So lot's of us are kids of the Amiga ? , that explains a lot about the mood here !
I too started with deluxepaint, then I did my first 'sphere on checkerboard" with Imagine.
One day I manage to get a copy of lightwave 4 or 5 (mmm not a very legal version :S), and there was this scene in the content directory :
For sure, i started with an Atari 800XL and had also a graphics tablet for it. Later then
i switched to an ATARI 512 ST.
What probably a lot people don't know is that the Amiga from the Amiga Company
was conceived at Atari. I still have somewhere in my basement the original Amiga
Joysticks from the Amiga Company, long before the Amiga Computer came out.
I got interested in 3D in 1984, when in Germany they aired a documentation
about the big CA Studios in America and Japan and all the cool guys and girls
from that time, like Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull etc. I still have that VHS tape! :-)
Should i find a Youtube link i post it.
And one cool guy, Tom Hudson who published his code in Atari Magazines became
later the father of the popular 3dsMax Software.
Well a little story... when i made a slide show with a couple of images
(including logos of various computer brands), for our Atari Dealer
i got my first job offer in this field from a big Pharmaceutic Company
in Germany. :-) But at that time i worked in shift and did not do it.
Maybe i should have started to do freelancing, then i would be
probably no hobbyist today.
It warms my heart to read that a number of MoI forum participants as well as Michael himself have an Amiga history. It sure was a special, revolutionary system that has helped many people to develop digital skills.
Michael, the Newtek Digi-View video digitiser with the red, green and blue filters, yes, that felt like some kind of magic. It initially puzzled me as a youngster how some isolated color filters could turn a black and white image into a full-color image. :)
And Newtek's Video Toaster, definitely! There was a TV series called Babylon 5 at the time, all its 3D space effects and spacecraft were completely created using Lightwave on a Video Toaster.
I also loved the Bitmap Brothers games. One of my all-time favorite pixel artists was Mark Coleman. He did the graphics for about half of the Bitmap Brothers games, including both Xenon games, and the first Speedball.
Assembly on the C64: supercool! If you really wanted to make use of the C64's capacities, you had to use machine language. I remember magical discoveries such as border sprites. Based on a graphics chip bug, border sprites were sprites that could be detected inside the border of the C64 screen.
Stefan, the first Amiga prototypes were indeed created under the wing of Atari. Jay Miner wanted the machine to be a next-generation games machine, with an emphasis on his favorite games: flight sims (hence the Copper for air color gradients, and the Blitter for fast vector graphics). But when Commodore bought the project, they wanted to turn the Amiga into a business machine, in an attempt to become an IBM competitor. Luckily, the Amiga was way too audiovisually potent to end up as a dull business machine, and it was soon adopted by the audiovisual industry as a machine that could do what was previously only possible on much more expensive systems.
Tom Hudson was one of the fathers of 3D Studio Max, but in the early 1990s, Daniel M. Silva, the genius coder behind Deluxe Paint, was one of the creators of the original 3D Studio, the basis of 3ds Max.
Marco, yes, Agnus, Denise and Paula. They were my first girlfriends, haha. Here's a YouTube playlist featuring a number of our Amiga games and demos, and a Dutch television interview from early 1993 where I'm very nervously telling something about our game development on an Amiga 2000: :D
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..
(out of subject
<< Mars habitat ;)
That is a dream's view : Human can't go to space & Mars! ( brain don't support cosmic ray ! )
(Plomb too heavy - Magnetic field - too power consummng & heavy - Drugs antioxidant - don't yet existing)
BTW. Chipp not to be off-topic here but since you mentioned Electric Image... Did you know
that President Trump's Campaign Manager for 2020 run, Brad Parscale, was the former President
of EITG (Electric Image Technology Group)? Interesting.
I just knew that you also had to have at least some Commodore background. :)
Mission to Avalon looks great. I think it could still be released, with its pleasant retro vibe.
Sculpt 3D, by Dr. Eric Graham, oh yes! The graphics world wasn't the same anymore after Eric's legendary Juggler demo was released, created with a first version of Sculpt 3D. It was the first time I saw ray-tracing on a consumer computer.
I also played around with Sculpt 3D. Later it became Sculpt 4D, with animation. And its main competitor was called Turbo Silver, which was the first bucket renderer I ever saw. Turbo Silver later evolved into Imagine, which was also available for MS-DOS.
Do you also remember Aegis Videoscape? It was a filled-3D-vectors renderer, not a 3D ray-tracer, but it could render almost in realtime back in those days, making it a fabulous tool for 3D animation in the early years. There was this cool demo featuring a red 3D Lotus Esprit, with lots of camera switching.
Hello Metin, Stefan, Pilou, Chip and all other moiers!
What a wanderful conversation about the "golden age" of the history of personal computing and CG!!
Thanks to each of you!!
As I've said....so many memories...how much emotion in remembering those wanderful "pioneer" days !!!!
Now...I apologize if I want to do this "clean break" :) but...I would really like to return to the original subject of this thread, if you want too :)
Always talking about the actual situation of "CG consumer software" I would really like to know what do you think about Vectary, the cloud based Polygonal/SDS free modeler. https://www.vectary.com/dashboard/
For what I've tested so far and based on comparison with many, more or less (or claimed), similar products I think that actually it's the coolest solution to create little 3D object in a Poly/SDS environment.
I would like to know the opinion of you colleagues "moiers".
what i have learned in the past, i could be wrong of course, offers likes this let you believe
they are free and a couple of year later, when you are addicted, then you have to pay...
(I learned that from Photobucket, which i used for many many years for free and later
they changed their plan to paid subscriptions...)
I also don't like to work in a web browser and been connected to the cloud.
The only things which are free are Open Source solutions, like standard Blender installs etc.
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