The problem is when XSI was introduced Maya had already established itself.” Wayde Duncan Smith, senior technical director at Nvizibleīy this point, Maya was the 3D suite of choice for feature film visual effects – and had become a crown jewel for Autodesk, which had acquired Alias in October 2005. “When the ICE effects system was introduced it greatly increased the capacity of what Softimage could do Most importantly it was fast and gave it an edge above Maya. Wayde Duncan Smith, senior technical director at Nvizible said: It allowed non-programmers to control elements within scenes in XSI – such as camera, particles, and light properties – simply by connecting nodes on a graph.Įven though Softimage Xsi hit back so hard many considered this move to be a bit late because it gave other competitors such as Maya and Max a lot of time to grow as well. Just to clarify, ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) was Introduced in 2008. Later ICE made it unique and others were envious.” Nick Webber, senior FX TD at Milk VFX There was the render tree and built-in compositing, and of course, the animation tools, render layers, and large datasets. “Early on, XSI had huge advantages over Maya, particularly mental ray integration, Modelling was fast. Nick Webber from Milk VFX said about this: This introduced a non-linear animation editing and mixing system, strong interactive rendering, a particle system, compositing, and ActiveX scripting. Softimage struck back with the redeveloped-from-the-ground-up Softimage|XSI in 2000. “When Maya 1.0 arrived, it was a superior system with the power of MEL scripting language, Many larger film FX companies built their pipelines around Maya, and when XSI was released it had a lot to catch up with.” Martin Chamney. Around this time the problems of Softimage started to rise to the surface. This had some immediate advantages over Softimage. The fact that Softimage was doing so good in the late 90’s made it so valuable because in 1998 Avid bought it from Microsoft for whooping $285 million – though there were hints it was more after Softimage|DS to complement Avid’s own Symphony finishing system.Īround the same time, in February 1998, SGI subsidiary Alias|Wavefront was releasing its character animation and visual effects software, Maya 1.0. Softimage 3D was used to create all the animations and the characters were created in a hybrid manner, with overall motion created using Softimage 3D and signature facial expressions created using ILM’s proprietary CARICATURE software.” With the new version, ILM was able to write a single expression for twisting the dinosaur body which provided realistic rotation that tapers along the length of the body.”Īlso if you are old enough you probably remember “Men in Black 1997, This movie was packed full with entertaining 3-D elements ranging from space bugs, aliens, and flying saucers to a 3-D supercar that flies around and drives on a tunnel’s ceiling. For instance, in the earlier version of “Jurassic Park,” to rotate a dinosaur’s head, animators had to manually enter rotations for the individual chains in the neck to make the motion taper realistically down the neck. Using constraint controls, expressions, and other tools in Softimage 3D, ILM redefined its methods for chaining characters. The 28 minutes of visual effects in Jurassic Park of 1997 we talked about actually included more than 11 types of dinosaurs, with some scenes showing as many as 40 dinosaurs at a time, all animated using Softimage 3D. Microsoft acquired Softimage when it was at its peak because around that time things were so hot in the industry with many amazing movies coming out each year. Softimage|DS was launched in 1997, an editing and effects system that was tied to high-performance hardware (for the time) to allow finishing of commercials and music videos (this was back in the day when hardware restrictions meant that most editing was done using relatively low-quality previews). 3D paint functionality was added a year later in version 3.7. Softimage|3D Extreme 3.5, released later that year, included particle effects and the mental ray renderer, which offered area lights, ray tracing, and other advanced features. The first Windows port of Softimage|3D, version 3.0, was released in early 1996. In January 1995, Softimage|3D was announced as the official 3D development tool for the Sega Saturn. with the intention of introducing high-end 3D animation software to its Windows NT platform, and subsequently renamed it “Softimage|3D.
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