Autodesk is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Maya, its widely used modeling, animation and rendering software. The company has dedicated an area of its website to reviewing a decade of Maya accomplishments, starting with the 1998 Chris Landreth short film Bingo the Clown, which is available for viewing at http://area.autodesk.com/maya_anniversary. The site also offers a look into Maya 2009 and the numerous awards the software has racked up over the years.
Maya grew out of three 3D software lines: The Advanced Visualizer from Wavefront Technologies in California, Explore from Thomson Digital Image (TDI) in France and Power Animator from Alias in Canada. In 1993, Wavefront purchased TDI, and in 1995 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) purchased both Alias and Wavefront and combined them into one working company named Alias|Wavefront. Maya 1.0 was released in February of 1998 on the IRIX operating system. A Windows release followed in June of that year.
Alias|Wavefront was renamed Alias Systems in 2003, and sold to investors in 2004. Autodesk acquired Alias in 2006, making Maya a sibling of its once competing software package, 3D Studio Max (3ds Max). Many animation studios, vfx shops and game developers use both Max and Maya in their pipelines.
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