developed by a separate company. During this time, in 2000, Softimage acquired The Motion Factory, Inc. On October 23, 2008, Autodesk signed an agreement with Avid Technology to acquire the brand and the 3D animation assets of Softimage for approximately $35 million, thereby ending Softimage Co. as a distinct entity. The video-related assets of Softimage, including Softimage|DS (now Avid|DS) continue to be owned by Avid. Softimage products were made in Quebec. Softimage is mentioned in the song "Fabriqué au Québec" written by the Québécois humorists Pat Groulx and Louis-José Houde. Products Softimage|3D Originally named Softimage Creative Environment, this was the first product developed by Softimage. Softimage President Daniel Langlois and engineers Richard Mercille and Laurent Lauzon begin development of the company's 3-D application software in 1987. The user interface would remain largely unchanged for the next 16 years of the product's life. In a first for the industry, the software offered modeling, animation and rendering in a single integrated environment. Creative Environment 1.0 was introduced at SIGGRAPH in 1988 and the first public release, v0.8, was followed shortly by v1.0 all in 1988. The next year v1.65 was released including texture mapping followed in 1990 by v2.0 with a set of new animation tools, the concept of object constraints, a new Dopesheet editor, and spline modeling. The software received a major update in 1991 with the release of v2.5 which included an Actor Module with Inverse Kinematics, a concept coming from robotics. The Actor Module also included Bones, Flexible Skin (Envelopes), and Rigid-Articulated Body Dynamics. Softimage received a Technological and Scientific Academy Award for the module's innovation after it was employed in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (which itself won the Academy Award for Best Visual FX). Additional updates followed in 1992 with v2.52 which included the addition of Motion Capture (Channels) and an SDK (DKit) and in 1993 with v2.6 which introduced a wide variety of features including Metaclay ("Metaballs"), Motion Control, Clusters, Shape Animation, mental ray rendering, Wave Deforms, Flock Animation (macro particles), a Standalone Particle System, Rotoscopy, 3D Booleans and Ghost display/Onion skinning. Mental ray rendering was made possible by a rendering technology agreement between Softimage and mental images announced the same year. Along with Microsoft's acquisition of Softimage in 1994, the company released v2.65 which introduced revamped File and Database Management, a new Topological scene graph update, Structure Keys, Extended Constraints, Expressions, Animation par Shapes, and Toon