Six foot under

Luis,

You have seen Mudbox for the Mac, Maya 2010 including Maya Composite for 3500$,Smoke for the Mac for 15k$ (and there is more stuff to come). We are determined to bring the tools of the pro at very affordable prices. We started this awhile back with combustion, but it did not meet the success that was needed to keep on investing in it and it had its own set of architectural issues as well. We know it created heartburn for many people who invested and believed in this application and we've kept it available and cheap as long as we could for its loyal followers. I stand by what i told you back in San Diego, our product portfolio is evolving to a brand new level !!

Wish you all a great 2010 too !

ahh, c'mon, Mark. "Maya Composite" is the abandoned Toxic project, no? Do we get to see "Max Composite" in 2010 when you officially drop Combustion?

"combustion, but it did not meet the success that was needed"
did that happen before or after Autodesk laid off the development team? (around 2003, if i remember)

In my more jaded moments, I'd describe the Autodesk M&E product development process as:
1)find innovative software company (discreet, Kinetix)
2)buy company
3)release innovative product
4)ignore product
5)throw in some 3rd party add-ons and call in a new "version"
repeat 4 & 5.


...and if this post seems inflammatory, well, I guess it is ;>)

-jeff

Wow. This post brought back memories. The non sequitur happy talk at Autodesk never changes, does it.

I could offer some simple advice like "show a commitment to your own products BEFORE expecting people to buy it" but why? If Autodesk hasn't learned this by now...

____________________________________
Eric Susch
http://www.LetsKnit2gether.com
http://www.EricSusch.com
Follow me on twitter @EricSusch

"Marc Petite....he told me, that Combustion would evolve to a new level, in 2 or 3 years."

Maybe the new level was high up on the shelf of unused/dead autodesk products..

I love combustion, the more I use other products the more I realize how advanced it was at the time.. Nothing has come close to the features for it's price point, I still use it everyday..

But I have moved on to using AE more and more, and it is refreshing to work with a product that is being actively developed (although the UI is poo and c* still completely destroys it for compositing)..

I had big hopes for toxik, but it just doesn't fit my workflow as well as combustion..

Smoke seems closer to what I need, I may even see if I can boot MacOS in a window under Win7 and play with the demo... But I've invested too much in my PC/Max/Combustion system and software to suddenly jump ship to mac (although all the post houses I go to use macs)..

Et tu, Autodesk?

-Matthew

I guess there is not much i can do to defend Autodesk's name here, the teams who are building the products are as passionate as you guys are and most of them are industry veterans. We're as disappointed as you when something does not work but we try to minimize the impact and move forward. Fail, fast forward, you know the drill... As i said, we are approaching desktop compositing differently, Maya Composite (btw not abandonned at all!!!) and Smoke for the Mac are two interesting steps,there will be more. We care !

I believe into low cost accessible software, 3500$ now gets you Maya Unlimited + a very good compositing solution plus a complete matchmoving package and rendering.

Maya Composite is getting better by the release and you should keep an eye on it just in case, it does LUT and a lot of the other important things. It is worth 3500$ on its own and even if it comes with Maya now you don't have to use it ;-)

Smoke on the Mac ain't a desktop compositing product but still, it's rather cheap at 15k for a complete finishing solution. Flare in its own class as an assistant to flame has been priced very agressively to help flame customers grow capacity, 1/5th of the price of flame gets you the full Flame creative toolset.

-mp

PS: Just a precision, Autodesk released 3d studio in 1990 and 3ds max in 1996 way before the acquisition of Discreet in 1999.

Marc...how can Autodesk expect a product to sell when it does it's very best to hide it in the cellar? Honestly...the colossal development gap (of time) between C4 and C2008 told everyone in the industry to stay away...it's dead.

Autodesk made no effort to promote it in any way, since what...version 2? It has been relatively hard to find even on AD's own website, compare to it's other applications.

If Toxic hadn't been so narrowly focused on film compositing, but instead was designed and developed to carry on Combustion's toolset and expand upon it, then instead of having 2 dead desktop compositing applications, you'd have one very compelling application.

Yet, I will always suspect that the System's management personnel had a lot to do with ensuring that never happened. A robust 2nd generation Combustion would be perceived as a very real threat to the uber-expensive systems line. That, my friends...to one degree or another, is why both Combustion and Toxic have been ordered to fall upon their swords.

Desktop hardware has come too far, too fast to justify the cost structure of the High-End systems, for a large percentage of the market. Therefore the Desktop line had to be the ones to go...in order to maintain the more profitable line.

One thing I think Autodesk is overlooking...this hearburn Marc talks about...it's not just a temporary condition. It's a permanent stain...of distrust and disdain. These customers have invested far more than just the cost of the software itself. They've invested countless hours of training and skill in the given software.

Instead of being able to build upon that investment...they are FORCED to abandon it entirely. Don't see too many studios waiting to get their hands on a Flame after getting burned in this regard.

Marc,

Thank you for your reply.
Smoke for the Mac is one of the best news i heard from Autodesk, for a long time. And the price seems a good price, to the point of view of Autodesk and the client. And i'm talking about the price, because the only (big) mistake Autodesk done with C* was the drop out to 1000 eur, still in version 2, when it cost 5000 eur when it was released. You can imagine what i heard from many people that bought C* for 5000 eur.. I remember being a beta-tester for Combustion 3 and posting a thread in the C* Beta Forum, about the price drop out, wondering if that was a good move, for Autodesk. Someone replied that it was strange a customer complaining about the drop-out of the price of a product. What i told then, was that if Combustion didn't sell the way that was intended, would Autodesk have the resources to continue to invest in its development? Time, unfortunately, gave me reason.

I know Marc, that you were not in that time, in the position you have now in Autodesk. Probably you didn't had nothing to do with C*. But i can imagine what happened. Combustion 2 was the top notch application in the desktop by that time. It had a new particle system, a wonderfull new text engine (still is!), a schematic view, among other things. It was a child of the state-of-art IFFFS's systems, incorporating some of their engines and a similar workflow. It was The Composition package in the desktop! It was sexy! I remember going to IBC and see Combustion live demos, with equal prime-time than Max, or the systems. AE was far away. I remember talking to a guy from Adobe in his booth at IBC and he telling me that AE was a good ad-on to C*! So, with all this mouth-to-mouth speaking wonders about C*, i can imagine some MBA exec of Autodesk, in his suit, with is education at Harvard, or Yale, but with no feeling to this industry, must have thought, that if C* would be at the same price range of AE, Autodesk could win the desktop video compositing / mograph market. It would become the new Photoshop for video! I strongly believe that this was the plan.

What he miss is that the peolpe who used C*, already worked in other video professional systems. They were not graphic designers that evolved from Photoshop to motion. The graphic designers, that represent the new generation in video, would not adapt to the Combustion's UI with the same ease that they do with AE's UI. And that was the big mistake with Combustion. You could have drop the price a little, but not that much. Suddenly, Combustion was not so sexier.. And didn't sell so much more. Autodesk lost the interest and pull the plug slowly..

I believe in simple answers to complex to be situations. I don't quite agree that the system's guys were against C* before the price drop out. The original idea of Combustion was born at Discreet Logic inside the systems team. With the new price, why release technology to a cheap product that doesn't sell as expected and it's indeed quite good and have a user base that is similar in terms of cultural aproach, to the system's user base and could in fact damage the sells of the higher systems? I understand that.

But as you told Marc, sometimes there are bad decisions, but things must move forward. I do bad decisions everyday. And i try to learn with them. What i don't understand is the lack of action when Autodesk discovered the mistake in lowering the price of C*, in version 3. What i would have done was very simple. I would release a Combustion v4 with a lot of new features, or a new product and raise the price again. I know the answer seems simple, almost childest, but that's the way i think.

Autodesk already had a user base for C* and among all the SW houses had / have the technology and the power to do that. I understand that sometimes the demands of the customers are not quite aligned with the corporate direction. It's business after all. But not speaking to, or hear their clients is a bad sign. And Autodesk have done that. The answers you had in this thread, are cold, to say the least. But they are fair. They express the frustration of waiting and waiting for a new release of Combustion, full of features that it should have for years. We all believed that a so well done product, couldn't die. Many were willing to pay more for a new release, because Combustion always got the things done!

With your answer, you are admiting the end of Combustion and i will move on. Nuke seems a good platform in terms of price and technology but I'm too excited to see the Smoke in Mac. It will be very difficult to leave behind the wonderfull technology of Autodesk, that finaly arrives in the desktop! But why only now? These are the things that i don't understand. I don't think it was because of the platform. It must be again the corporate vision.

Again Marc, thank you for your reply to this thread. To me it means that Autodesk is listening. And that is very important to the customers and partners.


http://www.animotic.com

Along the lines of juggling the prices as mentioned in the earlier post is the confusing product placement of Toxik for instance. At first it seemed poised to pick up the market that Combustion held but it was a little feature poor and kind of specialized. Autodesk started doing some good work to remedy this. For a while there it looked like the main options between AE and Flame were Toxik, Nuke and Fusion. Bundling Toxik in with Maya and abandoning it as a standalone sends the signal that Autodesk is not that interesting in aggressively developing the product. Where have I heard this before? It's a great freebie that comes with Maya. For some 3D people maybe that is a boon. For people whose main business is compositing (like me) it's a turn off. Like I said Autodesk is fickle. It seems the marketing is done on a whim rather than following a real plan. It's unfortunate as there is some great technology there that I have spent a lot of time learning.

To me the biggest problem is the nagging feeling that I don't know if I can trust Autodesk to stay commited to their products.

I freelance as a flame/smoke op, but I also have my own setup based around Final Cut with Combustion as the primary compositing app. I have truly tried to stay commited to C* despite its obvious slow death. Using C* 2008 on mac has been a less than pleasant experience. Trying to find workaround to stupid bugs so that my clients wouldn't realize that I was using software that never ought to have been released.

So during the past six months I have been in agony trying to decide what to do. Should I move to AE? Doesn't seem like a good enough compositor to me. I like scehmatic/nodes. How about Nuke? A really good compositor, but I do more online/finishing rahter than heavy effects.

Then one glorious day the answer to all my questions is released. Smoke on mac!!! Exactly what I need! The pricetag is hefty compared to nuke and AE, but its still my wet dream coming true.

But what will this do to the market? I think many of the big post houses will buy a bunch of Smoke on mac seats. This means that it should have a strong user base. But this is in direct competition to the more expensive versions. Is this Autodesks new plan? To move completely into this new price range? Try to sell more copies but at a lower price? Is the market for this kind of specialized product in this price segment really that big? Will the revenue be enough for Autodesk to keep pushing it forward? It wasn't for C*, was it?

I truly hope so. But I'm not yet convinced to the point of betting $15k on it... So here I am, still in agony... Should I go with AE or Nuke or live the dream with Smoke on mac and hope I never have to wake up...

Stephan

Many of us are in the same boat. In any case I think if you are in to heavy duty compositing Nuke looks to be the product to beat. It's definitely not for everyone. I've been doing this a long time and learning it seems a bit daunting. For Shake users it looks like a pretty natural progression. That said it entirely depends on what type of work you do. I'm considering Smoke on Mac to some degree mainly because it is a very good toolset with a familiar interface and has brand name recognition. If that name can help pull work in it might be worth it. I rent space from a larger production / edit house and am talking to them about whether it could be worth the investment. My first choice though will probably be to have the most powerful tool for the job (Nuke from what I've researched) and not to be tied to one physical system. Switching from Flint to Combustion showed me how nice it is to have the option do jobs at home, on a laptop etc.

Fusion looks great. Feature-wise it actually has a lot of stuff I appreciate in Combustion. Particles, a timeline. It's just looking like Nuke is getting the kind of industry acceptance that is going to make it a big name. ILM, Framestore, Weta etc. have all committed to it. The demos on the Foundry site look fantastic. The interoperability with 3D, HDR, 3d tracking (in v6) etc. look very compelling. Fusion can do a lot of that but it is starting to look a little more like a niche player. I want a larger community with whatever I move to next. Either app can probably do far more than I'll ever ask of it. I mean Combustion still meets 95% of my needs and it's core technology is relatively ancient. But then again, so am I.

Just to throw a curve ball here, if you're looking for an alternative node-based compositor, there is a hidden compositor in the free open source 3D modeling program Blender. It has some surprising capabilities. I posted about this a while back, have a look here:

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/14/865056

All it requires is that you put some time into it, and think outside of the box, of course...