The combination of a challenging economic environment and increasing demands for computer-generated content — including digital characters that are believable in a post-Avatar world — led the talking points at Autodesk’s press briefing for media and entertainment products earlier today. The company said that 2010 would see it continue down the path it chose last year, consolidating products with an eye on value, efficiency, and flexibility.

For example, last year saw Autodesk integrate compositing software with Maya 2010, itself a new consolidation of Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited. This year, Autodesk Composite will be integrated with 3ds Max as well as with Maya. Further, Autodesk Softimage users will see the standard and advanced version of that software merge in the 2011 version — at the same price point originally set for the standard version.

Autodesk is also offering bundled “Entertainment Creation Suites” that offer users their choice of Maya or 3ds Max plus MotionBuilder and Mudbox, all in 2011 versions. Autodesk officials said the suites are priced in the North American market at a 35 percent savings over purchasing the products separately. Prices are unchanged; a Maya 2011 or 3ds Max 2011 standalone license is $3495, or $1745 for an upgrade from the 2010 version of the same product. The standalone Softimage 2011 is $2995. Look for the 2011 versions to ship and become available for download on or after April 7, 2010.

The company outlined a raft of new features in the new versions of the products, such a new Nokia Qt-based interface for Maya on all platforms, which includes dockable UI elements, a new color chooser and a new file browser. Maya’s skinning workflow has been refined to allow more realistic deformations to be created in less time, and animators can now reuse motion-capture data with a “live retargeting” feature that lets them transfer an animation from one character to another and edit the results non-destructively.

3ds Max 2011 boasts the new node-based Slate material editor, a new Quicksilver multithreaded hardware renderer that’s said to provide up to a 10x acceleration on common graphics cards by using the CPU as well as the GPU. And a new containers workflow layers edits non-destructively, allowing users to work in parallel on different aspects of the same container without worrying that they’ll accidentally make changes to the same components simultaneously.

And Softimage 2011 has been boosted with new rendering and animation tools, a new advanced shading architecture and editing environment, and a new rigging paradigm with support for ICE Kinematics. Face Robot now includes an automatic lip-sync feature that lets users generate facial animations based on an audio file. (Don’t worry — you can always go in and manually tweak the results to get them up to snuff.)

For more detail, check out the press releases for 3ds Max 2011 and Maya 2011.