Autodesk has acquired Wonder Dynamics, the developer behind Wonder Studio.

Wonder Dynamics has traversed a short path from its founding to its acquisition, unveiling its inaugural product - the cloud-based VFX platform Wonder Studio - just last year. The company garnered significant attention in major media outlets, partly due to the names associated with it: actor Tye Sheridan is a co-founder of the firm, and Steven Spielberg, Sheridan's director in the film "Ready Player One," sits on the advisory board.

The capabilities offered to 3D artists were quite impressive: Wonder Studio automatically animates, illuminates, and composites CG characters into scenes, tracking and replacing the actor in the original footage with a 3D character. According to Wonder Dynamics' estimates, its artificial intelligence automates "80-90% of manual VFX work," particularly tasks like rotoscoping, allowing artists more time to focus on creative solutions.

Autodesk entered into a partnership with Wonder Dynamics in August of last year to enhance the workflow between Wonder Studio and Maya - the flagship software for 3D animation. Now, Maya is one of the three DCC (Digital Content Creation) applications into which users can export scene files from Wonder Studio, with the other two being Blender and Unreal Engine.

Autodesk's statement announcing the acquisition does not provide details on whether the company plans to integrate Wonder Dynamics' technologies into its products and how. It notes that Wonder Studio is "well-aligned" with Maya and mentions Flow - a new cloud platform for media and entertainment. According to Autodesk, acquiring Wonder Dynamics is another strategic step toward "uniting teams, data, and processes through Flow."

Wonder Dynamics co-founder Tye Sheridan stated that the company's immediate roadmap "remains the same." When asked whether the acquisition would change the pricing or terms of use for Wonder Studio, there was no direct response, with the focus being on ensuring minimal disruption for customers. Regarding future support for third-party software in Wonder Studio, Sheridan noted that during their initial discussions, Autodesk "confirmed its commitment to open ecosystems" and was "very open to our Blender workflow."