Autodesk to buy Softimage

in some surprising, out of the blue news today: Autodesk announced that they are buying another one of their main 3D Animation competitors, Softimage. Softimage had been previously owned by Avid for the past 10 Years.

This buy out will probably cause a bit of worry with dedicated XSI users who enjoyed being able to deal with Softimage cause they were a smaller company. On the other hand, game and FX driven companies that have to own lots of different kinds of software for different applications and different users will now be able to get all of their main apps from the same source.

Autodesk has been on a buying spree the past few years, with recent entries into the game middleware market (Kynapse), the 3D sculpting market (Mudbox), and of course, the buyout of Alias (Maya).

So with 3DS Max, Maya and XSI on the menu, they'll have a near monopoly on the Animation market. The only other companies left in the game are Side Effects (Houdini), and then lower cost options like Luxology Modo, Newtek Lightwave and Maxon Cinema 4D. Will Autodesk try to buy those guys too?

Read Autodesk's press release here