A subsidiary of Microsoft in the 1990s, it was sold to Avid Technology, who would eventually sell the name and assets of Softimage's 3D-animation business to Autodesk.

In 1991, Director of sales Richard Szalwinski left to found Discreet[7] and re-distribute Animal Logic's image compositor Eddie.

[10] Dominique Boisvert, Réjean Gagné, Daniel Langlois, and Richard Laperrière won a Scientific and Engineering Award for the development of the 'Actor' component of the Softimage computer animation system[2] In 1998, after helping to port the products to Windows and financing the development of Softimage|XSI and Softimage|DS, Microsoft sold the Softimage unit to Avid Technology, Inc. which was looking to expand its visual effect capabilities.

[15] Softimage is mentioned in the song "Fabriqué au Québec" written by the Québécois humorists Pat Groulx and Louis-José Houde.

Softimage President Daniel Langlois and engineers Richard Mercille and Laurent Lauzon begin development of the company's 3-D application software in 1987.

The next year v1.65 was released including texture mapping followed in 1990 by v2.0 with a set of new animation tools, the concept of object constraints, a new Dopesheet editor, and spline modeling.

The software received a major update in 1991 with the release of v2.5 which included an Actor Module with Inverse Kinematics, a concept coming from robotics.

Additional updates followed in 1992 with v2.52 which included the addition of Motion Capture (Channels) and an SDK (DKit) and in 1993 with v2.6 which introduced a wide variety of features including Metaclay ("Metaballs"), Motion Control, Clusters, Shape Animation, mental ray rendering, Wave Deforms, Flock Animation (macro particles), a Standalone Particle System, Rotoscopy, 3D Booleans and Ghost display/Onion skinning.

Along with Microsoft's acquisition of Softimage in 1994, the company released v2.65 which introduced revamped File and Database Management, a new Topological scene graph update, Structure Keys, Extended Constraints, Expressions, Animation par Shapes, and Toon rendering.

Version 3.5 was released in 1996 and included Windows NT support, User Data, an Image Library, Ambulate, Stepmaler,[17] and the Saaphire SDK.

[19] In 1998, v3.8 brought a GDK (Game Development Kit / high-level AP), dotXSI file format, import/export pipeline (Direct 3D, VRML, 3D Studio) and the GameFilter, Merge, Polygon Reduction, Neural Quantizer (color reduction), Animation Sequencer (precursor to animation mixing), and Audio Track for lip synch features.

[20] This was followed a year later by v3.8 Service Pack 2 which included Advanced Rendering (Caustics support, Global Illumination), Bézier curves support, Surface Continuity Manager (SCM), Drop & Slide Points, and GoWithThe Flow (which constrains objects to particles) plus additional games toolkits: Nintendo NIFF toolkit and Sony PlayStation HMD.

Digital Studio was a hardware/software integrated solution which was sold as a turn-key system including pre-installed software and a hardware workstation.

[34] Also in 2002, Softimage released Softimage|XSI v3.0[35] which was an evolutionary update[36] but introduced Softimage|Behavior, a procedural animation system, marketed as a new Crowd Simulation engine.

[40] In 2004, v4.0 was released[41][42] which included new Rigid Body Dynamics[43] based on ODE,[44] Character SDK, Custom Display Host, XML-based UI definition, new XGS real time shader pipeline,[45] a new Vector and Raster Paint tool in the compositing module[42] and shipped with Syflex.