By Chris Bradshaw, Senior Vice President, Autodesk Media & Entertainment

One of the best things about working at Autodesk is seeing the birth of great tools that enable designers to make amazing things. Today that’s exactly what’s happening as we announce our acquisition of Bitsquid, makers of the Bitsquid game engine. This pivotal acquisition will have a major impact on how our customers work in many different industries.

In game development, creating a unified workflow between the artistic and developmental sides of game creation is the holy grail for game makers. This is one of the ways Bitsquid fits into our vision for games. It will allow us to bridge the gap between our current strengths on the artistic side of game creation and the programming side of games, to deliver a much more effective workflow for game makers. This is especially important to professional indie game makers – who want a great art to engine workflow where they can create 3D assets and characters, and seamlessly bring them into their games. To this end, we plan to introduce a new, next-generation game engine that we will pair with our 3D animation tools and middleware. The current Bitsquid engine is already production-proven, having been used on several console, PC and mobile games. Our Games Solutions group is already working on our new engine based on Bitsquid, and we are excited to be able to share our work with you once it is ready.

Outside of the games industry, applying game engine technology to non-game workflows will enable the creation of a new 3D exploration platform for design data in architecture, manufacturing, and construction. Our vision is to bring the same fluid and interactive feedback of a game to design animation workflows. Imagine being able to walk through your design and being in full control of that experience. This is a huge contrast compared to the typical visualization experience where the audience usually assumes a passive role as a designer controls the creative experience. We’ll have much more to talk about in this area later this year.

We’re very excited to deliver new tools, new workflows and new ways to tie our products together to help our customers from ideation through realization. If you’re interested in following our progress and learning more, I invite you to sign up at www.autodesk.com/bitsquid.   

(War of the Vikings™ images courtesy of Paradox Interactive)