Another GDC is upon us.  This will make my 13th.  I feel older every year… oh wait I am older every year!

While Siggraph has definitely shrunk since its glory years in the late 90's, GDC seems to still be going strong.   It's definitely surpassed Siggraph in size.  Things have also changed an awful lot for me.  Back in the days of Alias, Maya was all I had to really worry about.  I could spend the weeks leading up to the show focused and preparing for one thing... Maya, Maya, Maya!

But things aren't quite so simple these days. At Autodesk there are now literally dozens of games related tools to keep up with. On the DCC side (Digital Content Creation) we’ve got Maya, Max, Softimage, MotionBuilder, Mudbox, as well as new and interesting tools like SketchBook Designer.   In addition we now have an entire group called Autodesk Gameware that is focused on Middleware tools. On this side of the spectrum we have toolsets such as Scaleform, Beast, Kynapse and HIK...  and there are new products and acquisitions popping up all the time.  Plus "Project Skyline" is continuing to evolve (see the bottom of this post for more info).   Honestly it’s kind of a daunting task for me to keep up with all of this stuff and I work for Autodesk!  So I can imagine that many of you out there have a hard time keeping it all straight and some of you have likely never even heard of some of these tools.

Because of this I was tasked with putting together a short, high-level overview movie covering the new Gameware group and the various tools under their umbrella. The purpose is simply to expose people to Autodesk Gameware in an informative but concise way. So I tried to cover the key uses and strengths of each tool without delving into too much granular detail. Hopefully I achieved that but let me know if not :)

So anyway here is the movie. It’s only about 6 minutes long with just a couple of minutes on each Gameware product.

So... we've got "Digital Content Creation" and we've got "Gameware".   Where this all comes together though is in something called "Project Skyline" which an authoring to run-time animation system that bridges the gap between content creation and a running game.  I will be showing an update of Project Skyline at our booth at GDC.  If you have not seen my previous demos you can check out my Siggraph post here ->  Project Skyline at Siggraph

If you want to see my upcoming demo featuring some exciting new updates, you will be able to see it streaming live on the Area ->  Autodesk at GDC 2012