The Thrills of 3D
Kunal Rupera | 01 November 2006
| The name AutoCAD is synonymous to Computer Aided Design. From civil engineers to architects and interior designers, anyone who understands 2D design is familiar with AutoCAD from Autodesk. After having established a name in the 2D space, Autodesk made great strides in 3D modeling and design with acquisitions of companies like Discreet, Revit and more recently Alias. The acquisition of Alias has made Autodesk the market leader in 3D modeling and animation technologies. Michel Besner of Autodesk shares with CHIP how they plan to revolutionize nextgeneration 3D graphics in games and movies. CHIP: Games like Crysis from Crytek have more realistic visuals and game play. Movies are also making similar strides—we partook of the mind-blowing visual effects in Jackson’s King Kong. What role do you think software plays in this? MB: Today, with the help of technology, we can make movies and games that are extremely photorealistic. Whether it is making a movie or developing a game, there is one common thread for all our customers—telling a story. Making a movie is all about narating a tale, presenting a commercial is all about selling a product. When you design a building, for instance, you want to communicate to the customer what you want to build and software like Wiz or Max help you convey that. It is an interactive story-telling process—our stable of software helps our clients create characters, adventures and breathtaking visuals to tell stories through movies or games belonging to different platforms. One of the taglines of Autodesk is ‘Ideas Realized’. We play a role right from the onset—help our clients create conceptual design, the story board and content—all the way up to compositing and finishing a shot or a game. Essentially, we help them realize their ideas and visions. CHIP: Technological advancements in hardware occur at a rapid pace whereas the software industry generally has to catch up. Is your software ready for next-generation cutting edge hardware? MB: The production process has become more and more complex. Our customers are pushing the boundaries on quality and the total volume of content has also increased. So the requirements of managing data complexity are more and therefore it is essential for us to provide the right tools. With the latest versions of Max and Maya, we have full 64-bit support. We have also improved on multi-threading and multi-core support, thereby increasing the performance levels as well as better memory management. Thus, we are in a position to use all of the latest top-of-the-line hardware available in the market. Today, there are many ways in which rendering can be performed. From real-time rendering used in games to pre-rendered high-definition quality movies, customers can use our tools to output different file formats in different mediums. It is all about openness, so the customers can choose from the different sets of options available and use them to achieve what they have visualized. Also, game developers are looking to leverage new technologies like those found in next-generations consoles such as the Xbox 360, the upcoming PlayStation 3, etc. It is all about multiple cores, parallel processing, pixel shading—there are many different techniques developed that use hardware to output best looking games, for example. We are a part of that process and our products integrate new technologies to produce better looking games or movies. CHIP: Does Autodesk provide end-to-end solutions? MB: We provide multiple offerings to our customers from a wide array of solutions. From tools to creating your layout, story board all the way to modeling and compositing, and color grading. We have tools that work well together and integrate themselves well. We also provide strong services to our customers. Whether you need help in training your employees or creating a project or better customer services— we offer all of these apart from just offering cutting edge software. CHIP: Can you elaborate a little on the FBX standard and how it helps in community building? MB: The Indian market is a key area for offshore development, contract work and co-production. We have a wide user base all around the world and even here in India. They can be great assets to help companies in India staff up for the projects outsourced to them and to deliver the projects on time, and on a specified budget. Organizations in different parts of the world work on different kinds of software to achieve their objectives, so the use of a standard is essential. Standards like FBX not only ensure inter-product compatibility for Autodesk products but it also helps other 3D software companies standardize on a file format to ensure inter-product operability. Thus users can also contribute using this standard. FBX is a file format that Autodesk owns but everybody has access to it. It is completely free, which means end users don’t have to pay for it. We also have a SDK (software development kit) for thirdparty developers wherein they can add support for FBX free of cost. Any company that decides to support this format will be able to integrate Autodesk’s solutions with their solutions. Autodesk has a huge committee comprising artists. So we can get the right person at the right place and the right time for a project. One of our new initiatives is a new community portal called the Area dedicated to our customer base. Customers can learn, and exchange knowledge and data to perform better and be more successful in their projects. CHIP: How does Autodesk contribute to physics in games? MB: We have clients working hard to provide photorealistic games and movies. We do provide different physics solutions—for example, in 3DStudio Max, we have a physics engine called Reactor and we have similar solutions for Maya as well. Some of the solutions are bundled along with the software—Reactor is one such example. There are other solutions that need to be bought separately or licensed separately but they can be integrated with the software. CHIP: What are your views about open source software? MB: Open source software has carved a niche for itself—there are communities that have adopted open source; there is also the professional market space which consists of tools built and well supported for businesses. If a customer invests millions of dollars in making a game or a movie, he can always rely on a partner who will be there to support him. In open source there is no scope for any support because if you face a problem with an open source product, you need the help of experts to fix it. So most companies that are serious about their business prefer to work with partners like us and rely on an internal development team to deliver their finished product. Open source is a fun place to learn all about the nuances of 3D but if you want to know about the market, Max and Maya are the biggest tools used professionally. CHIP: Will the flagship product of Autodesk, AutoCAD convert to 3D? MB: Autodesk truly believes that customers should be able to visualize their ideas. Clearly 3D is one component that shows a lot of value and promise in many ways. So many areas of our products including AutoCAD do have increased 3D capabilities. CHIP: Would it make sense to incorporate virtual reality in 3D graphics to provide a customer better visual experience? MB: Specialized environments with virtual reality have limited market penetration as of now. So we have not yet delved into it. |
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