Products
Wavefront developed their first product, Preview, during the first year of business. The company's production department helped tune the software by using it on commercial projects, creating opening graphics for television programs. One of the first customers to purchase Preview was Universal Studios, for the television program Knight Rider. Further early customers included NBC, Electronic Arts, and NASA.
Some of Wavefront's early animation software was created by Bill Kovacs, Jim Keating, and John Grower, after they left Robert Abel and Associates. Roy A. Hall, and others after him, developed the company's flagship product, the Wavefront Advanced Visualizer.
In 1988, Wavefront released the Personal Visualizer, a desktop workstation interface to their high-end rendering software. As with Wavefront's other software, it was developed for Silicon Graphics computers, but it was later ported to Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, DEC and Sony systems. Wavefront purchased Silicon Graphics first production workstation after their offer to buy the prototype they were given a demo of was knocked back.
In 1989, the company released the Data Visualizer, an early commercial tool for scientific visualization.
In 1991, Wavefront introduced Composer, an image manipulation product. Composer became a standard for 2D and 3D compositing and special effects for feature films and television.
In 1992, they released two new animation tools that worked with the Advanced Visualizer. Kinemation was a character animation system that used inverse kinematics for natural motion. Dynamation was a tool for interactively creating and modifying particle systems for realistic, natural motion. Dream Quest Images used Dynamation and Composer to create over 90 visual effects sequences for the film Crimson Tide.
In 1994, the same year that rival Alias made a deal with Nintendo, Wavefront partnered with Atari to develop the GameWare game development software. GameWare was the exclusive graphics and animation development system for the Atari Jaguar.
Wavefront software was used in numerous major films, including Outbreak, Aladdin, True Lies and Stargate. Electronic Arts' Richard Taylor, said that Wavefront's software was "so beautifully designed that even a non-technical person could learn it. Wavefront was a major reason that CG took a leap forward."
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