rendering. The Interactive Developer's Entertainment Authoring Software (IDEAS) with ProPlay and ProPlay Plus solutions was introduced in 1994 and included Softimage Creative Environment, Eddie compositing, video-effects software, distributed ray tracer and a 3-D particles kit. The 1995 release of v3.0 was the first major release in which the product was named Softimage|3D and the same year, the company released the first version of its Softimage|3D Extreme edition which included Osmose, Virtual Theater (real time capture and virtual set compositing) and mental ray. Version 3.0 included NURBS Surfaces and Modeling (Trims, Instances and Relational modeling), Qstretch deform (squash and stretch), Custom hotkey remapping (swift keys), a Spreadsheet function, the 1st generation of Polygon Reduction, as well as Games Features (Advanced polygonal modeling tools, 2D/3D Paint + UV Texturing + Painterly Effects, Color Reduction, and Game Export / filtering / on target viewing for SEGA Saturn). Version 3.5 was released in 1996 and included Windows NT support, User Data, an Image Library, Ambulate, Stepmaler, and the Saaphire SDK. It was followed in 1997 by v3.7 which expanded the Game Export functionality to include Sony PlayStation Export / Import / Viewer + Attribute Editors and also added Colors at Vertices (painting, OpenGL, Softimage + mr rendering, Saaphire), Direct3D Export / Import, and RenderMap (baking light maps). In 1998, v3.8 brought a GDK (Game Development Kit / high-level AP), dotXSI file format, import/export pipeline (Direct 3D, VRML, 3D Studio) and the GameFilter, Merge, Polygon Reduction, Neural Quantizer (color reduction), Animation Sequencer (precursor to animation mixing), and Audio Track for lip synch features. This was followed a year later by v3.8 Service Pack 2 which included Advanced Rendering (Caustics support, Global Illumination), Bézier curves support, Surface Continuity Manager (SCM), Drop & Slide Points, and GoWithThe Flow (which constrains objects to particles) plus additional games toolkits: Nintendo NIFF toolkit and Sony PlayStation HMD. Softimage|3D v3.9 was released in 2000 and v4.0 was unveiled in 2001 at SIGGRAPH and released in 2002. Softimage|DS In 1993, Softimage began developing what was initially known as Softimage Digital Studio on the Silicon Graphics IRIX (SGI) operating system. Digital Studio was a hardware/software integrated solution which was sold as a turn-key system including pre-installed software and a hardware workstation. The first Windows NT prototype of the product, under the new name Softimage|DS, was released in 1996 followed in 1997 by its 1.0 release on the Intergraph TDZ workstation and in 1998