what I learnt lightwave with from a VHS tape ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NGOoE-lValk.html this is fun ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-T6vUYAMKD5A.html How to setup the emulator ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OFEUQsk4os8.html
I saw the videos. I stand by my opinion; however, there is a RU-vidr who raised something interesting. He advocates the idea that Linux should adopt AmigaOS (version 4 and above) as its primary GUI since Linux has failed to make a dent in the desktop market. I was puzzled by the idea at first, but then it started to grow on me as a very interesting possibility. I wonder what RJ Mical would have to say about it. I'm not sure if it is feasible or even desirable, but that fact is that all Linux interfaces work as knock-offs of Windows/Mac. Linux has never developed a soul in the desktop, but the fact that we are still discussing Amiga almost 40 years later is a testimony to its enduring legacy.
I started with Sculpt 3D, Turbosilver and Videoscape 3D on a decked out Amiga 2000. After upgrading to a video toaster and Lightwave I eventually remortgaged my house to buy a used SGI 4D20 with Vertigo animation software. (True story). Those days were the golden age of 3D animation. I am blessed to have been a part of it.
LightWave is alive again! Development was shut down after version 2020 but LightWave Digital (UK) released version 2023 for both Windows and Mac. Now including the Octane gpu renderer, Turbulence FD, a live link to Unreal Engine, and more! Thanks for demonstrating that early version of LW.
Really interesting! I had been curious about the early pioneering 3D apps on the Amiga, so thanks for posting this. I never had an Amiga (wish I had), but I started out on Infini-D and Lightwave on the Mac around 1997. This is nostalgic as it brings back the memories of how it was exciting to discover the new possibilities of cgi.
great memories using first Imagine, Sculpt4D and also Vista Pro to create landscape fly through animations rendered to DCTV format and recorded real-time on VHS! I got my first paying graphics job this way in the early 90s. The Amiga was a real enabler for artists using technology!
never had the Amiga experience. I began on the Mac with Strata 3D and Electric Image. Which were excellent tool sets. when I was invited to go work with a forensic animation service, they were using Lightwave on a Wintel box. I have to confess, I was blown away and fell in love with it. coincidently, LW was porting over to the Mac so it was a no-brainer.
Fantastic. I have my old Amiga 1000 sitting next to my PC. I bought ANIMATE 3D (where I would create things one triangle at a time, by moving points,) when it was first available in my area and did some basic stuff in that, then moved onto Imagine. My university had Imagine on some of their A3000's and they were a LOT faster than my 1000, or 2000. I really wanted to use Lightwave but no one I knew had a copy or access to it, except 1 computer at school. Such fond memories. Thank you for sharing this. Edit: BTW I still have that cover-disk somewhere. That is the copy I used for many things. Eventually I went to school for Softimage, now I am studying Houdini. Things have changed so much it boggles my mind.
@@hd-be7di Mad or ignorant. Not sure which. It was what I figured out by reading the manual and just mashing through (Manual I still have, along with the program). I am sure there was a better way, but being a kid, in a basement, with no one around to give advice on it, it was the way I muddled through. It helped to be a bit obsessive. Made a cool, low poly head however.
@@fx_node I remember rendering the demo candle on small table scene. Got it going just before Sunday dinner and it still wasn't done by the time Poirot was on. I switched to Imagine 3 after that.
Great video! I started in the 80s with videoscape3d, then used Caligari32 and Lightwave, been working in games ever since. Sigh, I miss those olden days.
I still have My Amigas now. One is an A1200T with PPC + BVision. I always dreamed of having an A4000 or even the later tower version, so I wouldn't say the Amiga was entirely a kids computer. It was establishing a niche in video production using Lightwave and the Video toaster until commodore went bust. I'm currently getting back into the Amiga scene with the Pistorm accelerators so all the 68k software you demonstrated runs alot faster a bit like it does on WinUAE. It's really fun seeing were the Amiga could have gone in the future if it wasn't for commodore. Amazingly they are still developing for the Amiga now. The Amiga was way ahead when it first came on the scene. It could have easily competed with PC and Mac's with it's Multitasking OS that even Ghz computers struggled to do the same thing.
YES! Caligari .. That was my very first every 3D software, in 1991. Then, later in the 90s, I used a lot of its progeny, Caligari True Space. I loved that software. Used Lightwave at the same time; the separated modeller and layout I found annoying. But I still loved it.
It's always fun to see early LightWave. The new owners have really big plans for the next version and moving on. It's an exciting times to be a LightWave user.
It brings back some frustrating memories. We had about a dozen Toaster workstations (accelerated and with additional memory) running LW 3.1/3.5. Good workhorses for broadcast graphics. Made obsolete by the switch to Intel and Alpha in early 1995. We continued to use LW throughout the 90s, well into the early 2000s. We even developed a few plugins for it in-house use, including a new renderer and a node-based material and shading system before such a thing eventually showed up in LW natively. It was a solid and easy tool that helped us in the production of many commercials. Unfortunately, NewTek mismanaged the product somewhat. NewTek's stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to their paying customers (we suggested a Modeler/Layout merger around 1998 and presented sound technical advice) ultimately forced us to abandon LW and focus on Maya and XSI.
Yes, a blast from the past. So I got into 3d with Amigas. I used Real3d, and remember Imagine, but it was Lightwave that became all rage for us 3d'ers at college when the infamous Newtek Video Toaster Dongle crack came out from Warm And Fuzzy Logic. You could emulate the toaster, but just use the Lightwave part of it. Newtek also had Kiki Stockhammer - making sure Lightwave was all together the sexiest 3d app!
I worked for Impulse back when we ported Imagine 3D to the PC. I also worked on their non linear video editor named "The Edimator". It was a cool place to work back in the day, and I left Impulse in the late 90s to work for Adobe. If I remember correctly, Scott Kirvan (Impuse) and Dan Silva (D-Paint) were the ones who worked on and sold the first Ray Tracer engine that was used in 3D Max (which did not ray trace at the time). It was very fun to work with companies such as that back in the late 80s and through the 90s. I left the industry in the mid 2000s after we completed Paint Shop Pro 8 and then 9 while I was working for JASC. Those were the good days!
I had Cinema 4D for my Amiga 1200, I never really got the hang out of it - so hard to learn stuff those days. I remember setting renders of Vista Pro going before school and then coming home to find it had crashed!
Cool vid. I used Imagine from the cover disc too! I really got into it and me and a mate went halves for Lightwave (6?). I'm still a registered user of Lightwave 9 on my OG aluminium iMac! Man I love Lightwave. Generic Panels anyone?
The fact that a kid, sat at home, using the family tv, could do this, on a low price home computer, and a free cover disk, in the late 80’s, is pretty amazing!
Sculpt Animate worked but had a strange UI that I never really understood. I stuck to Real3D in the end. Really nice UI and renderer. I remember it even supporting NURBS and Boolean operators and stuff. It was nice.
Ah, the nostalgia! :) I recently found a CD with several Lightwave scenes that I made in my first years of learning 3D (1993 to 1996). Obviously I couldn't resist and downloaded the latest version of Lightwave 3D for PC and, to my surprise, all my old projects loaded perfectly and rendered images without any problems. Which got me thinking... Is LW so good that it's still compatible with works created 30 years ago... or is LW so outdated that nothing has changed in its code in 30 years? :) Now I need to create a video portfolio on RU-vid with these animations, which I never had the opportunity to share before. I think I'll call it "My Little Lightwave's definitive portfolio - 1993-2023"
Same here. I've got all the scene files of an animation i did back in 1998ish. It was about a four minute scene I believe with an animated dragon. I'll have to share it sometime.
I think (can not remember exactly now) I started with Real 3D... It was clunky but when I slowly learned more and more I could make stuff that actually looked OK (usually by bodging stuff that the program was not really meant for it seemed but results was really cool). But the animation part was a bit awful (if I remember right)... as I can not really draw stuff (well I can but it takes sooo long) I used it mostly for rendering cool sprite/BOB animations for games I never finished 🙂 Then I think I got Imagine on a coverdisk and thought wow this will be so much better, and I have seen some results (and it looked amazing)... But I could not get used to it, and I never learned it... Somehow I got a copy of Lightwave (can not remember which version) and gave it my best shoot... It was truly amazing, the animation part (with keyframes) was just soo cool and I really really liked Lightwave but it was a bit late in the Amiga years for me... So never mastered it sadly... I made a couple of short clips (I had my friends/neighbors running Screamernet on all their networked computers)... I loved AREXX also, made lots of standalone programs with it, and made lots of programs/macro type things for DPaint, Dopus, and so on and on... And when (I never had any real manual for Lightwave) realized Lightwave had great AREXX support I was just mindblown... I could do anything (again I'm not a good modeller/artist)... Like a working solar system, convert different data to be rendered (DEM maps?) and so on and on... you could expand Lightwave indefinitely with AREXX actually connect it to any program (with AREXX ports) and write any plugin you wanted easily... ---edit That Real 3D you are showing was much later then the one I used (I think mine was made for Kick/Workbench 1.3) and the later one you are showing are +2.04... I wished I had that one :-) ---edit2 Never used or even seen Caligari... Looks awesome! made for higher end Amigas because of the full frame line draw I guess. ---edit3 🙂 I know this is not a 3D program (but neither is DPaint :-) but was there not a program called Artstudio and it was also on a coverdisk... Image manipulation program? filters, and stuff. I liked that a lot... And there was also a morphing program that was just awesome... Took a photo of my friend and morphed him into a Chimpanzee (and made a large IFF-Anim in 16 color grayscale on my A500 I remember) I was super happy and thought he would be impressed like hell, but he got really mad haha...
"prehistoric stone age" I must feel old now, since my experiences go back further. Back to the late 70s and early 80s with completely proprietary 3D software. =)
makes me wonder about some of the old 3d effects in vfx because i always kindof thought of them all as open gl or something due to the lack of shading (compared to ray tracing for shadows and all) its interesting to see that they were using an older thing that is like open gl but older the space ship render you did kindof gave me mild nostalgia lol (not sure why)
Viewport rendering or the finished output? The later was mostly scanline rendering with selective ray tracing in some cases. Only the graphic sub systems on SGI hardware could dependently do proper viewpoint shading with textures in hardware at that time. As for just wireframe previews; we considered that a "luxury" in the very early days(as in predating the Amiga by some time). I animated my first scenes on a command line. =)
@@fx_node It's worth to try it. It was the most advanced 3D package never released for Amiga: realtime render preview, fluids and particles sims integrated, etc...
I'd rather not. We usually stacked different hand painted displacements in the mid to late 80s to "sculpt" and the renderer would do micropolygon displacment at run/frametime.
Not when you really know how to use it properly (2.x and 3.x are excellent and were more versatile than the home computer competition back in 1990 and 1992). ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kcH2yQaDAHU.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6sVUL5CDj-w.html
@@Nebulous6 Not really. I recently downloaded a Macintosh 128 emulator (1984 System 1.0) and gave it to my wife to test. She had absolutely no problem using it. I do not blame RJ Mical, Dale Luck, Bob Pariseau, or any other original Amiga creators. I guess they had the bad luck of not having someone like SJ to push for excellence in usability. Even Jay Miner him self, who was an outstanding chip designer, never got involved in that particular area. In the end, the Amiga was doomed from the start by being acquired by a company that had no taste, no clue what they had, and no idea how to market the superior technology they acquired.
You need to remember that the Amiga interface was a lot more customisable than, say the Mac or Windows. This was a double edged sword as anyone with no design skill could make it look awful. I would argue that, out of the box, Workbench 2 and 3 were very elegant indeed. It couldn’t quite match the high graphical design standards of the Mac, but it had customisation and it’s own ‘lovable quirkiness’ on it’s side.
@@patchso That and AmigaOS actually multitasks for real. Just finished reading a review of LightWave 5 on the Mac where they pretty much had to apologize for the fact that you can't continue working in Modeler while Layout renders because the Mac can't multitask properly.
@@jakestilgard4145 No one is denying that Amiga OS was way ahead of Macintosh System OS. It is just lame when you use the interface. Ugly icons, weird pointer angle, lack of support for vector fonts nor postscript ending up with lack of support for desktop publishing. The list of errors goes on and on and on. A visionary would have change it but Irving Gould would not allow anyone to fill this gap, vis-a-vis Thomas Rattigan short tenure.
