History
Autodesk Media and Entertainment is a division of Autodesk which provides animation and visual effects products and was formed by the combination of multiple acquisitions.
It originally created a San Francisco multimedia unit in 1996 under the name Kinetix to publish 3D Studio Max, a product developed by The Yost Group.
In August 1998, Autodesk announced plans to acquire Discreet Logic and its intent to combine that operation with Kinetix. At the time, it was its largest acquisition. The new business unit would be named Discreet.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences granted in 1998 an Academy Sci-Tech Award to Gary Tregaskis, Dominique Boisvert, Philippe Panzini and Andre LeBlanc, the original designers and developers of the core Discreet Logic products, Flame and Inferno.
The combined Discreet-branded product catalog then encompassed all the Discreet Logic products, including Flame, Flint, Fire, Smoke, Effect, Edit, and Kinetix's product, including 3D Studio Max, Lightscape, Character Studio.
Montreal-based Discreet Logic Inc had been founded in 1991 by former Softimage, Co. sales director Richard Szalwinski, to commercialize the 2D compositor Eddie, licensed from Australian production company Animal Logic. Eddie was the brainchild of Australian software engineer Bruno Nicoletti, who later founded well-known VFX software company The Foundry, in London, England. In 1992, Discreet Logic entered into a European distribution agreement with Softimage, and shifted its focus on Flame, one of the first software-only image compositing solution, developed by Australian Gary Tregaskis. Flame, which was originally named Flash, was first shown at NAB in 1992, ran on the Silicon Graphics platform, and became the company's flagship product.
In March 2005, Autodesk renamed its business unit Autodesk Media and Entertainment and discontinued the Discreet brand.
Through the years, Autodesk has augmented its Entertainment division with many other acquisitions. One of the most significant one was in October 2005, when Autodesk acquired Toronto-based Alias, and merged its animation business into its Entertainment division. Today, the division's main products are Maya, 3DS Max, Softimage, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, the game middleware Kynapse, and the creative finishing products Flame, Flare, Lustre, and Smoke.
Read more about this topic: Autodesk Media And Entertainment
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)