Mudbox SDK in development

Mudbox 2009 – the first release of the 3D sculpting tool since it was acquired by Autodesk – isn’t out yet but co-creator Dave Cardwell is already looking to the future, including the release of a full SDK for the high-end CG sculpting tool.

"There are areas we’re working on that we weren’t able to get around to, just because of time," he recently told Develop.

"There’s a lot more coming from Mudbox over the coming months."

Key among these is ensuring the extensibility of the package, which was originally developed while Cardwell, together with co-founders Andrew Camenisch and Tibor Madjar, was working with Weta Digital in New Zealand. Since the October 2007 acquisition, they’ve been located in Autodesk’s Toronto office, alongside the Maya development team.

"Everything we do with Mudbox is born out of working in a production setting," added Cardwell.

"All the features we add are to solve production problems, and knowing how companies have their own custom ways of doing things, one of the features we’ve worked tremendously hard on is a full SDK."

Still in what he calls "an alpha setting", it will soon be released to some select clients to iron out the bugs, before it’s made more widely available.

Cardwell won’t be draw on when this will happen however, so for now we’ll have be to be contend in the knowledge that Mudbox 2009 will be released on October 6th.