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.

[11] 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).

Motion: Animation of objects and parameters via keyframes, constraints, mathematical expressions, paths, and function curves.

Actor: Rigging and animation of digital characters using skeletons, as well as dynamics tools for physics simulations of object interactions.