Re: Why does AD bother with desktop Compositors?

[Don Nash] "The 3d geometry handling is something I think could help AD SELL Combustion to a large percentage of Max users, since you already have such good integration already. That's the angle I'm coming from. You can already use CB's paint tools to do live texture painting in Max...it even has a nifty UV template. You can re-texture an object in CB without having to re-render in Max. AD never properly marketed that. Even now, if they would stop making it SO hard to find Combustion on their website, and if they'd show some decent demonstration videos of these integration features on both CB's and Max's site, they'd start selling a considerable higher percentage of seats than they currently are."

I don't think having FBX import would make it more appealing to Max users, it would make it more appealing to select users and select uses. Plus this would require a serious core rewrite and I don't think there is enough need for that. AE only supports 3D Layers from PSD files, and even there it is limited in what you can do with it in AE. I am very interested to see what will happen with all the non-Photoshop CS products given the fact that Adobe has said its sales were far below expectation.

[Don Nash] "That's the other thing about Toxic...they specifically target the Maya userbase instead of Max's. That too tells me they have no intention whatsoever of making Toxic the successor to Combustion."

Part of that, I believe, is because both applications have Python as a scripting base. Meaning you can easily code up the same tool to do the export from Maya and the import in Toxik. Let all the bugs get worked out between Maya and Toxik's new precomp system, and who knows what the future will bring with Max and Toxik. Heck anyone with enough scripting knowledge could probably do the same with Max, it is just a matter of understanding exactly what the precomp is and how it needs to be written.

-Eric