Alias|Wavefront’s Richard Kerris, director of Maya Technologies, has left the company, according to a Macworld UK article.
Alias|Wavefront makes Maya, the award winning 3D animation and visual effects software for film, broadcast, video, and game development. Maya’s technology has been used by such film and video customers as Blue Sky, Cinesite, CNN, Digital Domain, Dream Quest Images, Industrial Light & Magic, Pacific Data Images (PDI), Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Disney, and Warner Feature Animation.
Kerris has become synonymous with Maya for Macintosh, and industry watchers expected him to announce the official launch of Maya at Jobs’ July 18 opening keynote at Macworld Expo New York.
In fact, at January’s Macworld San Francisco expo, Kerris joined Apple CEO Steve Jobs on stage to offer a “sneak peak” at Maya for Mac OS X. A Mac OS X version is “a dream come true,” Jobs said at the 2000 Worldwide Developer Conference.
Kerris, who has also been a product manager at Pixar (Jobs’ other company), was last seen at February’s Macworld Expo Tokyo, announcing that Maya had entered beta testing, according to Macworld UK. At the time he said, “Alias|Wavefront has developed many of Maya’s unique features with the needs of traditional 2D graphics professionals in mind.”
Macworld UK has also learned of eight additional departures from the company, a possible result of cost cutting in an attempt to boost profits and meet expectations in a softening market. Alias|Wavefront’s parent company, Silicon Graphics, appears sidelined on Wall Street. Its shares currently stand at a $2.19, falling from a high of $5 on Sept. 2.
The good news: Macworld UK reports that the Maya Macintosh development team is purportedly still “hard at work” producing the OS X version of Maya.