Alias|Wavefront

» see alias.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

this was not software you bought. you got hired somewhere that already had it, on a silicon graphics workstation that cost more than a car and under a license priced for a studio rather than a person. i have never opened maya. i know the name the way most people know it, off the end of film credits, scrolling past at a speed nobody reads at.

the alias half started in toronto in 1983, founded by stephen bingham, nigel mcgrath, susan mckenna and david springer on a sixty-one thousand dollar grant from the national research council of canada and whatever money the four of them had. the name came the following year at a restaurant in detroit during siggraph, and it is the best origin story in this whole category: they called the company alias because at that point its only actual revenue was springer's work on an anti-aliasing routine for silicon graphics.

what they built was poweranimator, and it did the effects work for terminator 2 in 1991, which took the academy award for visual effects the following year. alias went public in 1990 and raised around thirty-five million. wavefront, the other half, had been founded in santa barbara in 1984 and had its own oscar coming, awarded to bill kovacs and roy hall in 1997 for the advanced visualizer.

none of this touched turkey except as finished frames. there was no domestic effects industry to put those machines in and no reason for anyone to import one, so the software arrived here the way it arrived almost everywhere outside a few cities: already rendered, at twenty-four frames a second, with the tool invisible.

~ the record ~

~ the merger that made the name ~

on 7 february 1995 sgi merged alias and wavefront into a single division called alias|wavefront. the reason was defensive. microsoft had bought softimage the year before, and sgi read a software company from redmond entering high-end 3d as a threat worth consolidating against, so the two competitors it already owned became one product line.

they started building maya that same year and shipped it in 1998. it took over. by the early 2000s the question in a film or game pipeline was not whether you used maya but which version, and the pipe in the middle of the wordmark had become one of those pieces of typography that a whole profession recognizes on sight.

~ the funny part ~

on 1 march 2003 the academy of motion picture arts and sciences gave alias|wavefront a scientific and technical academy award for maya. this is the highest thing that can happen to a piece of software: an industry formally recording that its work would not exist without you.

on 17 july 2003, four and a half months later, the company put out a press release titled "alias|wavefront celebrates 20th anniversary and announces name change to alias". the anniversary announcement and the retirement notice were the same document. the pipe went and wavefront went with it, eight years after being merged in. the thing they had just won the oscar for kept shipping under the shorter name.

~ how it actually ended ~

sgi was in trouble by then and started selling assets. in 2004 it sold alias to the ontario teachers' pension plan and accel-kkr for fifty-seven point one million dollars, which is a striking number for a company holding the standard tool of an entire industry. alias bought kaydara that september for its character animation work and carried on.

autodesk announced its offer on 4 october 2005 and completed the purchase on 10 january 2006 for a hundred and ninety-seven million in cash. the private equity owners had roughly tripled their money in eighteen months. maya 7.0 was the last release with alias on the box, and everything after 8.5 switched to autodesk's year-based naming.

the products all lived. maya is autodesk maya and still runs most of the animation industry, and studiotools became autodesk alias, which is what car companies shape sheet metal in. alias.com does not resolve. the name that survived is the one somebody picked as a joke in a detroit restaurant in 1984 about a rendering artifact, and the name that died is the one two companies spent eight years building.

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