The New 3D Landscape, Part 2

By David Em

November 8, 2004

(The New 3D Landscape, Part 2 :  Page 1 of 1 )

Once upon a time, all 3D visualization and animation programs were coded by programmers for the facilities they worked for, such as NASA or ILM. In the mid-80s three commercial 3D software developers appeared: Wavefront in California, Alias in Toronto, and Softimage in Montreal.

Over the years, many new contenders entered the field, but Softimage and Alias (which absorbed Wavefront in the 90s) continued to be industry's high-end leaders. The two companies' products have undergone enormous changes since their start. Back in the day, they cost tens of thousands of dollars and ran on mega-expensive specialized Silicon Grapics Inc. (SGI) workstations. Today they cost a fraction of their original price and run on off-the-shelf PCs.

Recently, Alias and Softimage (now a subdivision of Avid), released their latest software, Maya 6 and XSI 4, respectively. I've been testing both in our lab. Here's my First Look at two of the best 3D visualization and animation packages ever written.

How Far We've Come

I tested XSI's predecessor, Softimage 3.4, around seven years ago on Compaq's first Windows workstation. At the time, it was the most powerful PC ever made, and the first ever certified to run Softimage, which had recently been ported from UNIX to Windows. It had dual Pentium 200 processors and two Elsa OpenGL cards, each with 16 MB of RAM.

Getting everything going was a hairy experience. Simply installing the license server required days of work over the phone with a Softimage engineer. Once the program finally ran, it completely took over the machine. No other app could run at the same time. Parts of the program felt glued together. Nevertheless, Softimage was widely considered the software of choice for film and character animation. Good Softimage animation skills were a fast track to well-paid employment in the 3D industry.

Alias's competitive program was Power Animator. It ran only under UNIX and Irix, and was showing its age, spurring Alias to write a new application from the ground up called Maya.

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