> 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

> 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.