration that is going on as well. And Andrew Camenisch, Dave Cardwell and Tibor Madjar are in Toronto now and are working on the next version of Mudbox, and we're starting to see with them how we can help them impact more products.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.