In September 2012, the Foundry merged with Luxology, a Mountain View-based software house known primarily for modo, a 3D modelling and animation package.
Project: Messiah began as a plug-in to one of the dominant animation packages, a common first step for animation software.
Eventually, many of the plug-in companies move beyond that stage and offer a stand-alone version, a soup-to-nuts animation package, which is what Messiah was doing this year.
Preview was animation package that referenced in OBJ files, managed hierarchies and assigned channel data to attributes such as translation and rotation.
The workflow differences between a bitmap-based and vector-based animation package have their advantages and disadvantages.
Now that the PC has an affordable animation package there's no reason why you couldn't be the next Walt Disney.
Anim8or is a proprietary freeware 3D rendering and animation package.
Some are integrated into larger modeling and animation packages, some are stand-alone, some are free open-source projects.
Some applications - like Photoshop, many compilers, most film editing and animation packages - need large amounts of RAM to do their job.
In 1986, Autodesk's first animation package was AutoFlix, for use with AutoCAD.