The thing is, as TY pointed out Nichimen - I've read that essay awhile ago from pg how Lisp gave them competitive advantage... and if you look at Nichimen (spinoff from Symbolics) their path was almost the same. There were SubD's before in our industry (Catmull Clark, Ligthwave MetaNURBS that fori made), but when Nichimen made SubD's into Mirai (and later Nendo) it caused a revolution in 3D, especially modeling. Prior to that we were churning out NURBS for detailed characters and objects, some ventured into poly-by-poly modeling, and when Mirai came along (even if not alot of people used it) it was suddenly a box-modeling revolution. There were stars aligned for them though, they had a system built on top of Franz Allegro, Bay Raitt was there to give them input (the guy that modeled Gollum - look at the workflow that changed minds of modelers back then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgvomRTW80 ) and there was a stale air around other software packages.
This was still the era when PA/Maya was coming out, SI|XSI was on the horizon and packages cost were $15K+. Bad management ruined Nichimen.
There is a common motif amongst Nichimen, Naughty Dog, even Viaweb - they all had a system that let them react to and develop new stuff at levels and speed no one could've competed against. And if you look at the talk from Dan Weinreb, he is basically saying the same thing about them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8
My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it? I was in Final Fantasy 7 project where we used Nichimen almost exclusively for real-time models, which was 1995-1997. Then I went into Final Fantasy the Movie project which adopted Maya (beta back then). We started off with nurbs but soon decided to shift to poly model, which was sometime in 1998, iirc. I don't quite remember we jumped right to SubD or we used layered shapedrive (low-poly cage morphs high-poly model) first.
I do remember I cursed a lot about Maya's scripting interface and C++ API, and wished to go back to the old days I could invoke REPL in Nichimen and hack almost everything in it. I ended up making a Maya plugin that allows Scheme to be scripting interface instead of MEL, and after that I used Scheme almost exclusively scripting Maya, but it wasn't as close as the feel in Nichimen where you could open the hood and mess around its guts.
> My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it?
I'm sure it wasn't the first one. LW had MetaNurbs before that, and Catmull had paper before that also - which is funny since Pixars RAT incorporated SubD's only later.
What Nichimen did was show the world a new way of doing things, that how we got things like connect poly shape in maya and other tools which didn't yet have proper SubD support.
Funny you've mentioned working on FF the movie (I still have nice rejection letter for being too young :) ), I still reference that kilauea parallel renderer paper now and then. It was a real feat. I also remember reading somewhere how you guys had only a handful of shaders in your pipeline - first time I've heard about someone actually making and using ubershaders in production.
Nichimen Mirai tech was bough by softimage and later some of the features made it into the XSI (poly bridge and other cool stuff).
Maya is still IMO a great platform, you can extend it to whatever you wish.
This was still the era when PA/Maya was coming out, SI|XSI was on the horizon and packages cost were $15K+. Bad management ruined Nichimen.
There is a common motif amongst Nichimen, Naughty Dog, even Viaweb - they all had a system that let them react to and develop new stuff at levels and speed no one could've competed against. And if you look at the talk from Dan Weinreb, he is basically saying the same thing about them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8