From “Fuel For The Mind”, edition 1, La Cite des Enfants Perdus—Buf Compagnie 1995
(aka The City of Lost Children)

http://vimeo.com/24917633

I remember watching this back in the old days when I worked at Softimage/Microsoft.
Many thanks to Miquel Campos for giving me this CD.

What’s this flea made of anyway? It’s not an electronic model, not a digitized photo, it’s a cute little chimera concocted in C. G. I., modelled, dreaded, and animated by his creators at the Buf Compagnie, using a mythological method of mathematics that took hundreds of hours on the computer.

The surface texture was obtain-ed by using several layers of lovely materials such as beach pebbles, green beans, snake skin, pig skin, leather, etc. The animators studied hours and hours of documentary films to find out how fleas act out there in nature. Now they know everything about how fleas hop, skip, jump, land, sting and drink, and do scores of dirty itchy tricks that have earned them a worldwide reputation.

Given the variety of shots where the flea would star, the animators modelled a series of fleas with varying degrees of definition. The most sharply defined had no less than 800.000 polygons.

Prix Ars Electronica 1996

City of Lost Children trailer

Eye-Candy Reel 2005
SOFTIMAGE|XSI 5.0

http://vimeo.com/24621051

While I was cleaning out my basement, I found Computer Graphics World, Feb 1998, sitting on top of my pile of decades-old Sports Illustrateds.

On the cover, Geri from Pixar was created using a new surface modeling technology called “subdivision surfaces”.

In the Spotlight, “Maya…appears to have positioned itself as a true competitor with the likes of major players such as Softimage…”

Click to view full page from CGW

Formerly code-named Digital Studio, Softimage/DS is “a complete turnkey system [that] costs approximately $100,000”

Click to view full page from CGW

Feature article: Unraveling Riven
To achieve the “next level of graphic reality…Cyan switched from Mac-based Vision3D from Strata, which was used to develop Myst, to the SGI version of Softimage 3D.”

This huge set, which consists of more than 2 million faces and 20,000-plus models, required two hours just to load in Softimage.

SOFTIMAGE Resource Guide Summary 1997

From the Summer 1997 Resource Guide, an ad for the complete line of digital media creation: 3D, Digital Studio, Toonz, and Eddie.

Thanks to Alan Fregtman for sending me the links.

Softimage 3D promotional video tape 1995 : Digital Domain, Psygnosis, Industrial Light and Magic and more…
Part 1:

Part 2:

Thanks to Miquel Campos, who brought me some vintage SOFTIMAGE|3D stuff all the way from Spain ;-), including a SOFTIMAGE|3D demo disk from 1999.

From the demo CD, here’s the advanced character animation demo, given by some guy who looks vaguely familiar.

http://vimeo.com/23367433

Thanks to Octavian from the XSI mailing list, here’s a reel from an old XSI CD he had.
Not sure if it is from XSI 1.5 or XSI 2.0.

http://vimeo.com/23058260

Here’s a collage of frames from the reel:

Some poladroid pictures of shirts I found while cleaning out my attic yesterday.

T-shirt from a SOFTIMAGE|3D training kit:

SOFTIMAGE|SDK t-shirt (front, back)

Softimage 10 years:

Softimage Technology Group–For awhile, I was part of the Technology Group, which was a group of Sumatra and DS developers charged with building common technology between DS and Sumatra.

IBC ’95. A month after I joined Softimage, they sent me to Amsterdam for IBC. I had been training for the Montreal marathon; instead I did the half in Amsterdam in the rain.

SIGGRAPH ’96 in New Orleans. I did the Canal Street Classic 5k while I was down at siggraph. It started and ended right outside my hotel, which was convenient. One of the hottest runs I’ve ever done; not enjoyable at all.

In late 1999 and early 2000, Canada Post issued a series of Millennium souvenir stamps, including a Softimage stamp. The Softimage stamp was part of a Media Technologies souvenir sheet, which included Imax, Softimage, Ted Roger Sr, Sir William Stephenson.

Softimage: From the Computer Age to the Dinosaur Age

As a Softimage employee, I received a copy of the stamp as a memento:

Click for full-size image Many thanks to Rui Santos, who took the time to send me some scans of a “Words from the Wizard” newsletter from back in October 1995. Here’s the cover from that issue. The big headline: SOFTIMAGE Web ’95! This fall, all you ever wanted to know about SOFTIMAGE will be available on the World Wide Web. Visit the SOFTIMAGE Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/Softimage… I remember being in a meeting where they presented the first designs for that new web page. It’s easy to forget that there was a time when companies didn’t have web pages 😉 I used the waybackmachine to dig up some old softimage.com web pages (see below):

1995

Web page from 1995

1997

1997

2002

25 Sept 2002

2006

15 March 2006