Softimage 3D

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.

Softimage Creative Environment 2.66 - Matter module with Render Setup dialogue box