For the first time, I went to SIGGRAPH without worrying what problems Alias and Maya were going to create for me. It made for a much less stressful event. If you missed our User Group meeting (1,300 of you didn't), then you missed seeing GMJ's 13 Million polygon database of 36 square kilometers of London loaded up in 3ds Max 9 64b and real-time (4-5fps) interaction with it. We spent a lot of effort optimizing the DirectX code for 3ds Max 9 and it shows! I think customers will be really shocked by the performance improvements as they are on the order of 5-10X improvements on 3ds Max 8. Anyway, the point is that performance matters and we're throwing a bunch of energy in that direction.

We also showed a research project that I was involved in, Geppetto, which is all about future innovations in character animation. We had one of our top Film/Post accounts tell us it was the most exciting thing they'd seen at SIGGRAPH. Without revealing too much, it showed how we could take mocap data and artfully interpolate it such that we could derive new motion seamlessly. It's hard to put in words - trust me, it's cool.

Finally, it was great meeting so many customers and talking to them about the future of 3ds Max. There's been so much confusion around the acquisition of Alias that it was great to reinforce, once again, that we're ramping up 3ds Max development and moving forwards with all guns blazing.