ENGINEERING

TORONTO, CANADA -- Alias/Wavefront(TM), an SGI (NYSE:SGI) company, today announced that the first public showing of its new OpenFlight® translator for Maya® technology will take place at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) Nov 26-29th in booth, No. 402. The new technology takes the form of a plug-in translator that allows for the importing and exporting of OpenFlight Format® data into the company's award-winning Maya software. While best known for its use in the creation of 3D content for the film and interactive entertainment industries, Maya's vast 3D toolset and open architecture is well suited to the needs of the military and commercial visual-simulation markets that have systems based on OpenFlight databases. ``Over 10 years of creating software for the realtime 3D graphics market has left us well positioned to develop technology for the Vis-Sim marketplace,'' states Mike Wilson, Director of 3D Interactive Technology at Alias/Wavefront. ``With the Maya Open Flight translator plug-in, those producing content for Vis-Sim applications will be able to reuse legacy data and exploit the productivity advantages of Maya such as its innovative user interface and efficient 3D workflow. Moreover, Maya's modeling history, MEL scripting language and open API are all features which will prove highly valuable to this growing community.'' Maya in Vis-Sim Until recently the Vis-Sim market was solely based upon highly proprietary hardware and software platforms. The advent of low cost 3D hardware and technology improvements that have come from the mass market computer game industry in the past couple of years (i.e.. entertainment oriented war-games, urban simulation titles) have caused parts of this market to re-tool around lower cost PC-based technologies. While Maya is best known within the entertainment industry, it is in fact already in use in some Vis-Sim applications. EPL Productions Inc., developers of visual databases for realtime flight simulation, has been using Maya for the past twelve months. Says Gene Lynch, President: ``With over ten years of experience in the interactive game world, prior to moving into flight simulation, we were aware of the power that Maya offered. That power includes such things as an integrated workflow, advanced texture mapping tools and model history. Having the Maya OpenFlight translator will extend this flexibility into the high-end realtime market and give us increased model quality and production speed.'' Maya, available for the IRIX®, Windows®, Linux® and Macintosh platforms, is the leading 3D software package in the interactive entertainment market, having been the tool of choice for such renowned game titles as GT3(TM), Star Wars® Rogue Leader(TM): Rogue Squadron® 2 and Madden NFL(TM)2001. Its leadership in this market is due to such features as: powerful modeling and animation toolsets, human motion simulation capabilities, real world dynamics and particle systems. Moreover, Maya's open API and MEL scripting language give engineers the ability to customize and extend the software's existing features and UI, making it easily adaptable to existing computing environments.