Economic troubles that have curtailed Hollywood production have had a negative impact on the post-production software manufacturers. Their chief customers – animation and F/X houses – have seen less work coming through their doors, and the hard times have meant these shops have invested in few new systems lately. But some manufacturers see the silver lining in the current storm clouds.

‘These are times that really test which companies have lasting value,’ says Paul Lypaczewski, GM of Montreal-headquartered systems and software developer Discreet, and executive VP of Autodesk, Discreet’s parent company. ‘We are using this as an opportunity to consolidate, to make sure we have our focus and our vision.’

Discreet recently acquired the software product line from Media 100, based in Marlboro, MA. Included with these products is Cleaner 5.1, encoding software that delivers interactive streaming video and audio to websites across the Macintosh and Windows platforms.

Of the acquisition’s significance, Lypaczewski explains, ‘Streaming is a fundamental part of the content process pipeline. There are strong interdependencies between the way content is created and how it gets streamed. The streaming products will allow us to come out of this storm at the right trajectory and hit the ground running.’

Lypaczewski says that despite the company’s push to the Web, it hasn’t neglected its editing and F/X software. Discreet’s updated combustion 2 animation and compositing system, for example, boasts an artist interface without dropdown tabs or menus. It also offers a 3D working environment with a fully vector-based painting system and particle F/X capabilities found in the company’s higher-end tools.

Toronto-headquartered Alias|Wavefront is ushering in the new year with a new plug-in for its flagship Maya 3D animation and F/X software. Labeled RTA (Real Time Authoring), the plug-in allows artists to add behaviors and artificial intelligence to content created in Maya, and then publish it on a Shockwave 3D Player. Also this year, A|W will ship its new optional integrated renderer plug-in mental ray, developed with Berlin’s mental images.

The company is also celebrating five new patents awarded to its software developer/scientists. The patents are for systems and methods relating to: generating planar maps of 3D surfaces; producing fluid-like animation with a Navier-Stokes solver; modeling light reflected from anisotropic and diffracting surfaces; curving through points residing on underlying geometries in a 3D space; and for curve and surface modeling based on point cloud data.

Maya product manager Shai Hinitz anticipates more elaborate F/X being produced at boutique facilities.

‘Whereas those shots used to be reserved for the very elite in our industry, such as Disney and ILM, we are now seeing the same caliber of work done in much smaller shops,’ he says.

For software systems to succeed these days they must be as open-ended as possible. Michel Besner, president of Montreal software developer Kaydara, sees great potential for the company’s FiLMBOX system, which encompasses animation production, motion capture and online, as a complementary solution to 3ds max, Maya and NewTek LightWave.

‘Our focus is to target specific areas of the production pipeline by making these elements better and faster to run, especially for character animation,’ says Besner.

Kaydara’s mandate is to offer user-friendly software for animators looking to do realistic CG characters, similar to what was seen in the recent feature Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

‘We are seeing growth in character animation in games, TV and film,’ Besner says. ‘People are realizing that they don’t always necessarily have the top animators they would like, but they still need to produce the content they want, and FiLMBOX makes it a lot easier.’

According to Besner, the economic downturn has actually increased post shops’ interest in FiLMBOX due to its production efficiency.

Montreal-headquartered animation software provider Softimage is currently shipping its XSI v.2.0 3D creative content package, which it believes gives it the leg-up on its competitors, some of which launched their ‘next generation’ software as long ago as three years.

‘We have the advantage of going deeper and learning from their mistakes,’ says XSI marketing manager Michael David Smith.

XSI v.2.0 is being marketed at film, broadcast and gaming companies, and according to Smith, Softimage has been able to keep its developmental pace high despite the economy. The new XSI features a fully integrated compositor and built-in film-quality F/X, and is fully scriptable with a graph-based interface.

‘We’ve eliminated a huge amount of time and hassle in the production pipeline,’ says Smith. ‘Traditionally you have to go back-and-forth between another compositor and your 3D until you get it right. We’ve set it up so the passes can be composited automatically and the artist or director can see the results immediately and make the tweaks before anything leaves the 3D package.’

He adds that all the 3D animation tools, lighting tools, expressions, scripting, and other features are built into the product. Both deluxe and standard editions are available.

-www.discreet.com

-www.aliaswavefront.com

-www.kaydara.com

-www.softimage.com