Kinetix

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

~ the eulogy ~

kinetix existed for three years and put its name on a splash screen people still remember. i knew the product a long time before i knew there had been a publisher, which is the normal way around for anybody who was not buying professional 3d software in 1996. i was twelve that year and two years off my first modem.

the company stopped existing at roughly the moment i arrived. autodesk closed its purchase of discreet logic in march 1999, the kinetix name went into the new division, and i had got online the previous year. so the brand and i overlapped by about twelve months, and i had no idea it was there.

the history behind the name runs back further than the name does. autodesk had been in 3d graphics since 1990 with 3d studio for dos, written for it by the yost group, an outside team under gary yost. that product went through four dos releases. then the yost group rewrote it for windows nt, and shortly before it shipped autodesk renamed its multimedia division kinetix and set it up in san francisco to publish the result.

3d studio max 1.0 came out in april 1996. it landed on windows nt workstations at a moment when softimage and the alias side of the business were still mostly living on silicon graphics hardware that cost several times as much. that was the argument, and it worked immediately.

i want to be straight about the distance here. i never ran this software and i am not going to dress up a version number glimpsed on somebody else's screen as a memory. what i can say is that in the years right after this, 3d studio max was one of the handful of program names a turkish teenager with a modem knew without having any route to a copy. the name traveled a great deal further than the license did. kinetix is who put it on there.

~ the dossier ~

~ the numbers ~

by 1997 kinetix had shipped more than fifty-three thousand copies of 3d studio max. the roncarelli report that year put it at twenty-nine percent of the professional 3d animation market overall and thirty-eight percent of the pc segment, and animation world had the division holding close to two thirds of professional animation on the pc. character studio came out of the same unit, with its footstep-driven biped system and the physique tool for skinning a character onto a skeleton.

~ the sale ~

in august 1998 autodesk announced it was buying discreet logic, a montreal company whose flame and inferno systems did high-end film compositing. estimates at announcement ran to about five hundred and twenty million dollars. by the time it closed in march 1999 the figure was nearer four hundred and ten million. autodesk put its 3d business and its new compositing business into a single unit and called that unit discreet. kinetix was the half that lost its name.

the product carried on regardless. 3d studio max became lowercase 3ds max under discreet branding, and in march 2005 autodesk dropped the discreet name too and called the whole thing autodesk media and entertainment. the software has now outlived two publisher names that were invented specifically in order to publish it.

~ the long tail ~

what kinetix actually did was move professional 3d off dedicated unix workstations and onto a pc running windows nt, at a price a small studio could reach. everything downstream of that, the plug-in economy and the freelance animator working off one machine, stands on ground this division broke inside a three-year window.

kinetix itself is now a footnote inside an article about a different division. there is no logo file for it on wikipedia and nothing on commons. the only place the word survives in public is on old boxes and on the startup screen of version 1 and version 2, which is a strange afterlife for a company name, still legible on software that is still running.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »