Hi jonah,

> Didn't I read that your school project was a polygon modeler?

Yup, that was Sculptura.


> Did any of it's workflow trickle into MoI? Or was it a completely
> different animal (sorry for the bad pun)?

No, not really, it was pretty different. I mean this was way back in 1992 so it was pretty primitive.

The system requirements were:
386sx or better processor
Windows 3.1
4 MB memory
Hard Disk
A 256 color display and a math co-processor are recommended.


> Would be interesting to
> see the type of work it was able to produce back then... :)

One thing that it did have in common was a sort of general idea to try to do things quickly, there was a "conform to outline" tool in it where you could sketch a closed outline in one of the 2D views (the 3D view back then was for visual feedback only and not drawing in directly), and mesh vertices would travel towards a "local origin" point until they hit that outline. So you could repeat that in a couple of different views to kind of sketch/carve the vertices to some blobby shape pretty quickly, that was kind of interesting.

At the time there was not even anything really available for Windows at all, that was the time of 3DS DOS, so having anything 3D at all on Windows was kind of cool...

You could then save your scene out to POV-Ray or Vivid formats for fancier renders.

But it mostly served as a learning experience.

The first place that I gave a public demo was at the Olympia AutoCAD User's Group meeting and Bob McNeel and several other RMA people were there, at the time their main business was that they were an AutoCAD dealer. That's how I got hooked up with them, they became the distributors for Sculptura and I started working there as an intern initially. After I finished Sculptura 1.1, I threw everything out and then started Sculptura 2.0 from scratch and that is what turned into Rhino.

- Michael