The Advanced Visualizer

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Also referred to by scientists as well as animators of yore as TAV, the flagship product of Wavefront Technologies through the eighties up to the nineties, made into an animators package after the hype about "The Abyss", "T2" and "Jurrasic Park". When Microsoft purchased Softimage in an attempt to take over the 3D computer graphics market, Silicon Graphics purchased Alias, a competitor of Wavefronts, and their competitor from England TDI (Thompson Digital) Explore, and created a super company called Alias|Wavefront (the realtime rendering capability of Maya, in fact came from TDI's IPR package). In 1996 Alias|Wavefront announced the release of Maya and coined the phrase "Watch the sparks fly" to express the siamese relationship between Wavefront and Alias. Recently the company was renamed to Alias technologies. Upon the merger of Alias and Wavefront, forced by SGI, Wavefront's programmers continued to reside in California but the management of the company was carried out in Toronto, Canada. When TAV was pulled from the market, Alias' representatives continued to peddle "Alias Power Animator" as a revolutionary animation package, though some artists were not impressed and had severe troubles producing animation exceeding the quality of TAV's Kinemation (a program that had many of features found in Inverse Kinematics packages such as Sega's Animanium, in the mid-90s!!).