The Foundry (Modo 3D) gets sold again. Roper Technologies becomes the new owner

General Forums Latest News
1

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/03/18/1756583/0/en/Roper-Technologies-to-Acquire-Foundry-Leading-Provider-of-Complex-Visualization-Software-Solutions.html

It’s not Autodesk or Adobe, but I have never heard of Roper, so I can’t say if this will ultimately be a good thing for Modo as far as development goes.

It could be good, but we are seeing the beginning of Modo bouncing between owners, and that could mean the software stagnating like Carrara and Bryce. I hope the existing Modo owners have a backup plan so they can continue doing CG no matter happens. If anything, what little is mentioned in their community is that Roper is pretty hands-off, so we’ll see what happens.

2

It seems like it’s not just modo but the entire foundry which would include nuke, mari etc.

3

Apparently, Roper technologies is a really large company with a sales revenue of more than twice that of autodesk. And a roughly equal market capitalisation.
https://www.forbes.com/companies/roper-technologies/#d42e29534688
https://www.forbes.com/companies/autodesk/#3e148ebf1d3d

4

They seem to be a big player, but not a software company itself.

http://www.ropertech.com/application-software

5

Modo-related news:

6

What I honestly don’t understand is why they keep selling out to the highest bidder, can’t they be independent and survive on the profit they make? Maybe I don’t understand the business side of running a huge DCC company.

As far what this means for Modo, probably nothing bad or good, its always been a redheaded step child under Foundry, all the money gets pour into Nuke and Mari.

1 Like
7

It’s good to see it’s someone from within foundry getting promoted to this rather than some random business bro jumping from one corp to another to yet another cluless to the actual business of the industry.

edit:

Madden joined Foundry in 2013 and has held positions as Chief Operating Officer and most recently, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Product Officer. Over the past six years Madden has been instrumental in leading the company’s growth. Prior to joining Foundry, Madden spent more than a decade in technology management and studio leadership roles at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm, and Digital Domain after graduating from Stanford University.

So been with foundry for a while now, and while she has moved from one company to another it’s always been within the VFX/CGI industry.

Only potential concern here is the history of DD I guess. But then that might be good experience. :man_shrugging:

8

From a developer point of view, the best point to cash out is at the top, when you don’t see much future growth. Why these trades are made is because the devs think they make more money by selling their product to another company than continuing with development, and the company buying the product sees they can make a profit by being better at marketing and squeezing money out of their client base.

2 Likes
9

If you’re a founder/owner of a company, the best reason to sell is not to make “the most money”, but risk diversification. You can buy anything with the cash from a sale. If you stick with the company you may make more money, or it could all go downhill and you’re at zero. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as they say.

The Foundry has been handed around private equity firms for a while now, that doesn’t necessarily have much of an impact on products. They can just hold the company and perhaps sell it for more later on. Meanwhile, they are entitled to the profits.

10

Never heard of these Roper Technologies. What kind of a company are they?

11

They buy up companies for their portfolio, fix issues (think mangement, customer care etc.) within that company and potentially sell them for more (think flipping cars but then on a larger scale.)

I know a personal friend that works for one of the companies they bought up.
They pretty much fixed the communication issues they had but left the company alone to just do there thing so I feel pretty confident in Foundry staying Foundry at least for the outside world.
For what I heard and read about them they have a pretty good growth rate.

Specifically Modo might be interesting to some of their other companies as well.
We’ll see how it all plans out. Maybe Nuke can finally get the transformation everyone is begging for the past decade. :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
12

It did not pan out well. They went the Maya route. Was looking into things ran into this old thingy figured I would reply.

13

Yeah, it is interesting overall, Modo has completely dropped off the radar as a generalist 3D App (at least for me) in the last, I would say, 8 Years. That is just my perception. I don’t know what went wrong with it. It seemed to be building steam from around 2011 forward.

Here is what went wrong for me. As of v6 they came out guns blazing with now it could now animate with rigs and so on. As a person who was using LightWave before it was fascinating to see the 10 year growth back to a full version app.

Unfortunately the animation and rigging tools were still half-baked and were not really production ready. I wound up going with Softimage and then Maya.

What do you think everyone else did who was looking to migrate from LightWave or Maya or Blender or wherever? Seems like it was, OK, wait it out.

Then it was acquired - again, by the Foundry and it is in that family. But in the grand scheme of things, what did happen to Modo?

Seems like the talk of the town is all about Blender these days. Modo is almost never mentioned as the go-to alternative to LightWave or Maya or Max anymore. Conversations all center around Blender.

Any Modo users?

1 Like
14

In short, the Foundry dropped the ball hard. A lot of core developers left or were let go. They pushed subscriptions (software as a service) on the user base as well as a horrible log in system just to use the software. To make matters worse, they raise the price while the development has slowed to a crawl, with a lot of additions or changes being fairly minor in the larger scheme of things.

Many users were already fed up with the Adobe/Autodesk like behavior coming out of Foundry, so Blender was the shining beacon on the hill, one that actually made significant progress on a development front and without anti-consumer log in requirements.

2 Likes
15

Hopefully all the long awaited performance work in Blender (ongoing now) will rope a bit more of the users in.

Though Modo’s decline might overall be a bad thing for the industry when considering Maxon has also been heading in the direction of slower development and higher prices. If both of them go the way of Lightwave, then 3D content creation in the commercial world will be down to Autodesk and SideFX. Blender’s big uptick in development could not come soon enough.

Though the wildcard will be whether or not Unity and Unreal become full blown DCC apps (as they have both dabbled in modeling at least), it probably is still well into the future though.

1 Like
16

That’s interesting. I was not on the inside track of what was happening there. Seems to make sense.

17

The thing is those apps have not been competing with Autodesk or visa versa. Autodesk tried to go head to head with Side FX and lost. That was Softimage. Since then they have simply used those resources to develop MASH, Xgen and Cache playback in the viewport. A little improvement in animation workflow with sculpting for Blendhapes, and a few other small improvements. (not to mention the node features in Max).

But Side FX owns FX, Maxon -Mograph, and Modo, I don’t know - making shoe renders. Product advertising etc.

These are all niche markets. LightWave had a symbiotic relationship with all pipelines. That was its strength. And initially it had a niche market in TV FX.

We are not living in a world of diminishing choices. There have never been any good variety of choices for your basic go-to 3D app. That is how I see it. There was a brief moment in time when you had Max, Maya and Softimage. And a few stragglers hanging on to LightWave as an end to end solution. But it did not last. And apps started to specialize. Maya kept getting better at what it does which is animation and a little of everything. It is the only premere go-to app for all around 3D pipelines, worldwide, hands down.

The only app that has attracted the same kind of crowd looking for the app that could do everything reasonably well, over, say the past say 7 years, is Blender.

So I don’t think it matters what happens to those other apps. Maya has MASH and Xgen and Blender is getting Animation Nodes and Geometry Nodes.

Both Maya and Blender have reasonably user-friendly animation tools and overall attract the same kind of user base which is not a specialist base.

You want to open a shop to create general animation and fx that is strong on character animation and does everything else reasonably well, there is Maya and Blender. In my opinion, these are the only reasonable choices. If you want to do something the other apps do well at, likely you go there.

If any of the other apps fail, kind of a 50/50 split. Some users will fall on Blender and others on Maya.

5 Likes