The Advanced Visualizer was a package famous for its use in the production of numerous Oscar-winning movies such as The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park.
Silicon Graphics responded by purchasing Alias Systems Corporation, and their two major competitors, Wavefront, and the French company TDI (Thomson Digital Images) for their Explore, IPR, and GUI technologies on February 7, 1995.
[2] In contrast to many modern day (2011) computer graphics animation software, TAV was a set of independent programs that each focused on one aspect of image synthesis as opposed to a monolithic product.
Many primitive utility programs such as graphics conversion were included in the toolkit and were frequently employed for batch processing via shell scripts.
fcheck loaded image files from disk into RAM and played them back at monitor synced frame rates for real time playback evaluation.
Paint was an image editing program for manipulation of bitmap graphics - its texture map support focused on the RLA, SGI, Cineon (now DPX) and TIFF file formats.
Support for 16 bit integer textures, sequencing capabilities for rotoscoping in addition to paint cloning from adjacent frames in the timeline.
Kinemation - an 'advanced' animation system that allowed for the manipulation of geometry using Inverse Kinematics (IK), geometric skinning to 'bones' featuring lattice based deformations.
Composer, though not an initial member of the family, is a time-line based (similar to after effects) compositing and editing system with color corrections, keying, convolution filters, and animation capabilities.