hi There
Michael Woodcox of Autodesk posted THis message at the VIZ Newsgroup
http://discussion.autodesk.com/WebX?....14@.f19723a#1
here is the Message copied verbatim
"From: Michael Woodcox
Date: Oct/28/03 - 18:09 (GMT)
Many of you have expressed concern over our somewhat vague design visualization product strategy. I would like to clarify our intent and in so doing perhaps shed some light on the underlying issues which have made it difficult for us to give proper guidance in a timely manner.
Over the years we have watched our customers evolve the way they use our technology for the purpose of seeing into the future life of a design project. At one time there where a handful of skilled users who were able to bridge the divide between art and technology to develop Visualizations. Now that design practice is moving ever more rapidly towards a 3d paradigm as evidenced by ADT, Revit, and Inventor, the expectations around visualization have expanded. Our customers range from those who demand the best and most advanced technology for remaining competitive to those who demand something
more simple, direct, and transparent.
This broadening market has presented us with substantial challenges. Those of you who are more advanced might feel ignored. Simplifying an inherently complex task like visualization is difficult - much more difficult than just exposing all the rough edges of technology to someone expert enough to tackle it. VIZ Render required a considerable amount of time and effort to develop. Simplification also brings with it inevitable compromises - one must give up some feature areas so that the whole becomes more approachable. We learned much about bringing advanced visualization capabilities closer to the designer needing "casual visualization" and this experience has informed many of the new features in 3ds max 6. It Is our intention to continue developing more advanced features after we complete what is now a three part cycle.
The third part of the cycle is our current focus, developing the
intermediate solution - VIZ 6. We are taking all we have learned from VIZ
Render and 3ds max 6 and beginning development of the next version of VIZ
guided by some important goals derived from interviews with our customers.
One of the most consistent requests has been for better interoperability
between VIZ and max as well as more complete and reliable features. The next
version of VIZ will be a direct subset of 3ds max, removing the more
advanced animation and rendering features of max to produce a more
affordable product. VIZ 6 will have the same basic feature set as before
with much of the additional performance and organizational advantages of 3ds
max 6. There will be no features in VIZ 6 that are not shared by 3ds max 6.
This important goal will allow us to keep these and future releases of VIZ
and max in sync so that files created in VIZ can be opened directly in max
with no loss of data or image quality. Our goal is to coordinate the
releases of VIZ and max much more closely in the future and shorten the time
interval between. The process of developing new design visualization
features will therefore be focused on 3ds max as the platform from which
future versions of VIZ will be derived."
michael.woodcox@autodesk.com
Design Visualization Product Manager
Discreet
a division of Autodesk
The landmark @ One Market
San Francisco, CA 94107
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re-posted by Randy