Autodesk at Siggraph 13
July 23, 2013, Anaheim, CA—Autodesk held a press conference at Siggraph, even though they are not participating this year o n the exhibit floor. The industry is changing with more production and higher budgets. As a technology provider, Autodesk is trying to meet the demands for more visual effects while helping to hold costs down. The cost increases are much higher than the increased budgets, so the producers and directors are trying to make do with fewer or simpler shots.
The industry is evolving, with assets from the TV and movie production are moving to games and consoles and the gaming complexity is going up very rapidly. To help these issues, they are trying to support standard flows that are easily interoperable across tools and platforms. The first efforts are in data exchange, where they are supporting Open Data including rich data and metadata. All of the Maya tools will support these data transfer standards.
One reason for not participating in Siggraph, is that most of their product releases will be later in Q3, so there is little reason to attend a show to demonstrate older versions of tools. Their focus is on the new initiatives and partners. They are working to help reduce complexity, which can lead to improved quality. The move to virtual production tools and hybrid reality capture and modeling requires that they open Maya to other tool flows.
Rob Hoffmann announced a free viewer, FBX Review, for Windows 7 and 8 for sharing assets and animation. The use modes available are full animation, wireframes, and shading views. The viewer supports a wide range of open 3D file formats, from popular digital creation formats like .fbx, .3ds, and .obj to .dxf. Reviewers can choose to view assets with various shading options, animations, cameras or lighting options in the Microsoft DirectX 11enabled viewport. Supported viewing options include: static and dynamic tessellation, displacement and vector displacement maps, skin deformations and animation, real-time shadow maps, reflection maps, light and ambient occlusion maps, image based lighting, and ground and sky ambient color.
Another new initiative is to put all its Media & Entertainment (M&E) support and learning content for its 2014 product line to be available live and it is now available under Creative Commons (CC) licensing; that equates to 20,000 pages of documentation, 70 videos and 140 downloadable 3D asset files. This change simplifies the use and repurposing of the content, especially for educational institutions. Eventually all of the Autodesk content will be under this licensing system.
The Autodesk Knowledge Network is initially implementing Creative Commons licensing for the media and entertainment industry, but also plans to publish product help materials across the company under the license. In addition, Autodesk intends to place its Knowledge Base and Discussion Forums, as well as past and future training content from Autodesk University under the Creative Commons model. Once digital content has been released to Creative Commons, it can be modified, remixed and shared globally.
Earlier this year, Autodesk jumped on board to help maximize digital creativity, sharing and innovation by investing at the Innovator level in Creative Commons, joining Creator level corporate donors such as Google and eBay; numerous foundations including: the Bill & Melinda Gates; William and Flora Hewlett; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Alfred P. Sloan; as well of thousands of committed individual
contributors.
Creative Commons is part of Autodesk’s ongoing support of students’ pursuit of careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Today’s students face a challenging job market, and Autodesk’s goal is to ensure the next generation of designers, engineers and digital artists have great training and free access to the same software that professionals use every day.
To improve user interfaces, they partnered with Leap Motion to integrate Leap’s 3-D controller into Maya for the 2014 release. Avinash Pabir described the controller as small USB plug-in dongle that generates a control space with resolution down to 1/100 mm. The control space encompasses a volume that is 2 feet above the controller, 2 feet wide on each side covering a 150° angle and 2 feet deep on each side , covering a 120° to enable the use of hands as object controllers. The $79.99 controller is enabled through apps that are available from their Airspace apps store. www.leapmotion.com
Leap Motion plug-in for Maya 2014
Other new capabilities for the creation tools will be released later this year. These new functions will offer improved functionality and will be featured in virtual release events.
