People doesn't appreciate what a marvel are modern real-time rendering engines and what amount of works is happening behind the scenes of any animation.
A lot of software companies back then were little more than a couple of bedroom coders banding together. If it’s just you and some other guy making the software then sure, why not throw in the fractal generator you were making in your spare time? It’s not like you have to make a Jira task for it, after all.
I have some more videos where I create models from scratch. Ive been sitting on them for a while, ill try to do final edits this weekend and upload. This video is pretty basic.
I had a $5,000 PC/SVGA back in 1991 and it could only do 1/4 of the screen animation. There were no PC's back in 1991 that could play animations this fast. Maybe a pentium pro in 1996.
Back in the 8-bit days, i had made my own quick and dirty method of error diffusion dithering for polygons. I basically approximated the color of each polygon with an array of only 8 pixels, then randomly selected through that indexed array to make a full polygon. Things were definitely different back then. When you have a potato computer, you make potato salad.
And now we have people testing android apps written in a jvm running inside a virtual android machine with about 50 layers between the pixel and the hardware!
I remember all these! I had pirated versions in high school. You used to be able to call autodesk and talk to a person and ask questions for help like a small garage company lol. I found a career in visual effects and helped win many academy awards including spider-man and lord of the rings. 👍🏻
Autodesk in late 80s, hard to believe it was like this back then, must been hard to make things on these programs without any instruction manuals. I also loved the music for the vid!
I luckily had access to all the instruction manuals. Animator thou was quite intuitive considering its a dos program. Though I do often wonder how I survived without google and my cell phone way back then.
@@rman6746 There is more to Autodesk Animator: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Animator It has since been abandoned; however, the source code is available on Github.
the really early "3d" stuff managed to get done in the 1960s computers with vector graphics, like ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oQMD7oufO4s.html also it was like a huge IBM or DEC system generally used for radar defense at the time.
Man this brings back some memories, I was offered my first video games job in 1988 at 16 years old, but started the following year after finishing my exams. Have used Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Anim, Sculpt 4D, Animator, 3D Studio (we used that for Croc: Legend of the Gobbos on PSOne), Alias Wavefront (on SGI's), Maya 1.0 and beyond!
lol I was considering to play Croc again yesterday, what a coincidence, it was my first game too! Now I work in the game industry too and it's a pleasure to meet you
@@ClaimClam It's not about using them for work in present. It's just nostalgia and being curious about how today software come from those retro programs and how people at that time used them within that limitation to produce works. That's why retro gaming and pc channels exist you know.
@@ClaimClamThat doesn't mean me and others can't watch this video. I like to watch retro things and there are many people who like this kind of content. This video is clearly not for you lol😅. Plus I already support open source projects like blender as it is my main software.
god, this is such a trip down memory lane. my dad was an architect and pretty early adopter of AutoCAD, and i used to play around w his software: this version of AutoCAD, early versions of 3d studio...
Bro!!!! Animator was my first animation program, thanks to it today I'm working, I fulfilled my dream of living from animation, I also used 3D Studio R4 for DOS. You made my day!! I remember one of my coolest animation was a spiderman swinging, made it in Animator and then i made a bakcground of a city in 3D studio R4 and compose both in Animator, years later we saw it everywhere...
I used animator in middle school around 1994, and got in trouble for doing a project where a Monty Python style foot stepped on the earth. Then the earth cracked in the shape of a ☮️ sign, and exploded. The Tech class teacher said “How would you like it if that happened?”. Like what? Bad teacher, did the opposite of motivate after all my effort.
Incredibly grateful that software like Blender has gotten so advanced and easy to use, and for totally free! It's really cool getting to see what it would've been like to use these old programs, subbed.
I remember BBC Horizon doing a programme on the NASA animations by Jim Blinn and knew thats what I wanted to do. In 1994 when we reviewed trueSpace at PC Magazine I took the floppy disks home and life was never the same!
Really interesting. There's a lot of videos about how very early 3D modeling worked, way before computers were powerful enough, and there's videos of modern software from the late 90s to the present. I haven't seen much of anything about this particular period of early 90s stuff. Gives some insight on to how early 3D games could've been made. I'm not at all familiar with how 3D modeling works to begin with, but I know AutoCAD pretty much existed since the early days and is still just as popular as ever. Plus CAD software existed on machines you'd never associate with being powerful enough to handle 3D.
You could dual-monitor on an ancient IBM PC. How? Two **kinds** of video cards... A Hercules for fine monochrome pixel graphics, and CGA or text for console. Early CAD apps supported, or perhaps required this configuration
Fantastic. I came into CG on the Amiga. My first actual 3D app was "Turbo Silver" by Impulse, later re-branded as "Imagine". Quickly moved into Lightwave but would eventually work in Maya, Softimage XSI, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max and even Blender.
Some of my Computer Animation instructors swore by Lightwave 3D, though my college only taught 3D Studio R4 (old DOS version before 3DS Max came out), the thing that really sucked about 3DS R4 is the software was super expensive ($3,500 for the base program itself), and they wanted to charge $1,500 per add-on, so if you wanted to animate with bones you had to buy the $1,500 Bone add-on, if you wanted to model using Metaballs that was another $1,500 add-on, there were many $1,500 add-ons; according to my instructors who swore by Lightwave 3D Lightwave 3D had all of that built in for less than the cost of the base 3DS R4 software without any add-ons ($2,700 back in the 1990s). I wanted Lightwave so bad back then. :) But as expensive as 3DS R4 or even 3DS Max was back then it still wasn't as expensive as Alias Wavefront (now called Maya), back then (in the 1990s) Alias Wavefront was only available for the SGI computer which cost $50,000 for the computer, and then $40,000 for the Alias Wavefront software. My college had an SGI Alias Wavefront classroom, but because the computers and the software were so expensive it was reserved for only the top students in the CA/M (Computer Animation / Multimedia) course. I wasn't in CA/M I was in Industrial Design, we also did 3D modeling an animation, but weren't allowed on the SGIs.
Same. I bought Turbo Silver for about 300$ (1990 or so). Was so excited. Set up a scene with a ball and a mirror, hit the render button, was told it would take 13 hours. :(
@@D2SProductions Holy shit, the price of the software was insane. I suppose they must have had a relatively small market to sell that sort of product to, making it both necessary to charge a high price to cover the costs of developing (presumably) complicated software and also perhaps because they felt they had a bit of a captive market.
@@danyoutube7491 Mind you this was also back when RAM was ungodly expensive as well. PCs maxed out at 128 MB of RAM only came with between 8 MB to 16 MB of RAM and to upgrade your RAM cost $40 per MB and the RAM sticks had to match in size or they wouldn't work, so you'd need to buy four 32 MB RAM sticks to upgrade to 128 MBs and that cost $5,120 just for RAM. 3D Studio R4 only required 8 MBs of RAM to run, but one of my friends had it on his PC and he only had the 8 MBs that came with his PC, we attempted to model a Veritech Fighter from the Robotech animated series, we successfully modeled one piece with that 8 MBs, we started on modeling a 2nd piece and the 1st piece we'd modeled started to disappear vertex by vertex as we add more to the 2nd piece. So we learned really quick that 8 MBs of RAM is absolutely useless for doing 3D computer modeling. By the time I'd left the college the price of RAM had come down a lot, so I was able to finally get my PC maxed out to 128 MBs of RAM and it ended up only costing me $160. The computer I was using at home my first PC, had a Pentium 133 Mhz processor, 2 GB Hard Drive, 16 MBs of RAM and an 8x CD-ROM drive and all of that initially cost me $2,500. My friend's computer we attempted to model on had a 486 DX 66 Mhz processor, 8 MBs of RAM, I don't know the specs of his hard drive or CD-ROM. My PC ran 3D Studio a little better, but not much better being that it only had 16 MBs of RAM initially, but once I got the RAM upgraded to 128 MBs of RAM it ran 3D Studio great. :)
@@Picticon I'd never heard of Turbo Silver until reading these comments, but I know about long rendering times. My experience is with AutoDesk 3D Studio R4, the last DOS of 3D Studio before 3D Studio Max came out for Windows. I went to college for Motion Picture Special Effects, so we were taught now to optimize our meshes to lower the rendering times, but even then it would still take a long time. Our college had a rendering farm, so all we had to do is complete the rendering project and submit it to the rendering farm, but before the rendering farm would even take it we had to make sure it would only take no more than 8 minutes maximum to render a single frame of our animations or the rendering farm wouldn't take our projects. Once I'd downloaded a mesh of the Millennium Falcon, it was a movie quality mesh, just that model by itself took my PC 44 hours to render an single still shot at a resolution of 640 x 480, and that was just the Millennium Falcon, nothing else in the scene, no back ground image, just a black back ground. My PC specs at the time: Pentium 133 Mhz processor, 128 MBs of RAM, 2 GBs Hard Drive.
Glad I watched this. I remember doing loads of animations and models as a kid with my mates at home. Had them all saved floppy discs. Could never remember the program. It was Animator.
Being reminded of all the software that I used to screw around with as a teenager just makes me realize how successful I could have been if I just actually learned how to apply it to a profession.
All this new 90's software makes me feel old lol. My first taste of a modeler and renderer back in 1988 was Sculpt 3D (then 4D) on the Amiga A500 1MB, no accelerator (so just a 7 MHz 68000) no HDD, floppy disk and yet I was able to make visuals that impressed a few companies enough to pay me. And just to be clear I'm not any kind of artist, I was just in the right place at the right time when news was talking about theses "New high resolution realistic computer graphics" I did move on to other packages like imagine, Real 3D, Cinema 4D with Lightwave being the last. I really didn't get into LW, maybe because it offered so much and that really wasn't what I did (I was a PC hardware engineer, graphics and animations was a side gig) Somewhere out there is a 12" DnB single (can't remember the name of it) with a green glass female head glowing that I rendered (most of the other stuff was for internal use at corps)
I never used any of these on DOS, but I was big into Caligari TrueSpace when it was around in the 90s. Later got into Lightwave, something friends were using on the Amiga as part of Video Toaster before I started using it on Windows.
Yes, I later used TrueSpace, I forgot about that app, I think it was my first exposure to windows 3D rendering. I might still have some renderings from it somewhere!
Its fascinating seeing what few people could use back in a period where the computer wasn't so common place in households yet. Nowadays we have free and/or much cheaper alternatives to programs that would normally cost an arm or leg, and it's just made the act of creating this type of stuff more accessible if you put in the time!
Even if you had a computer in your home, the chances that you had a copy of AutoCAD R10 were insanely low. You needed a pretty high end machine to even run it at a decent pace, and past that AutoCAD itself was several thousand dollars and could take months or years to learn to use effectively! On top of that, it doesn't really do anything a home user might have wanted. If you had AutoCAD at home in 1993, it was pirated and you used it to see Columbia.dxf
I got into 3d modeling by using VR Basic when vrml was the thing. It came with northcad 3d. Later i used Genesis, POV Ray and settled to using Truespace. Began using Milkshape because the game engine I used supported it. Fun times😊
Yea, I was exposed to Newtek in like early 1992, it was a game changer. I also saw 3D studios in the summer of 1992, that really changed everything. These tools are really from the late 80's, but I didn't get access till the fall of 1990, so to me they are still 90's software.
In the early 90's I got a program from a book I converted to work on my system to build an animation of a bouncing sphere on an "infiinte" plane that I used in a presentation to win a bid to do the technical art for a mathematics textbook series. The animation was under a minute long and took 12-14 hours to render. Got it right on the second render.
For me it was 3D Studio (Yes, prior to 3DS Max.), Caligari (on an Amiga), Truespace (by Caligari, but on Windows PC), Bryce, and Lightwave. OH! And POVRay with Moray of course.
Yep. I started with R9. My dad wanted a cheap draftsman. I remember when AME came out. First parametric modeling. You could let it sit all night crunching away to remove hidden lines and show the solid representation only to find it crashed. I wanted 3DStudio when it came out. But it required a 486.
I'm appreciative not just in capability but also clarity of use and interface because god damn, I do not like imagining having to learn to use a lot of these
in high school we had matrix 2D CAD (ran on a floppy disk), and eventually got autocad R9 (but no 3d other than a flat isometric). First time I attempted 3D was using cadkey at my first job in 1995. I experimented with extruding flat 2d wireframes, then making a simple assembly. Then around 1998 someone showed me a demo of solidworks and I was like "A 3D solid model ASSEMBLY, that you can spin around in REALTIME! holy crap!". Now I completely take Solidworks for granted some 25 years later.
Yea, IRL im a Solidworks guy by day! I left Autocad behind in 2002 and haven't looked back! I love Solidworks, but have been learning Freecad as of late and also built some stuff in Onshape.
It was a wondrous time. Though we have way cool tech like VR now, the "feel" of the paradigm shift is gone. In a way I'm spoiled, I have everything I want on my modern computer, even "real" AI. But the thrill of going to Best Buy and saving up to buy a new soundcard or VGA card is gone, the internet has killed the fun of logging onto your local BBS, and the mystery of advanced computing is gone when we can all rent time on AWS. Don't get me wrong, I love all this new tech, but sometime I like to turn off my phone, put my quest on the shelf, breakout one of my old 386's, pop in some VHS tapes, and go back to that glorious time called the 90s, when VGA was king and a 120 megabyte hard drive seemed un-fillable.
There’s a certain charm about the experimental phases. A lot of times I wish I could’ve been part of that birth of CGI- visit pixar when it was a small little office studio. The new generation is bringing back that spirit, with low poly art styles and indie projects. I hope I can be part of the next renaissance
@@vinylvannah back in the 90s were moving so fast thru tech we didn't have time to catch our breath. Now as we approach fully realistic raytraced VR worlds, we can relax, go back and really fill out the full and unrealized artistic potential of 8/16/32 bit tech from a more aesthetic angle, much like the vapourwave music types are feeling out the unexplored possibilities of 80s music tech, and to be honest, doing so with better results than the rushed and forced synth of the 80s. Good luck on your artistic adventures. I hope you will upload your results to your channel when you can.
These all ran in the lower 640k, with some swapping. There were 32 bit versions of AutoCAD and AutoShade for dos that could use extended memory in later versions, but it wasn't required, if you and your hard drive are masochists.
Do you use newer 3d modeling software like blender as well? Also I don’t know why but old 3d modeling software has this certain allure to it, like it seems foreign yet familiar at the same time. I love it lol great video and great channel!
Its hard to appreciate now but in 1990 this was so amazing. I can still remember the thrill of creating NASA like 3D images on my PC (even if it was dithered which sucked even then).
Used Sculpt 3D/4D and Turbo Silver on the Amiga back in the day. A very frustrating exercise! Lots of effort, slow and took FOREVER to render. But for the time it was impressive.
I love the File submenu lol 3:20 - Open - ok, expected and logical - Script - I guess? - Information - cool - MANDELBROT - NOW WE TALKING BABY, FOR ALL YOUR FRACTAL FILE NEEDS
