Hi there,
There's not much info about SESI Prisms (Houdini's ancestor) on the internet. So I thought why not make a thread related to it.
Version 6.4 that floats around was released in 1996 and I'm running it on Octane under IRIX 6.5.30.
Here's a video clip of me rushing through its menus. I like the archaic interface that doesn't look like anything.
It would be great to hear from somebody who used the program in the 90s (even if it was just for flying logos).
Yeah, though the "web" was fully in swing during the major usage years of Prisms, there's really not a lot of info out there. Here's one of the better mini histories on it:
To mark the 25th year of Side Effects Software we talk to co-founder Kim Davidson and to SideFX's Sci-Tech Oscar winners about their work on micro-voxels.
www.fxguide.com
...and it's a real shame too because until they stepped up the juice with Houdini, it was Prisms that was the most production tuned DCC on the market for studio work because that's where it was born from, like Wavefront. Not a uni project, not a 3rd party commercial software creation by an academic engineer with no production experience. It was the commercialization of the Omnibus studio tools, same as how Nuke began life as the in-house compositor at Digital Domain.
I got to see it and take part in SESI's wares becoming the de facto VFX backbone of high end VFX production in Hollywood, and it began with Prisms. On the heels of Siggraph 1992 and post Jurassic Park everyone was gaga for IK, while most operators at the time had no aptitude and might never have aptitude for actually using IK effectively, since character animation isn't just something you pick up. At Metrolight we started evaluating upgrades to our in-house Wavefront tech based pipeline and toolset. All the buzz made everyone excited for Softimage, and then to a lesser extent TDI, solely because of their industry leading IPR tech. We had all of them come through on a dog-n-pony. When SESI came to demo, because they weren't as well known outside of Canada, only two of us even came to the demo.
It was clear, after having used Wavefront and Alias, seeing the updates from them, and Softimage, and TDI, it was clear that Prisms was the only package (other than Wavefront) actually designed for production work. It had the best interface to Renderman, was completely open and scriptable. You didn't have to wait for 3rd parties or an inhouse software team to write "plug-ins" you had a procedural toolbox to build your own solutions, and then if you could code and script you could basically do anything. Same as Houdini, just with a process stack procedural interface prior to nodes. Two of us made a stink and basically shamed some of the other TDs into a second demo from SESI and they won the contract so that Dr. John could create the award winning transformation FX for the TV show Viper.
Not too long after, a contingent of us from Metrolight got hired during the early startup of DD 1.0 in 1993 a few months before Siggraph. The company started out with Softimage and Alias, but once development and pre-production for True Lies started the FX team pressured management to get us Prisms, for the same reasons, only this time thankfully it wasn't just two of us. "We can't do the work needed without it," was what we told them, and it was true. And so from that point on, however grudgingly in the beginning (or middle) of DD 1.0's history, Prisms was the VFX backbone and responsible for a majority of the heavy lifting in the Features division until being replaced by Houdini towards the end of the '90s.
Shortly after, or concurrently, Prisms replaces Symbolics as the workhorse at VIFX and it also took hold at Sony Pictures Imageworks. One of the reasons I left DD in late 1997 was because they were dragging their feet on upgrading to Houdini. I went to Centropolis FX to work on Godzilla '98 where a former DD sup had already got SESI in place. We actually had both Prisms and Houdini simultaneously for the first several months, developing parallel pipelines to test if we were confident enough to move to Houdini. I helped make the call to do that and then in joint film dailies and cooperation with Imageworks, also working on the project, I discovered they were sticking with Prisms at least through Godzilla (they moved to Houdini in time to put it to work on Hollow Man though).
Anyway, I loved Prisms. Houdini is far and away so much more but I still have a major soft spot for Prisms and the things I and my team were able to come up with.
