There is a lot of amazing talent out in the world creating tech and tools that enables artists and animators to be more productive or have amazing new options at their fingertips. We see this every year with new research papers coming from Siggraph, amazing work at our local universities in CompSci, fantastic talent in our studios who are passionately creating tools to enable people to work better or work around a problem, and of course new features that we see in updates that we see in other tools on the market.
What is interesting though is that a lot of this work is being driven by some amazing individual talent and small teams, and often these developers are coming from a background where they lack solid financial backing to pursue a steady development process that can move these tools from a personal or research based environment into a more regular commercial phase that can benefit the greater community of users. As such my idea proposal is about Autodesk setting up a grant program that developers can pitch and apply for to craft new tools, add-ons, features/functions, etc. for 3DS Max.
Grants like this exist in a similar form from organizations like Mozilla, game engine developers like Epic (via their MegaGrants), or through government agencies (such as the Canada Media Fund, or other similar programs in other countries), but none of them are specifically driven towards seeing research, tech, and tools being driven from the 3rd party community towards a specific content creation tool like 3DS Max.
In these program there are often 3 types of phases: Prototype, Production, and Marketing. Prototype is about creating a MVP, risky, with smaller grant amount, but the general idea is that something is being tried out. Production is about taking that MVP into a finish product, this is obviously more costly and still risky. Marketing is focused around the promotion of the tools, low risk, low funding. As such there is a wide range of potential to see research, techniques, and processes turned into functional tools and features that we can have at our fingertips.
Now there are catches with these types of programs, and I would expect no less from Autodesk (they are in the business of making money, not giving it away freely): 1) each application/pitch is often reviewed for the capabilities of the team and the validity of the idea, not everything gets funded unfortunately; 2) a recoupment method/model always exists to ensure that the money is recovered (often at a 50/50 rate until the grant has been recouped and then it shifts to an 80/20 split), with the potential that the work can be bought out at any time by either party; 3) there is sometimes an exclusivity, or support, period that is required for you play in a sandbox, and 4) you need to share data and information with your funder.
That is the jist of the idea. However I do feel that it is one that could be of extreme benefit not only to Autodesk but to all of use end users as well as it could mean that we get unique emerging tech faster, but see existing developers being able to focus more of their time and efforts onto developing and supporting what they create. I hope that some of you will see these same benefits that I do and join me at encouraging Autodesk to consider this idea.
