Each 3D application available on SGI served a purpose for its time.
Alias didn't begin its life with feature films in mind. It was more industrial design and as animation features developed, for turn table design views, it slowly and organically became a visual effects and game development solution beyond its industrial design aims.
Softimage was from the outset designed to be applied to visual effects and animation.
Houdini began life as a software called
Prisms. They did aim to bring visual effects and 3d animation to the masses but it was very expensive. Due to its procedural approach it found a niche in motion graphics and logos as well as particle simulations as it had a much more advanced particle system than the competition. Houdini has remained the strongest simulation suite comparatively to the other applications to this day. It is so specialized though, as a skill set, that you often do not find people creating many models or character rigs in Houdini the way you would in Softimage or Maya, due to the initial attraction being the visual effects specialty area of the software over the last 15 years.
Maya began life as Alias PowerAnimator and Wavefront. When Disney began production on Dinosaur there was a directed attempt to combine the Wavefront render engine and Power Animator's animation base code into a new unified UI. This would turn all data information into generalized attributes that pass information to each other throughout the application for seamless integration between geometry creation and rendering. This integration made Maya a singular self contained application that was a prototype universal adapter for different workflow ideas that could crop up in production. If you have basic C+ code capabilities, and later adding python, one could quickly create custom tools to stream line many functions in Maya and even create special UI without deeper coding or software development knowledge. Because Maya's framework allows these simple attribute to attribute connections it became a universal adapter for outside render engines like Renderman, Mental Ray, Arnold, Vray, etc etc. Greatly reducing pipeline technical hangups. This single adaptability has kept Maya on the cutting edge of 3D animation and asset creation.
Lightwave 3D was software that began as part of Newtek's Video Toaster suite. It was a very basic text and 3d primitives generator for the Video Toaster product and eventually was separated into a standalone product by version 3 I believe. It was Amiga only up until v4 which had its first release on pc which was also the first version I used. Lightwave was a blue collar 3d application as it was under $2000 while Alias, Softimage, and Houdini were well above $10000 as well as requiring an SGI machine to run whilst Lightwave could run on an Amiga or PC that cost $1200 on average. Lightwave was not nearly as feature complete as Power Animator, Softimage, or later Maya, but it delivered a lot of capability for one tenth the price or less. It also allowed 99 render nodes per license dongle where as the bigger applications required individual licenses per render node so Lightwave became the way smaller TV productions were even able to attempt to do 3D animation at all from the mid 90s onwards.
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A discussion of usefulness.
Maya and Alias/Power Animator both have very strong polygon and nurbs tools. Maya of course is a UI that was formed after people had used the other packages like Softimage and Power Animator so naturally there is quite a bit of streamlining going on by the time Maya was created.
Power Animator feels a little clunky in comparison to Maya but does have some areas of advantage over the first few iterations of Maya. By the time you get to Maya 4 and beyond the advantages in modeling over Power Animator are quite apparent because you can so polygon, subdivision, and nurbs and even retopoligize with the magnet tool or perform symmetry with mirrored instancing.
Lightwave was quite simple and when I was beginning in 3D animation in 1994 a lot of people felt that Lightwave was far easier to understand than Softimage, Alias, and even later Maya. Since it was the cheapest and easiest to learn it really did carve a niche for itself that hasn't died since. Lightwave is still utilized on many sci-fi tv series.
Houdini was always the odd one out with its procedural approach compared to the other apps though I have met so many Houdini users who said that Houdini just made sense the way their brain works compared to the other 3d software they tried. Now it is a staple fx software that is used in most big budget CG heavy films over he last 15 years.
Maya remains the centerpiece in most production pipelines. It has only been further refined as a product since other applications have made advancements. I am currently putting together a 3rd Maya 6.5 Tutorial for modeling a sink. It covers the Bonus Tools and I figured out how to install them correctly on Irix since the last video as well as the MJPolytools. This tutorial should provide insight as to why Maya was then and is still the most used software. Even though it is a little clunky in comparison to modern maya you can quickly see how, with a good understanding of a few of its tools and modeling approaches, it is quite capable of being able to quickly create any idea fairly fast. I will also cover retopology and symmetry modeling with instancing on the tut. I am going to attempt to get Renderman for Maya working as well. Since it is quite a bit faster than Mental Ray and makes beautiful Pixar esque renders quite easy.
ON SGI Machines
Maya 6.5 with mental Ray is the most useful overall 3d animation application on Irix. Even the 6.5 features are still VERY capable in being able to produce high end quality imagery to this day. Most people did not fully exploit the features in Maya 6.5 with Mental Ray during the Maya 6.5 release era because it takes time to try and test some of the higher end rendering features. So the Depth of Field, physical Lights, blurred reflections and refractions, displacements were not fully used together as a collective featureset until Maya 8.5 - Maya 2009 as the processors on PC were not Multi-core or 64 yet. What amazes me is that when I test these features on my Octane or even o2 they are slow to render BUT they work. Irix's and SGI 64 bit architecture makes these bleeding edge features in Maya 6.5 work at reasonable times. I can imagine that these were the primary tools at ILM for the CGI in the phantom menace. You can see the droids and space craft use the fresnel shading, though I imagine they customized their own shaders vs using the default set that came with Mental Ray. It was also capable of volume clouds and particles. BUT that is really the point here. Because Maya's framework was designed with this kind of workflow in mind is why it has been a constantly adapting and changing package. Due primarily to the philosophy that it have a core workflow of attributes that simply speak to each other.
Houdini is quite cool to play with though I am not sure Houdini 6.5 on Irix has Volume shader capabilities. Guess I should fire up my octane and look.
Houdini's copy SOP really is a great motion graphics framework. Definitely more calibrated overall for motion graphics ideas than Maya 6.5, so in that regard it has quite a useful set of tools for graphic stingers and logos.
Softimage 3.9.x has quite a few features I haven't even began to really utlize. You would likely have far more ease of use attempting anything in Maya 6.5 ofr modeling or rendering rather than using Softimage in general but this program is able to handle quite a bit of data very well. I haven't stress tested its texture capabilities. I know that Dinosaurs and Terminators had been animated in this software before the days of Maya. Its implementation of Mental Ray is really powerful for the timeframe it was released. I am still surprised by its capability even now when I do simple modeling and lighting renders.
PowerAnimator on Irix is probably most useful beyond industrial design in that its render engine is very fast and clean. Since we do not have render farms to create animation, Power Animator might be the fastest way to produce animation on an SGI. Sure, it slows down if you use raytracing for more than just shadows but the render times are quick enough for simple phong and lambert renders with shadows that one workstation could kick out some animations rather fast, in a couple hours for even slower SGI machines.
This render engine is quite charming for its age and has a signature that just screams early SGI era renders that were seen across many dos games when 3d renders began being preferred over pixel art. As was seen here with Quake in the PA thread.
Blender I feel must be mentioned even though I don't really use it that much. It is quite capable and has a nice render engine. At some point I will give it an Old Irix Tutorial vid. Blender still exists today, is still open source (free), and is very capable with all the modern features and modern capabilities that its contemporary non-free applications contain.
Lightwave is also complimented with a very fast raytracer. It also, like PA, could be used to produce animation rather quickly. Logos, space ships, and soft shadows give the user a nice range of simple tools to create nice simple clean renders.
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