Studio Maya

Discreet bought out Alias just recently, (he news of it was everywhere) but as of yet i havn't heard anything about merging the software (they did say they would continue to support each as seperate programes for the time being though), or anything about it being gcalled 'Studio Maya' which sounds kind lame

Ok, first of all, autodesk discussion hadn't even begun early last year when this maya tour was held, secondly this discussion has been spawned all over the net from the ridiculous to the absurd.

So, I know that it's complete speculation on their half... in other words "a fabrication inverse to the truth", whether they're pulling your leg, or they had theirs pulled. I mean, for starters, think about it. There's no viable financial or market gain from this, let alone the sheer logistics involved in application merging. They would lose market share from people swapping to competitors. I can say I have it on a bit more solid foundation that this is not the plan than from the word of college staff. There are pruning plans in terms of staffing, but there's also massive funding plans for r&d which would put that staff number up (eg, get rid of marketing, get more r&d for actual development).

I spoke to the Australasian Discreet rep last week - there are no plans to integrate the two products at this time. They will both be marketed and supported individually for the forseeable future.

The CGC staff must be full of crap then. Anyway I like to see it merge for the sake of employment.

What I'd like to know is what is whether this merged app is going to work on a real operating system (i.e. unix and/or unix based OSs). I suspect it will because so many film studios are using Linux on the desktop now, but afaik Max has never been designed to be portable whereas Maya has (it was developep on IRIX and ported to Windows). I wonder how much code will come from each app, or if they are starting from scratch but taking the best features from each package.

They won't be easy programs to merge at all imho, and unless they embed both MaxScript and MEL a huge amount of work done by 3rd parties will become obsolete [:(]

Sounds sus, merging both products would be a bad idea. Each application has their strength and weaknesses, best to have a choice between the two and even maybe cross-application importing/exporting maybe ... who knows.