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 It was superseded by Softimage XSI in 2000.
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 targeted at visual artists. The software was initially demonstrated at SIGGRAPH in 1988 and was released for Silicon Graphics workstations the following year as the Softimage Creative Environment™.[1]
The first Windows port of Softimage|3D, version 3.0, was released in early 1996.[5] 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.[6] 3D paint functionality was added a year later in version 3.7.[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.[8] 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.[9][10] 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.[11]
Softimage|3D was also used for VeggieTales until 2000 where the newer episodes were then moved to Maya.
Release history
Version
Platform
Release date
Price
Notes
Softimage Creative Environment 1.0
SGI
Jan 1989
Beta debuted at Siggraph '88, v1.0 commercial release in 1989[12]
Added multi-UV texturing, vertex colors. Final release
Features
The Softimage|3D feature set was divided between five menu sets: Model, Motion, Actor, Matter and Tools, each corresponding to a different part of the 3D production process:[14]
Model: Tools for creating 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 available via a third-party plugin from Phoenix Tools called MetaMesh.
Motion: Animation of objects and parameters via keyframes, constraints, mathematical expressions, paths, and function curves. Animatable cluster and lattice deformations. Motion capture through a variety of input devices.
Actor: Rigging and animation of digital characters using skeletons, as well as dynamics tools for physics simulations of object interactions. Included inverse kinematics and weighted / rigid skinning.
Matter: Creation of materials and rendering images for output. Standard features included 2D and 3D textures, field rendering, fog, motion blur, and raytracing.
Tools: Utilities for viewing, editing, and compositing rendered image sequences, color reduction, and importing/exporting images and 3D geometry.
Notes
^The beta version was released in SIGGRAPH in 1988.
