Autodesk now owns 3ds Max , Maya and XSI !!!

Only lightwave left to go, and LW is generally considered second tier to the other three. I remember Maya being in trouble almost 9 years ago and wasn't surprised when they were bought up. There had been rumours for years.

Autodesk owning all three can't be that good though :(.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=12022457&siteID=123112

Ack ... what happened to the other thread. We got it on topic by bringing GTA into the fold ;)

That's a shame. I hated Autodesk.

I just upgraded my copy of XSI. I do feel somewhat cheated by this announcement... but I guess there are worse things in the world. It'll work as a solid tool for the next few years.

I don't like autodesk either, they have always been like the EA of 3D. Still 3ds max and maya are both great products and neither suffered much. Just not sure what they will do with three of them. At least Softimage CAT is likely to remain available for 3dsmax. Wasn't sure what would happen when Softimage bought out the Character Animation Toolkit which is MUCH better than character studio for game animations.

Modo

I hope they continue to copy the best features of each. It doesn't have to be a bad thing.

I like Lightwave, so this news doesn't particularly bother me.

I'm guessing that they plan at some point to create a new super duper 3D software, combining technology from all three, that will eventually take over. I'm not talking next year, but maybe within the next 10 or so.

It doesn't make sense for one company to develop and sell three directly competing software.

Blender is looking spiffy though, they won't be buying that anytime soon. :)

They don't realy need to develop an uber 3D app now...why put all that money and time into developing one, who is left to seriously compete with? No one...

Well, it would presumably cut their maintainance costs considerably once done.

Yeah I have always been interested in Blender since it was a commercial app doing the rounds at the CG conventions back in the mid 90's. It's a real shame they don't rework the UI and get regular native OS file system dialogue boxes. I go nuts just trying to navigate my HD in blender before I even touch the modeling tools.

Your also forgetting the mighty blender :)

They should buy blender. And lock it away in vault somewhere.

Autodesk internal discussion about Softimage ;)

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7UWImpG54

Thanks Mustang, that video is brilliant....loved it. :)

Excellent video, Autodesk has been really a PITA recently. They even ruined OpenGL3. And they think that nobody will notice. Fortunately ARB has been able to get over Autodesks corruption as AMD started to implement OpenGL3. My advise is: don't ever buy anything from Autodesk, Adobe, Microsoft.

meh, OpenGL sucks thanks to too many cooks spending countless years fighting over specs letting D3D leave them in the dust. Most industry people see GL3 as a huge disappointment being little more than minor update barely deserving a 2.5.

There's a long article about the mess that is GL over at toms hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

I was surprised that XSI didn't go for all that much, $35 million.

XSI had some pretty innovative stuff for rigging and animation in XSI ICE from the guy that wrote CAT for 3dsmax.

Mustang:

awesome, but you owe me a new keyboard over the "viewport cube" line at about 3 minutes! :)

Every time they thouch this scene from The Dawnfall, it's always something brilliant! XD

I like the RA3/DRM one.

http://www.luxology.com/modcast/audio.aspx?id=57