Autodesk buys Softimage - Long Live MayaMaxSoft

In the beginning of the summer the Autodesk/Maya/Max rep visited our studios just to say hi.  Our office is 40 minutes from the NH Offices of Autodesk and he was in the area.  Around the same time I received an email from our new Softimage rep who is head quartered in London.  I understand Reps move around a lot but this seemed very odd because our office is 50 minutes from AVID (parent company to Softimage) and we are a short 6 hour road trip to Montreal where Softimage is headquartered.  

So it now all makes sense 3D will soon be one happy family, or 3 brothers that fight all the time while their father AutoCAD tells them that when he was their age there were only lines and not solids and they only had 2 dimensions

I think Newtek may be a bit upset because the article mentions that Softimage was the last major independent package out there.  All the products have always had their followers, strengths, weaknesses, and vertical markets.

Rumor has it that Autodesk is also looking at Houdini and Blender.  But Blender is shareware and they are not sure how to buy it.  Blender may become that cousin on the Brady Bunch that is brought in to show how cute the show is after the rest of the kids grow up.  And so few people use Houdini and its so expensive that Autodesk plans to repackage their regular MayaMaxSoft with an install code that makes the program randomly disappear from your computer.

Long Live MayaMaxSoft

Softimage Press Release

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

MontrealGazette

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=3bad0262-e86a-4ac3-98b3-6345b62a96d0