PowerAnimator was used in the film to create Arnold Schwarzenegger’s main enemy, the chromium killer cyborg.

The following year Alias released PowerAnimator and ILM again won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This gave Alias software high-profile recognition for the first time in movie animation when the pseudopod creature in the film (which was seen as one of the most technologically advanced at the time) was made with Alias NURBS rather than the standard polygons. This was closely linked to the use of Alias software by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which received a lot of publicity in 1989 when they won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects with The Abyss. In turn, Alias, which was founded in Toronto in 1983 by four people with the goal to produce a user-friendly animation program, had taken its’ name from the only paying gig the company had at the time – writing anti-aliasing programs for Silicon Graphics users.īy the early 1990s, a time when a lot of things were happening in the world of computer graphics, Alias already had a good reputation in the entertainment industry, at first through its’ modeling software Alias, which was one of the earliest programs to use NURBS, and later through PowerAnimator.

Silicon Graphics was already in a partnership with Alias as their hardware provider, selling a workstation every time Alias sold software. Softimage was a genius 3D software in the period we are talking about that’s why it was loved by studios and artists who used it, also it was a source of fear for the competitors. The merger, which would lead to the creation of Maya a few years later, happened in response to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Softimage at that time which was seen as a threat to Silicon Graphics’s market dominance in selling expensive workstations for use with computer graphics software. Silicon Graphics purchased Alias and Wavefront and combined them into Alias|Wavefront.

Autodesk maya software price