The Advanced Visualizer

The Advanced Visualizer (TAV), a 3D graphics software package, was the flagship product of Wavefront Technologies from the 1980s until the 1990s.

A software package famous for its use in the production of numerous Oscar-winning movies such as The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park.

This was widely seen as the result of Microsoft purchasing Softimage in an attempt to take over the 3D computer graphics market. Silicon Graphics responded by purchasing Alias Systems Corporation, and their two major competitors, Wavefront, and the French company TDI (Thomson Digital Images) for their Explore, IPR, and GUI technologies. Thus SGI created the super-company Alias|Wavefront.

Wavefront's programmers continued to reside in California but the management of the company was carried out in Toronto, Canada.

In 1996 Alias|Wavefront announced the release of Maya which incorporated aspects of all 3 software suites.

Wavefront was renamed to Alias Technologies and acquired by Autodesk in 2005. Some of the technology under Autodesk's ownership is still sold today as part of Maya.

In contrast to many modern day (2011) computer graphics animation software, TAV was a set of independent programs that each focused on one aspect of image synthesis as opposed to a monolithic product. The collection of these smaller programs formed the entire suite based on simple interchange of mostly ASCII file formats such as OBJ.

The major components of the TAV software suite included: Model, Paint, Dynamation, Kinemation, Preview, and fcheck. Composer was also available as an add-on for compositing of imagery. Many primitive utility programs such as graphics conversion were included in the toolkit and were frequently employed for batch processing via shell scripts.

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