The Foundry acquires Mischief and ADF technology

So in an unexpected move, The Foundry announced today that it has acquired Made With Mischief. Mischief, of course was a sketching application that popped up some time ago but never really went anywhere. So why is this important?

First, the technology the application uses is actually rooted in 3d. The use and application of ADF can be used in a variety ways, including 3d painting and even sculpting.

Following this acquisition, Brad Peebler hired some feelance programmers to play with the tech. One of them is the guy behind the fluid simulation painting application, Verve.

Whether or not this changes the game or not in regards to content creation is to be seen, but its worth following.

This is a link to an indepth article (with videos) regarding ADF and its uses as well as the Foundry Mischief acquisition.

Side note, Mischief is now officially the cheapest foundry product on the market…it will break your bank for only $25.

FAQ – The Foundry and Made With Mischief

What are you announcing?

We’re excited to announce we’ve acquired Made With Mischief, founded by Sarah Frisken. With Made With Mischief, we’re ideally positioned to extend The Foundry’s presence into a new market with engaging, easy-to-use offerings for creative people.
Its flagship product, Mischief, is a unique pen-based application for Mac and Windows. Mischief’s sophisticated core technology and clean, elegant interface make it both powerful and simple to use, ideal for professionals and creative hobbyists alike.
Key to its underlying technology is revolutionary patented shape representation, known as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), which Frisken co-invented. ADFs have several advantages for creative applications: they provide high-quality stroke rendering; they are amenable to hardware-based rendering so drawing is extremely responsive; they are very compact, resulting in small file sizes; they can be scaled without introducing pixelation artifacts; and they can accurately represent much richer and more complex shapes than traditional vector-based stroke representations.


How does this fit with The Foundry growth strategy?

Our strategy has always been to enter into the broader creative market once we had the right technology and products. Therefore, the benefits of this acquisition are two-fold. First, Mischief allows us to immediately establish a legitimate presence in the market with an inspiring offering.
Second, Mischief’s powerful new technology has massive potential to impact future creative solutions. As we work to enhance the current Mischief platform, we’ll identify ways in which we can incorporate relevant Mischief technology into solutions for design, visual effects and games.


How will Made With Mischief fit within The Foundry organization? It seems very different from your typical customer/product?

Made With Mischief will remain a stand-alone entity with a unique value proposition for creative people. While it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of The Foundry, we’ve made a conscious decision to preserve its Mischief brand and independent website to make it easy for people to engage with Mischief.
While the customers and product are new, the process by which we’re bringing Mischief to market mirror our past success. We’ve commercialized solutions that have become pivotal to the creative process at studios like Dreamworks, Pixar, ILM. We’re now applying that same expertise to deliver a relevant offering to creatives with Mischief.
At the same time, we’ve already begun researching ways in which our collective technologies strengthen future product development for both The Foundry and Made With Mischief. Therefore, we’ll see benefits for all our customers, while still remaining true to the qualities for which each brand is known.

zBrush people had better watch their back.

Semi OT: my 666th post. I feel no power surge, I hear no organ music, just business as usual.

Are you really so intent on wanting to see crap happen to everyone’s favorite apps. (do you still use 3D software even)?

I would personally wait until there’s some actual demo videos before gauging just how much it might affect Zbrush.

So they’ve hired Taron from the Verve and Petterson from Sculptris?

Would be nice to see what they can do together using that tech (which sounds pretty awesome from what it says in the article)

The video showing that sculpt demo looks nice, I found it very similar to 3DCoat.

Interesting that they have also releaed a free version of the software. can´t wait to try it out :slight_smile:

I am not intent on wanting to see crap. I am a realist (check a thing called dictionary for an explanation) and I know that the reasons why a firm buys another one are:

  • eliminate a competitor, get its customers while firing whole staff or…
  • …acquire technology to create products which compete with other ones.

In this case, especially with the mention of Sculptris dad in the deal, the long term direction is clear: add powerful sculting to MODO with possibly something free around. If this is not in direct collision course with zBrush, I don’t know what it is (b.t.w. zBrush new polygonal modeling tools are putting it on collision course with MODO, at half the price…).

The positive side is that it appears that TheFoundry is exploring the idea of the combo free version for casual users/payed one for professionals. One can dream of a reduced capabilities free MODO…

The sculpting demo looks pretty cool but nothing really groundbreaking. The impression I get from seeing it is “dynamic voxel sculpting” which absolutely DOES seem very helpful but it is something very similar to what 3D Coat does.

If anything I think the Foundry should have looked to aquire 3D Coat together with ADF since it would already built on the same foundation. MODO was never really built for sculpting anyway and I think that 3D Coat deserves more recognition in the field of sculpting.

NinthJake, you might want to read the “ADF vs Voxels” part of the linked article.

I am not a programmer nor very technically minded so I might have misunderstood parts of it. What I got out of that part of the article was that ADF is an extension to voxels, or that it is “close but not quite” voxel-based but perhaps that is incorrect?

Ace, are you, of all people, calling someone out on hyping up the consequences of a business move before there is enough information to come to a conclusion?

This should be interesting - I found the Verve stuff to be refreshing for painting digitally. From what I can tell, the key is the memory footprint of the strokes and the ability to have any resolution after working on unlimited canvas.

What a move on The Foundry’s end.

I had the opportunity to be on the beta for Sculptris (this laso means access to the closed beta forums). To this day I’m still in awe of what Tomas Pettersson did. Not just in terms of brute coding, but the whole interaction he had with the beta team, and specifically Taron. It was really something to get a glimpse of the works behind the scenes.

I’d be willing to bet that Tomas is the guy behind Dynamesh in ZBrush.

If they can have those guys, something good’s gonna come out of it … at least in terms of the raw product.

BTW, haven’t seen Either of those apps before. Loved the Verve demo, and ADF looked very smooth. Thanks on the link!
I’d have to try ADF and see how it feels. Currently sculpting in Blender with Dyntopo for me has a very good feel. Plus, the Blender environment brings a lot to the table, it’s a huge upside.

The gist of it is that while you can think of voxels as bitmaps (pixels) ADFs are more like vectors. You can for example smooth them much better because they are not dumb “blocks” but contain directional info.

I tried the free version of Mischief lastnight; it feels very very good to sketch, and the unlimited canvas and resolution are pretty cool, but it tends to lag a bit, maybe it’s because it uses GPU…?

I have a pretty decent card, I don’t know why it was slowing down, or is it maybe because it’s just a free version. I don’t know…
Does anyone else tried it out?

Notice the sharpness of the edge, the voxel resolution in 3D-Coat would have to be extremely high to get that kind of definition. Adaptive subdivision would help here but then it’s not voxels anymore and if you drop back to voxel mode you will have to resample and again turn the res extremely high. ADF seems like a best of both worlds kind of deal.

I see no way of naming/renaming individual layers.
If one cannot do that most basic thing, it would be a crazy omission.

… Steven.

Short and information light article (in italian) on imaginaction.com. It hints at something really great, above and beyond what either 3D Coat and zBrush can do.

I see, thanks for clearing that up.

For us non-Italian speakers, what would this hint be? :stuck_out_tongue:

Just some wow, it will be great (they mention Lightwave Chronosculpt). Anyway, something is definitely brewing in TheFoundry home.