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.
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.