As usual, Autodesk is busy at NAB with new products—most notably, Flare 2010, which the company calls “a creative companion” to Flame and Inferno, designed to perform a mix of advanced tasks and support tasks that can be handled by junior level artists who collaborate with senior-level Flame and Inferno colleagues.

But the company’s real innovation at the show may be its steadfast focus on looking for ways to drive business to its users by offering them solutions for new and evolving workflows those customers will be getting themselves involved with in the coming weeks and months. Bruno Sargeant, a broadcast market manager for Autodesk, told me today that the company is working closely to develop not only new tools, but techniques in collaboration with artists in various market segments that can them port over to other market segments. Thus, Bruno suggests, as the economic downturn hammers the advertising industry, Autodesk is urging artists to transfer the tools and workflows they use to create car commercials into workflows they can use for automobile and architectural pre-vizualization work. This could open new markets for such artists and for Hollywood-style post houses that typically have always worked on broadcast or movie projects. High-end visualization work for other industries, he suggests, is a growing area and Autodesk artists and clients are uniquely set up to join that party.

“They can enable their commodity—3D models of a car, for instance—as assets for other types of work,” he says. “Automobiles, these days, for instance, are going into video games quite a bit, so people with those assets available can push into that world, if they want to. We are adding functionality to [Flame and Inferno] that is suited to that type of workflow. We want to help companies build pipelines using common assets that can help them in more than one industry. Autodesk is trying to drive new business to customers in this way.”

–MG