Developer(s) Softimage, Co. | Operating system | |
Initial release 1988; 29 years ago (1988) Stable release 4.0 / August 2001; 15 years ago (2001-08) | ||
Softimage|3D is a discontinued high-end 3D graphics application developed by Softimage, Co., which was used predominantly in the film, broadcasting, gaming, and advertising industries for the production of 3D animation. It was superseded by Softimage XSI in 2000.
Contents
History
In 1986 National Film Board of Canada filmmaker Daniel Langlois, in partnership with software engineers Richard Mercille and Laurent Lauzon, began developing an integrated 3D modeling, animation, and rendering package with a graphical interface suited for visual artists. The software was initially demonstrated at Siggraph in 1988 and was released for Silicon Graphics workstations as the Softimage Creative Environment. Its character animation tools expanded substantially with the addition of inverse kinematics in the second release, which was used to animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Softimage Creative Environment was adopted by major visual effects studios like Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain for use in their production pipelines, which also typically included software from Alias and Pixar as well as a variety of custom tools. In 1994, Microsoft acquired Softimage, Co. with the intention of bringing high-end 3D animation software to its burgeoning Windows NT platform, and subsequently rechristened it "Softimage|3D." In January 1995, Softimage|3D was announced as the official 3D development tool for the Sega Saturn.
The first Windows port of Softimage|3D, version 3.0, was released in early 1996. 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. 3D paint functionality was added a year later in version 3.7.
In the late 1990s, Softimage Co. began developing a successor to Softimage|3D codenamed "Sumatra," which was designed with a more modern and extensible architecture to compete with other major packages like Alias|Wavefront's Maya. Development was delayed during a 1998 acquisition by Avid Technology, and in the summer of 2000 Softimage|3D's successor was finally released as Softimage XSI. Because of Softimage|3D's entrenched user base, minor revisions continued until the final version of Softimage|3D, version 4.0, was released in 2002.
Features
The Softimage|3D feature set was divided among five menu sets: Model, Motion, Actor, Matter and Tools, each corresponding to a different phase of the 3D production process:
Model: Tools for the creation of spline, polygon, patch, and NURBS primitives (later releases also included Metaballs). Boolean operations, extrusions, revolves, and bevels, as well as lattice deformations and relational modeling tools. Subdivision surface modeling was only available via a third-party plugin.
Motion: Animation of objects and parameters via keyframes, constraints, mathematical expressions, paths, and function curves. Animatable cluster and lattice deformations.
Actor: Rigging and animating digital characters using skeletons, as well as dynamics tools for creating physics-based simulations of object interaction. Included inverse kinematics and weighted / rigid skinning.
Matter: Creating and managing materials and rendering images for output. 2D and 3D textures, field rendering, fog, motion blur, and raytracing were included as standard features.
Tools: Utilities for viewing, editing, and compositing rendered image sequences and importing/exporting bitmapped images and 3D geometry.