Electric Image Universe Lite: The Story of the 3D Toolkit 

Hah.. @15:50 "..paying only $65"... Hey! That's me! (wish I could include an image of Jinx in her workshop googles here). Wow... we're getting really close to that being 20 years ago. Time flies when you're having fun. Who would have thought that in those two decades I would have had a career in feature film VFX and since moved on to teaching computer graphics at a university. Actually.... even more surprising is that Disney now has an entire business model around making internet fan films. :-p Ah well. Thanks for the memories. Have fun.

This is great, and such a deep, deep dive into a subject I'd almost forgotten about. I really do owe Alex a beer too, as his work changed the path of my career for the better. Thanks to both of you :)

Hey I hope you are still creating these films. They really are the most original in the entirety of biopics of system histories. No other videos are as original or in depth as what you create

Reasons it didn't worked. - No availability in PC/Windows: That mean it couldn't be usable on widely available and cheap PC clones, which many of us in the scene were the only thing we could afford. - Cracked 3DStudio and 3DSMax. This means cost of 0$ which could be routed then to a better CPU, faster graphics card or more memory. Basically, Alex Lindsay enumerated the reasons pretty well. Since Blender in the end managed the 0$ price and the full program became opensource, in the time Yt, forums and latter social media were in Boom, it was able to success to were it is today.

Good to see you updating the Thumbnails for the videos.

Another awesome video! Great job, buddy! cheers!

Wow this takes me back. I never used this software but I used 3D Studio. Back in the mid 90's I saw the potential for 3D but I never managed to do anything with it, just a thousand unfinished projects. Eventually I kinda lost interest as my computer wasn't up for it. Trying to learn Blender now after a 20 year break is no fun. Thanks for the video :)

Very nice documentary and lots of nice memories. Almost 20 years ago I enrolled in Lindsay´s Pixel Corps program and received a 3D Toolkit v2 license to follow along the teachings and to keep. I was a Lightwave user by then and quickly found ways to use both programs at the same time, making use of that amazingly fast render engine. I was very involved with Lightwave´s Modeler and 3DTK own Nurbs Modeler didn´t catch my eye that much. I still have the app installed in my PC and every now and then launch it to play and try not to forget how it operates. Congrats for such a very detailed and interesting doc.

Great video! But no mention of TrueSpace? I was barely out of high school, back around 1995-96, when my dad and I stopped by a Best Buy. That's when I discovered TrueSpace! It was discounted to $99, so my dad agreed to buy it for me. I think it was originally priced at $250, but it probably didn't sell very well. TrueSpace was, still is, for PCs, and it was/is the full package! Texturing, Modeling, Animation, & Rendering. I poured over it for months, and my first "project" was animating a bouncing ball. It "squashed", aka "scaled", as it bounced, and I even rendered it. The animation was like 100 frames, super tiny, because rendering took forever, but TrueSpace had Raytracing! So that ball *had* to have 8 lights, and *really* needed a mirrored surface! The family couldn't use the computer for a couple days, but it was totally worth it! 😑 Eventually I managed to model an interior to a museum, so TrueSpace had some advanced-ish features. I've moved on to Maya, but looking back, the worse thing about TrueSpace was it's stupid interface! As a teen, it felt accessible, but now, it looks clunky and amateurish! Like, absurdly so! Fortunately, the newest version looks a lot more refined, and more inline with professionally oriented products of it's ilk. TrueSpace was affordable back in the 90s, and it was capable of a lot more than I ever managed to get out of it, so I'm surprised it's not mentioned more often in videos like this. Somehow it found itself on a shelf, next to screen savers, and "Plus!", at a Best Buy. I mean, seriously? Who was in charge of merchandising?! A general purpose 3D program, at a Best Buy in Wisconsin, in the 90s?! I was very lucky to find it in the first place! Let alone for $99! 🤨 On second thought, I guess I know why no one talks about TureSpace, but I find it comforting to know it's still around, and hopefully it'll inspire others to animate incredibly well lit bouncing balls! I love your videos, and keep it up! 😁

Obscure. :) It (the 'regular' EIAS) had a place in our production pipeline from roughly 1991-1999. Wrote lots of custom plugins and shaders for that one. Retired it step by step after Maya took the professional VFX market by storm in early '98. Still, the renderer delivered excellent quality while being blazingly-fast. edit: Back in the day Form·Z was one of the recommended 'companions' to EIAS for modelling. I think it is still on the market.

5:51 Those still using SGI around the turn of the century would be already seeing the writing on the wall. Flagship apps like SoftImage, previously only running on SGI, also became available on Windows NT, giving comparable results on hardware that was only a fraction of the cost.

I took a 3D animation class back in college in the mid 90's. I don't remember the software, but it was on a Macintosh desktop.

bought it for my mac ppc 8500

6:18 NURBS patches are I think mainly used in CAD. VFX models are mainly built out of polygonal meshes, with Catmull-Clark geometry subdivision applied to create the curvy bits. There are other ways to build 3D geometry, of course. If you thought “NURBS” was fun to say, how about “metaballs” ...

I was very interested in 3D graphics in that era for video games and, although I was a little too young to really go anywhere with it, I tried my hand at Blender and Maya. I think that kind of shows why something like the toolkit would find it very difficult to carve out an existence in that environment. I simply used cracked versions. Same for Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver etc etc. And if cracks were that accessible for a 13 year old discovering the internet proper, it must have been nigh on impossible to monetise the novice market. In the early 2000s, piracy and the internet went together like chips and gravy (that means very well for any non-northern English). Why would I pay for a stripped down version when I can easily get the all singing, all dancing version for free?

I enjoyed this video very much. One question: Were you not able to include any input from Alex Lindsey, for example, his thoughts on the implosion of 3D Toolkit? An interview with him would have been awesomely priceless.

16:20 I may have found a clue as to why the software was abandoned. The Wikipedia page for EIAS says that, owing to a licensing dispute, the full-price version of the software lost its “Modeler” module around this time, and it seems EI has depended on third-party modelling applications ever since. Since the 3D Toolkit could hardly have been a comprehensive learning tool without an integrated modeller, that is what probably spelled the end of that product.

Hero √

4:17 Unfortunately, LightWave 3D is showing its age. It has never been properly updated for more modern ways of doing things (like using quaternions for rotations to avoid gimbal lock). So it is pretty much dead now.