Sidenote: SGI purchasd Alias and Wavefront in a desperate attempt to compete with Microsoft who had bought up Softimage, in 1996. Alias and Wavefront, rivals, were forced to work with each other, the ad campaign for the merger was "Alias/Wavefront Watch the Sparks Fly", of course the most popular took center stage, Alias, and the entire product line morphed to resemble the GUI of Alias' product line, Wavefront's code was still used in Maya, though sales people for Alias pretended like it was theirs. Alias Poweranimator (I had used) was completely useless for animation, as it contained too many features and took too long to render.. I preferred Wavefront cause I found a technique for making animations with Wavefront, that I have not been able to duplicate since with any package {including blender}. Most 3D pakages these days are useless to me (how can I say this? It took me about 3 weeks to animate thorax, and you won't find much animation these days interacting with a complex terrain, you can only do this with IK).. Animators tend to use pose to pose animation, which is really interpolated forward kinematics, instead of inverse kinematics which is the animation technique that made Jurrasic Park famous. Forward kinematics animation can't be easily recognized, but "walks" tend not to interract with terrain, nor look realistic, figures seem to skate on the surface rather than touch the surface and propel forward with the surface. On the other hand, "Thorax" used a contiguous form of Inverse Kinematics where every keyframe contributes to the solution, this means that the animation seems to flow. The only package I've seen that works this way is Sega Animanium {I guess it wasn't successful in the world market, but there is still a site in japanese}. )