Wow inspired by Mirai! It was indeed a very cool application. In my oppinion stomped on PowerAnimator and Softimage.
Mirai was written all in common-lisp. Wings3D, inspired by Mirai, is written in Erlang.
Mirai was written all in common-lisp. Wings3D, inspired by Mirai, is written in Erlang.
This is Mirai: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgvomRTW80 Here is Bay Raitt working with it. Note the year. Also note that is the guy that worked on Golum (and later at Valve). Modeling in that video seems like a normal workflow by today's standards, however at the time NURBS/Patch modeling was all the rage and box modeling was a novelty most users were skeptical of. Mirai provided workflow which pushed it onto a new level. Prior to that Lightwave had something similar with its MetaNURBS.
IIRC, it was a time when Maya finally caught on (ver 2 I believe) and new Softimage (codename Sumatra, later XSI) was getting adopted too. Interesting fact is that Softimage bought nichimen's modeling toolset and integrated it into XSI.
So many firsts were spawned from Mirai. Some due to technical achievements/features, some by its users. Bridge poly tool comes to mind, and of course, box modeling pioneered by Bay Raitt and Mirai peers for production. Truly defining time for 3D. A year later we all learned about skybox/GI/FG, and a couple of years later Zbrush came out. Nothing was the same anymore.
Dave Cooper of Genworks (http://www.genworks.com) told me that he met some of the Mirai developers (they're still around: http://www.izware.com/) at a conference not too long ago, and that they're working on the next iteration of Mirai.
Funny thing is that, since it's in Common Lisp, when there's a problem, you were dumped into the debugger, which was scary... only now do I know that it's an amazing opportunity to access the underlying system in fact !