History
Maya is the culmination of three 3D software lines: Wavefront's The Advanced Visualizer (in California), Thomson Digital Image (TDI) Explore (in France) and Alias' Power Animator (in Canada). In 1993 Wavefront purchased TDI, and in 1995 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) purchased both Alias and Wavefront (due to pressure from Microsoft's purchase of Softimage earlier that year) and combined them into one working company, producing a single package from their collective source code. The combined company was referred to as Alias|Wavefront. In the mid-1990s, the most popular pipeline in Hollywood films was a combination of tools: Alias Studio for modeling, Softimage for animation, and PhotoRealistic RenderMan for rendering. This combination was used for numerous films, such as Jurassic Park, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It took Alias|Wavefront two more years after the merger to release Maya.
Both Alias and Wavefront were working on their next generation of software at the time of the merger. Alias had taken a Macintosh product, "Alias Sketch!", moved it to the SGI platform and added many features to it. The code name for this project was "Maya", the Sanskrit term for "illusion." Maya was developed in close collaboration with Walt Disney Feature Animation, during the production of Dinosaur, and the GUI was all customizable as a requirement from Disney so they could set up their own GUI and workflow based on decades of animation experience. This had a large impact on the openness of Maya and later also helped the software become an industry standard, since many facilities implement extensive proprietary customization of the software to gain competitive advantage.
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