Autodesk Media and Entertainment was established in 1999 after Autodesk acquired Discreet Logic, Inc., and merged its operations with Kinetix.

AutoDesk had a lot of different software products at that point. These included 3ds Max, Viz, Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire, Smoke, Lustre, Combustion, Cleaner and Toxik. Autodesk Media and Entertainment's advanced compositing and editing product line, or "systems" line, is commonly referred to as IFFFS, which stands for Inferno/Flint/Fire/Flame/Smoke.

While companies like SoftImage, Alias and AutoDesk were growing and improving their graphics solutions, another company was developing a product that would eventually be a key component of any large animation studio. That component was motion capture and the company was Kaydara Inc.

Founded in 1993, Kaydara Inc. was a leading provider of solutions for the acquisition, authoring, and delivery of digital media content for Web, film, broadcast, broadband, and game development applications. It developed an award-winning product called  FiLMBOX^® and its broadcast systems products enabled content developers to acquire, manage, and deliver secure 3D mixed-media content in real time. Kaydara was a privately-held company headquartered in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

For many years Kaydara’s FilmBox was the animation industry standard program for editing, cleaning up and modifying motion capture and computer character animation data. When developers of 3D packages added features similar to FilmBox to their programs, some began to question the future of the software. In March 0f 2004, Kaydara answered the questions with MOTIONBUILDER, a very powerful and innovative character animation tool.

Motion capture was gaining importance in the world of animation, with more and more studios using the technology, and MOTIONBUILDER was the clear product of choice for those companies using motion capture. This did not go unnoticed by Alias.

The industry saw its first glimpse of mergers and acquisitions that would happen over a period of 2 years in August of 2004.

While attending a User Group meeting for Alias Maya users at SIGGRAPH 2004, in Los Angeles, president Doug Walker opened the meeting by welcoming the users and promised some exciting developments ahead. Then, at the end of the first break, Walker and Kaydara Inc. president Michel Besner announced that Alias was acquiring Kaydara. The acquisition was finalized in October, 2004.

Would this make Alias the powerhouse of the industry with its own suite of products and the MotionBuilder product from Kaydara? The industry would never know.

The two companies had barely completed their integration when on October 4, 2005, Autodesk, Inc. signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias.  On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD.

From 2001 to 2006 SoftImage continued to improve its product but did little on the acquisition front. That was, however, until July of 2006.

On July 6, 2006 Avid Technology, Inc. purchased the intellectual property assets of Character Animation Technologies Ltd.(CAT). The assets are now managed by Softimage Co., Avid’s wholly owned subsidiary. 

CAT has been a pioneer in providing intuitive tools for animators developing plug-ins for 3ds Max since 2003. Now those tools are under the control of SoftImage

On December 21, 2006, Avid Technology, Inc. announced that its Softimage, Co. subsidiary released SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® 6, the latest version of its flagship 3D animation and character creation software.

In addition to many new features, some significant features were made available in this version specifically for use with motion capture. A module within XSI 6 adds most features found in MotionBuilder, and in fact added several features that MotionBuilder does not have. The key area for motion capture enthusiasts is that of being able to transfer motion from one character rig to another, regardless of what software was used to develop the rig.

An excerpt from the SoftImage web site follows:

MOTOR—Motion Transformation
MOTOR is an intelligent and dependable solution for transferring motion from one character rig to another—think GATOR for character animation. Now you can transfer motion between character rigs of all sizes and proportions, all while preserving keyframe timing. Build reusable libraries of animation by importing and retargeting motion capture data onto arbitrary XSI character rigs.

Animation Layering
Animation layers give you an interactive and non-destructive way to add keyframes on top of existing animation, and break individual motions into primary and secondary animations without having to commit to changes or edits up front. Layers make it easy to work with motion capture data without wading through highly dense FCurves.