I was working with 3D on PC first (needed an external frame buffer in those days) using software called Cubicomp which did the first commercial Phong rendering I believe-- probably an 8086 in the very early 80's.
Then I switched to Mac as soon as Jobs introduced it. Of course at first it was only 1 bit, but soon found 8-bit and Super3D and was in heaven, even though the render quality was only flat shading.
Then one day I picked up a Macworld and saw Sculpt 3D, a ray tracer on the Amiga was coming to the Mac. I called the company, Byte by Byte, and went to visit them and the president gave me an Amiga to run it on as the Mac version was a way off. Sculpt3D was a pretty amazing piece of software and I remember creating ray-traced water pitchers for my client Igloo (we were designing products for them). This was before any ray-tracing was on either the PC or Mac. Wickedly exciting at that time.
What fun the Amiga was back then! Next for us, Electric Image came along for the Mac with 640x480 AA Phong shading in under 5 min and things got really interesting. We created a design for the initial lunar habitat for NASA, then a Mars habitat and built 3d walkthroughs and full scale models all back in the late 80's. A couple years later we would standardize our shop on Lightwave on PC (I believe it was V3 or 4), which of course also came from the Amiga. Who can forget the Video Toaster? Newtek eventually moved to San Antonio, just up the road from our shop in Austin. A few years later, using Lightwave, we had fun creating the first cell-shaded TV show: Mission to Avalon. Got it funded, then bad luck with the distribution. An early trailer:
All good and fun memories.
Just released our first AR museum installation at the Witte Museum in San Antonio this past weekend. The full Alamo Reality project will be released later this month. And the better news is we're starting a 3 year AR project on Gettysburg in the next month. 3D has come a long way, but not surprisingly, many of the main issues are still very similar.
Here's one of the mobile AR scenes without final lighting, but there are still the same challenges of bandwidth, polycount, texture sizes, etc..
