Hi All
I wanted to share a statement from Autodesk’s Chris Vienneau, the Director of Product Management for the Media & Entertainment products. This relates the news which some of you may have found distracting around the recent false rumours of 3ds Max being discontinued. Many of you have contacted me over these myths and as such Chris has kindly allowed me to publicly re-share this with you all. This will certainly help set your mind at ease about their false nature.
Chris originally shared this on a web-forum/message board. For your reference, ‘EOL’ refers to ‘End Of Life’ and ‘PM’s’ relates to ‘Product Managers’. These, PM’s, are the people responsible for driving the powerful products we all care so much about.
“Hi Everyone,
Let's break this down into two pieces as I want to start two threads here with the group. The first is to flatly call out that the rumor that the eol of Softimage and 3dsmax is upon us is totally false. I run the team of Pms responsible for all three products so you can twitter it out that this is a false alarm.
Both teams were affected but are fully staffed and the products are awesome. Cory Mogk is now also responsible for Softimage and we have been working with the team on the future of the product with lots of key customers. When your product is used on Metal Gear Solid (still one of my favourite games) and you put out stuff like this or the final fantasy games and trailers there is no questioning that product can still deliver world class results. For 3dsmax, we have brought on Frank Delise who was one of the original product designers and managers after ten years of making games like Homefront. Max has hundreds of thousands of users and 3dsmax Design is now part of most every Autodesk design suite and there you are talking millions of users. Max has a more challenging role because it literally plays in 5-6 industries but a good balance, some XBR, and a focus on stability and performance is a good recipe to follow.
The key here is that we are only going to address the anxiety that people have about their favourite products by making them more stable, add more features, and make sure they always have enough hooks for people to get their way out of production jams. You can always ask for more of all three but we are not stopping any of them. In 2007 when the boards were alive with the Autodesk killing Maya rumors we knew that they would not stop for years until we continued to show our commitment to the software. We understand people make their living from this software and that they make huge decisions about their projects and companies and we take that responsibility very seriously.
This leads me to my next point. Autodesk is not a person and people posting Autodesk did this or said this on this board is surreal for us and it alienates the community from the company. Next time just say "Hey people on the board from Autodesk" or HPOTBFA for short and ask us any question you want. Sometimes we take the responses private and when we can we respond publicly. Many of us have been in the industry or worked in it for over 20 years (god I am getting old) and we listen here or at Siggraph or on customer visits and we go back and we all work to make you guys happy and help you make the awesome stuff you do every day. Making it seem like old white guys in robes are pulling the strings actually takes away from this forum as it is a place where the top companies and artists get to talk like we were at the pub or waiting for a render.
Again the door is open to contact us or challenge us. Please let everyone you know their products are safe.
CV/ “
I would like to echo Chris’s comments, and say that I can always be contacted should you ever have any questions on 3ds Max..
Happy Max’ing
