It's official. Wavefront has at long last unveiled Dynamation 1.0, an interactive dynamics software product useful in creating physically-based animation and SFX.

Dynamation, released last month at SIGGRAPH '93, uses smart particles, Wavefront's trademark effectors, to build animated environments with 3D geometry and images to create natural phenomena.

Dynamation's introduction came as Wavefront, headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., and rival Thomson Digital Image announced they were to merge their two companies.

Testing for the interactive software on television commercials was conducted in Canada by TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation, and testing for films was conducted in Los Angeles by Sony Digital Productions.

Dynamation was earlier used in the production of Last Action Hero, a recent Arnold Schwarzenegger feature released by Columbia Pictures, to add rain and other sfx to live-action scenes.

Wavefront software, running on a Silicon Graphics Crimson Elan, next helped revamp the new company logo for Columbia Pictures, featuring a toga-clad woman holding a lamp aloft.

Dynamation was essentially used to animate the clouds in the background, create a roiling effect in each cloud and, horizontally, simulate a multiplane effect creating the illusion of parallax motion between the various layers of cloud cover.

The software itself works according to the laws of physics and how elemental forces behave. Basically, animators can control the force acting on particular objects, the hardness of animated surfaces objects hit and bounce off, for example.

The software comes complete with a number of "canned" effects to be used as production tools. These include Pyrokinetics (fire, smoke, explosions, fireworks), plants, bouncing 3D objects, melting objects, cloth modeling and 3D image effects.

Computer mavens may choose instead to mathematically open the way to their own tricks and effects, should the clip sfx not be enough.

Wavefront also used siggraph to unveil Composer 2.1, its digital layering and sfx software package. Composer 2.1 is especially useful, says Wavefront, in distributing the complex task of multilevel layering and color correction over all of the cpus on a host workstation.

The new software package is compatible with image files from Wavefront, tdi, Alias, pixar and SoftImage. Its inventors also tout Composer 2.1 as useful in working with ultra high-resolution images from the Kodak Cineon film scanning and recording system.