I joined Apple in the summer of 2013, as part of Graphics, with a mandate of improving game related technologies, and professional production workflows.
ModelIO was started early 2014, and introduced at WWDC 2015. It's purpose was to introduce 3d asset IO, analogously to ImageIO providing import and export of a large variety of 3d file formats. Due to various concerns including ongoing negotiations with Autodesk, FBX was not part of the release.
ModelIO also contained a suite of pipeline related tools, in-memory scene organization tools, geometry transformations, and bakers of various kind such as automated distortion minimizing UV mapping, occlusion baking, and so on.
What ModelIO did not have was collaborative editing, large scale scene management, and notions of asset composition such as template assets, attribute overrides, asset variations, and the like.
Having architected the content creation pipeine at LucasArts for a decade, and from having worked as a developer and architect on ILM's proprietar