Alias|Wavefront caught its competitors off guard at last year’s NAB by dropping the price of its Maya Complete package to US$1,999 (from US$7,500) and Maya Unlimited to US$6,999 (from US$16,000) in time for the show. With production budgets tightening and customers restricted in terms of how much they can spend on gear updates, A|W saw the discount as the best way of broadening its Maya user base.

Bob Bennett, GM, product development for the Toronto animation/F/X software provider, says the strategy has paid off.

‘Some of our competitors were hoping the news would not be good,’ says Bennett, who adds that Maya’s ‘shipments are way up. Maya is being used by groups of people we never would have reached before and we have continued to be profitable. Our sales cycles are shorter… in no small part as a result of these changes.’

Maya will have a significant presence on the NAB2003 showroom floor at A|W’s booth along with those of partnering companies. A|W will also have a shiny new Oscar statuette for scientific and technical achievement to show off (see p.19), as well as partial bragging rights to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Spider-Man, the two highest-grossing effects-driven films of 2002. The software is currently being used on the highly anticipated Marvel comic book movie adaptations X2 (the sequel to X-Men) and The Hulk.

Bennett says A|W plans to emphasize Maya’s versatility.

‘[We have aimed at] making it work better with Macromedia Flash, and in other markets that means opening up the rendering API so that a production company can add their own renderer to Maya,’ he explains.

Given that high-end effects-driven film and TV production has stalled, if not declined, Maya has meanwhile been popularly used in the booming gaming market on titles including Star Wars Rogue Leader and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Areas of strong diversification also include industrial design, education and the sales of learning tools such as instructional Maya DVDs.

Following A|W’s price drop, Montreal’s Softimage cut the price of Softimage|3D, its 3D character animation and F/X software (US$2,995 to US$1,495), but has pretty much held the line on V.3.0 of its XSI software, which starts at US$6,750, and which is marketed at the high end.

Softimage managing director Michael Stojda expects NAB attendees to be looking more at the attributes of the new generation of software than the price tag.

‘I think people are looking at the overall value,’ he says. ‘If you are going to grow in sophistication and work under the same time constraints, you need a newer technology – one that can make you more productive. That’s where XSI fits in.’

At NAB2003, Softimage will primarily display XSI at the booth of parent company Avid Technology. It says XSI v.3.0 creates faster, with higher-quality images than previous versions. Stojda reports that Quebec F/X house Hybride Technologies is using it on the feature Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and California’s Industrial Light + Magic has also incorporated the software into its pipeline. It is also used in Electronic Arts’ sports video games.

Softimage will also be singing the praises of Behavior, its behavioral animation system that began shipping at the end of 2002. Behavior is one of several software systems being widely used for crowd duplication scenes, as in a recreation of the Battle of Waterloo in the international copro mini Napoleon, accomplished by Hybride. Behavior will also be used in the forthcoming DreamWorks animated feature Sharkslayer to create teeming schools of fish.

Stojda says that in addition to new products, what Softimage will be promoting is ‘increased performance, additional interoperability between XSI and other Avid products, and some functionality that we’ve never seen before.’

Cross-town rival Discreet launched 3ds max 5, its 3D animation software, at SIGGRAPH 2002 at the moderate cost of US$3,495, and that price remains. However, the company is jumping into the price war, promoting the US$995 cost of combustion 2.1 (previous version US$4,995), its paint, animation and 3D compositing desktop software.

‘The re-pricing of combustion 2.1 was done to position the software properly with the community for which it was designed – professional content creators working on desktop PCs,’ says Discreet product marketing manager Maurice Patel.

Combustion and 3ds max were recently used to create the stunning animated title sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.

At NAB2003, in addition to presenting a new digital color grading system developed with exclusive technology partner Colorfront of Budapest, Discreet will hold the first public demo of cleaner XL for Windows, its new media mastering and streaming software. It will also be showing the upgrades inferno V.5, smoke V.5, fire V.5, flame V.8 and flint V.8.

‘Last year was a very challenging year,’ admits Patel. ‘The high-tech industries were badly hit. There was a worldwide recession that hit our industry.’

He goes on to say, however, that Discreet and its competitors have been soothed in recent months by ‘DVD sales and general box office. The market isn’t growing, which is why we have a good desktop initiative.’

-www.aliaswavefront.com

-www.softimage.com

-www.discreet.com