Yeah – in one of their other videos showing “new” features, they demoed a tool that bears a striking resemblance to the shrinkwrap modifier.
Compete with who? blender?
AD has to keep adding stuff so that their customers dont get too angry at being forced to spend a ton of money after every new release. This “Grease pencil” feature actually existed in Maya long before Blender had it, though it was in the form of a plugin. Before even that, animators would use dry erase markers to draw on CRT monitors.
Nearly most of those features see added to Maya usually existed as plug ins for maya first, or have been features of one of their other apps such as 3ds max or XSI.
I think AD is still cocky and comfortable to the point where they dont feel they have to “compete” just yet, which if they are not careful will hurt them in the long wrong.
This isnt a defense of AD by any means, I just dont think they feel the need to compete with anyone just yet, much less Blender.
incredible feature!
I hate to shoot you down there, but this is a very old tool for Alias.
In Alias you since ever were able to create canvases and sketch on them.
Blender’s grease pencil however is more path based, so both dont really compare actually.
To do the same in Blender you have to create an image empty and then you can use texture
paint to sketch on it.
Maya however totally copied at one time the way how Blender does UV unwrapping.
You guys remember the time they told Maya users to simply use Blender for unwrapping???
I think Autodesk needs something big soon or they might slip a little. Even minus Blender continually trucking along, both Lightwave and Modo have had good releases recently. Cinema 4D customers seem satisfied also. Contrast that with a lot of AD customers have been pretty disappointed the past few releases and combined with their recent price hikes, some are talking of dropping their subscriptions.
Course what people say they’re going to do, and what people actually do are not always the same thing. For a lot it’s not a trivial thing to just drop them completely.
You know, I feel sad for SI: this seems to be one of the major new features in Soft Image 2014:
SI is a great app, and still years ahead in some areas, which makes it all the more depressing that AD is allowing it to rot, until all SI users are forced to jump ship.
Hey Phonybone; Now is your chance to finish up the old particle nodes project, we still have the opportunity to get node-based particles before Autodesk has a chance to port ICE to Maya 
But indeed, that is a sad thing for XSI users, imagine what it could’ve become had Autodesk not bought them out.
AutoDesk I think is doing well, they have a big market share like Adobe.
Try to find a Photoshop or Illustrator killer uhm there arent any.
Some for Maya. If you need Maya or 3DMax level then well, you have to go with it.
XSI seems to have the same fate as Freehand. Macromedia had great products till well Adobe bought them killed few of them
and bloated up the rest like Flash.
Like with iOS or Android it is not only about the app itself but the ecosystem and in both Adobe and AutoDesk simply are solid.
Sad but true.
My theory was if Autodesk didn’t bought it, XSI would have died sooner. AFAIK, at that time XSI was going through a re-write, and by the time they completed, a lot of users already move to another app. Since film takes 3 or 4 years to complete, and people rarely upgrade mid project. I don’t know how XSI is going to wither the years.
Almost the same thing about to happen to LW (no version upgrade for years due to CORE) till Rob Power come to LW and put some of CORE features into LW 10 and throw it out of the gate, and later cancelled CORE. If they stick to their gun, nobody will use LW because it was outdated (and other than Vue, almost no major plug in supports it) and CORE is a new born baby, no way it can compete with Maya or Max.
So the fact that XSI got bought by their competitors already tells something: they were hurting for cash. And the fact that AD thrown in Face Robot (which was a $50K software or something) for free with XSI license tells something too. AD really bought them cheap. My theory was if AD didn’t bought XSI, it would have defunct earlier.
The only good thing that saves LW is that Newtek have successful tv hardware (that own a lot of market too). XSI AFAIK don’t have that support.
Adobe hasn’t built nearly the amount of negative animosity Autodesk seems to have. People don’t necessarily like Adobe, but I don’t think they hate them either. Photoshop users are happy with Photoshop.
Even the most hardcore Maya/Max users seem to genuinely hate Autodesk and are frequently disappointed with updates. Virtually any Autodesk thread on CGTalk winds up in a discussion with people trying to justify renewing their subscription. The business/customer relationship seems to be really strained and Autodesk seems tone deaf doing things like jacking up prices, and apparently trying to ween people off XSI.
So, I can’t say for sure it will happen, but I really would not be surprised to see Autodesk fall. Apple lost to Microsoft in the 80s (ironically later to be the reverse), Nintendo lost to Sony, Sony lost to Microsoft, Yahoo lost to Google, Blockbuster Video lost to Netflix, MySpace lost to Facebook, Digg lost to Reddit. Giants fall all the time, and the tech industry is way too young to have anything set in stone. Modo, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Blender, and others haven’t been slouching either.
It’s like the line Bill Gates says in Pirates of Silicon Valley - “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
When you’re in the business of doing (“multi-million dollar … and it’s somebody else’s dollars …”) projects that last for many years start-to-finish, “you have to dance with the one who brung 'ya,” even if by now you don’t particularly care anymore for how (s)he smells. You’re never going to “trade partners,” because you’ve got so much time and money invested in the path that … for better or for worse … you (and/or your $$client$$) chose.
But it surely is impressive how Blender is incorporating some very-good imps of some very up-to-date tools and techniques now! 
http://www.sparpointgroup.com/News/Vol11No41Autodesk-announces-job-cuts,-restructuring/
The moves comes on the heels of weaker-than-expected second quarter results, which Autodesk reported in August. The job cuts could impact Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment and Platform Solutions and Emerging Business segments after they posted quarterly sales declines of 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Sales of its flagship AutoCAD software used by designers, engineers and architects, suffered an 11 percent drop in the quarter.
I think Maya LT might be targeted more towards Blender than anything else they’re doing. The prices for their products are so high that they risked losing the indie developers to free software, plus the economy is terrible with no end to it in sight. Adobe responded to piracy, Gimp, and Inkscape by allowing users to rent their software. Autodesk is also doing the rental thing, and they have a cost-reduced version of Maya for indie game developers.
Meanwhile there’s some reason to believe that Max, in addition to SoftImage (as everyone knows), are in an unofficial backburner as Autodesk tries to figure out what to do with them. A lot of the layoffs were from the Media & Entertainment area, so I can only imagine what that means for their capacity to develop.
And that is of course, not the first wave of layoffs either.
As free and open source software gets better, these expensive programs are going to start feeling the pinch. I fired up Inkscape the other day and was amazed at how advanced it’s become since the last time I used it. It’s getting close to being a competitive alternative to Illustrator, especially since Illy hasn’t really changed much in the last few years. Blender has some catching up to do in order to challenge Maya or Max, but don’t be surprised if the gap closes quicker than you think.
There will always be a distance between commercial and free software. Just their R&D department has more funds already.
Question is however with free software getting better can they at one point be enough for your needs like a small studio
that does architecture renderings can use Blender and Cycles instead of Max and VRay.
But a big game or animation studio would rather use the big toys for also other reasons.
I love this photo from Siggraph 2011:
It has not happened in last generation, specially in Japan and Europe.
who? even if they are ripping it off someone else(which they’re not really) admit it, there are not competitors for autodesk,
i say, even if they made a new crappy software that cost in the thousands, companies will still buy it before even looking at it, so what are they campetiting against?
“compete with none other but thine self, for you are you’re ultimate enemy”