Autodesk has decided to reinvest in its digital sculpting and retopology software after several years of minimal product updates.
The official Mudbox blog was all about silence after the release of Mudbox 2015. Autodesk started to integrate Mudbox functionality into Maya and Maya LT, so the customers were wondering if the tool was due to be retired.
The Mudbox 2018.1 update doesn’t actually bring new features, but the release means that the company is not done with the tool. Jill Ramsay states that the release “fixed over 75 major bugs, including some that go back to Mudbox v1, like not being able to undo subdvision”.
I know things have been slow for the last couple of years (to put it mildly), and I understand your frustration, but we are getting back on track.
We added a lot of functionality to Maya from Mudbox, but Mudbox remains a very viable standalone option, and we decided to reinvest in it starting this summer.
The fact that we [chose] to address stability and quality first [indicates] that we are serious about keeping Mudbox viable. It would have been easier to spend the time we spent on bug fixing adding a couple of features, but in the long run, the team decided it wasn’t the right order to do things in.