From “Prototyping 3D Games: Lesson learned from Riven,” in the March 1998 issue of Game Developer Magazine.

“Softimage’s tools are really flexible, and are one of the biggest strengths of that whole package I think,” said Richard of the 3D application used to create RIVEN. “A lot of these animations were so complex in terms of the geometry that we knew we were only going to have one shot at fully rendering this thing — it was just going to take so much time. So we really tried to make sure that we had seen it as many times as possible in its various primitive stages, including wireframe and shaded views.”

For example, even with four SGI servers, the submarine adventures at the bottom of Jungle Island Bay lived in the queue for months because the atmospheric shaders and reflections caused the  animations to creak out very slowly, frame by frame.

Also in the March 1998 edition, a review of 3D Studio MAX R2, with a list of competitors with estimated prices:

• Softimage 3D ($7,500)
• Softimage 3D Extreme ($15,000)