Wavefront Technologies

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Wavefront Technologies was an American company founded in 1984 that was one of the pioneers in software development for compositing and computer animation . But Wavefront also played a role in the analog film sector. The company developed special effects for the television series Knight Rider and NASA , among other things . In 1995 Wavefront was taken over by the computer manufacturer Silicon Graphics together with the Canadian competitor Alias ​​Research and continued as the Alias ​​| Wavefront brand. When it was taken over by Autodesk , this name was dropped. Today, only the 3D computer animation package Maya , initiated by Wavefront, is still on the market. Maya is one of the standard programs for 3D animation and special effects in film and has its development team in Toronto .

history

Science fiction films were booming in the early 1980s . To meet the strong demand for large-looking spaceships and starbursts , Bill Kovacs , Mark Sylvester and Larry Barels founded Wavefront Technologies in 1984, "Wavefront" referring to the surfing paradise of Santa Barbara . The young company received its first orders for commercials. One of the early areas of expertise was motion control , a technique in which a camera movement is programmed so that it can be repeated as often as required. So you could - still with analog film, i.e. celluloid - create scenes that consisted of two or more sources. There was no standardized control software for these applications. Wavefront developed one.

At the same time as the introduction of high-performance computers from Silicon Graphics in the mid-1980s, there was an increasing need for software that could be used to digitally create real models and effects (such as fire). The product that made Wavefront known well beyond Hollywood was The Advanced Visualizer (TAV). It is considered one of the first professional 3D animation packages with particle effects .

In 1988, Wavefront took over Abel Image Research from Robert Abel and Associates and received grants from the Belgian government to set up a branch in Ghent . That was the reason why, even after the merger with Alias, technical support for the software was provided from Ghent. Because of Abel's good contacts to the Japanese television market, Wavefront also became known in Japan. Even today Maya is only delivered in two languages, English and Japanese.

In 1993, the French competitor Thomson Digital Images (TDI) was taken over. TDI had developed a technique that made it relatively easy to describe curves in three-dimensional space, the NURBS . For two decades, virtually all 3D movie characters, such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, were based on NURBS curves and surfaces .

In 1995 Silicon Graphics took over the company and merged the brand with the competition Alias. During that time Maya came into being, the basic ideas of which were developed in Santa Barbara before most of the team moved to the Alias ​​office in Toronto.