I only got to Lightwave in the early 2000's and was writing a tool that exported data out of it into Maya. I myself started with 3D Studio R3 around 1993. You couldn't pull me away from CG onward. I copied cinematics I've seen in computer games, and one of my biggest regrets is in not being able to preserve any of my works I spent countless hours making. I remember every pixel, like it was yesterday. And yet, my renders are lost to time. My brother was making 3D as far back as 1988. I inherited his hardware and his interests. Started with 2D and then moved my way up.
Yeah I feel VERY fortunate that some how I managed to save my first computer art. Even back from my very first in 4th grade! Thanks for the story. I dig it when people share all the old tales.
My story is very similar as I also started in 3ds in DOS in 1993 and never stopped since. Never went into programming, though, nor changed from 3ds (now "Max"). Those were the days...
@@vladimirsavkovic7701 It was magic. My brother showed me "ray tracing" which was the emerging new tech and I misheard him say it. For a number of years I called it "rat racing". 3D became a career, because I was obsessed with computer graphics from the moment I saw it. I wanted to make game cinematics at first, but went into film instead. Still doing it full time more than 30 years later.
@@enilenis I had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the world (western balkans, then lived in a few places around the world, ending up in Russia for 25 years) so there was never an option for me to go into film or game cinematics and stuff. Had to learn literally everything by myself then endure about a decade of being told and shown how useless and pointless my chosen "career" (more of a "trade") was. Then demand for it finally picked up in the 3rd world I still inhabit (luckily, I'm back in the western balkans) and now I can finally make a more-or-less bearable living out of it. Just had to never give up. Since I can't do anything at all else nearly as well as I can do 3D, quitting was never an option.
I have the exact same regrets over homemade movies from the 90s and 00s that I've lost. Sometimes I wish I could recreate them but... it'd never be the same.
if funny how renderers keeps getting more complex and realistic and thus ensuring that you can still... experience that single frame overnight rendering speed on modern hardware with modern software... it just looks a bit better now than 35 years ago
I have a Lightwave 3D shirt from the GDC a LONG time ago that says "Piss off! I'm coding" on the back. I had to watch a 30 minute demo to get it, but it was an interesting demo & after the first day of the conference you're usually looking for things to do if you're not attending a lot of talks.
i got my hands on an a400t last year, and i wanted to try doing basically exactly this. to learn how to render with the older hardware for fun. these videos help a ton as far as learning how the interface works
‼️For maximum effect, you have to comp it into a Cineon recorder and then shoot the film down to the lab and wait two or three days to find out how it looks on the big screen 🙂
WOW. i stumbled upon your channel just now and you got great content AND SURPRISE this video IS IN HDR!!! thank you for literally brightening up my morning :D. awesome information here AND production quality!
8:50 Spinning light trick! I remember when DD had a trick setup by Richard Wardlow to do that, and when I first heard of it, I set up my own version of it in 2002/3 that scanned latlong skydome image RGB data into orbiting spotlights for environment lighting - the speedup vs. straight radiosity was substantial (though I couldn't completely save the rig due to bugs in that version of Layout - I had to reconstruct it each time).
@@yori4434 Lightwave motion blur works by rendering subframes at intermediate "slices" or steps of time, the number of which are set by the antialiasing settings - 5 steps for Low, 9 steps for Medium, 17 setups for High and 33 for Extreme. So a sphere flying by the camera will get "stretched" into a line. If a *light* is moving, it also gets stretched - and so does its light. A moving point light becomes a linear light. So, by carefully controlling subframe animation of a light, it can thereby be "expanded" using the motion blur. But since each pass is rendered by the light in its original form, the rendering speed stays as it would be if the light were not moving. IOW, you get the soft shadows for "free" by exploiting the motion blur process. My rig used a set of spotlights parented to a null, pointing to it, and arranged along what amounts to a line of longitude on a sphere. I then spun it around at the right speed to match the AA and motion blur settings, and voila - cheap environment lighting with nice soft shadows. I also had a hack to read RGB values from a spherical image map and fed them into the light's color on the fly as they spun, but that was the part that wouldn't save because of bugs.
I love Lightwave 3D. I started with 7.5 when I was a teen on a Celeron 500Mhz with 64MB of SDR Ram and ATI 8500 All in One vid. Never used a physical Amiga but one of these days I am hoping to be able to snag one. Before getting Lightwave I messed around with Bryce3D and a couple other simple 3D software but Lightwave 7-7.5 was my first full fledged 3D software experience and I still love it today.
i LOVE retro CGI that ACTUALLY looks synthetic and doesn't want to pretend to look photorealistic. Because actually synthetic looking computer generated images were always more fascinating to me. And i always wanted to create something like that my own but always found 3D software to be sooo freaking complicated and un-intuitive. The look of TRON is something that will never lose any its fascination because of its use of primitives and the amazing designs of Syd Mead. The metallic plasticky shiny surfaces flat surfaces is really what makes so so iconic and it's really hard to re-create that with modern 3D software that always adds too much modern shaders.
It's really impressive to see what a mid-late 1980s home computer could pull off in terms of CPU power to render 3D images. I mean the Processor of the Amiga wasn't even meant to do it but i really love that they actually did it anyway. Sadly i never had a Amiga in the 90s but would have definitely felt like a freaking king with one and would have probably done something like that at one point, beside using Pro Tracker to make music :) I mean Eric Schwartz used the Amiga and Deluxe paint to freaking make animated shortfilms. Working on a PC nowdays never gives me the same feeling of "everything is possible and only limited by your imagination" like working with an Amiga does. I later fiddled around with Emulators and even if it's not the same as working with real hardware, you still get the whole look and feel experience of what working under a Amiga workbench environment must have been like and i wonder if Lightwave ever worked with AGA Amigas and the later hardware addons like the Vampire or ACCA.
Lightwave Amiga works with all the latest hardware that has come out for Amiga folks. My A1200 has a piStorm cpu type card in it and it's insanely fast.
Great to see you in person, playing around with Lightwave and running into our normal little problems like fiddling with the wrong object and finding that out later after hours of rendering... Wasn't it great fun? Have a great day!
I just want to let you know how much I appreciate these videos. The history of CG software fascinates me, I only began using Blender in 2008, but I love stuff like this. The original Tron really captured my imagination as a kid, so much so that I also modeled a light cycle, but from Legacy, as a way to practice hard surface modeling. Keep making these and I'll keep watching, thank you! I wonder what resolution they rendered the original Tron at, they had to do surprisingly large image sizes to match the size of film stock and to get around not having anti-aliasing. I know on The Flight of the Navigator it was done at 6000x4000 and took 20 minutes to render a frame. Knowing that makes me feel better when it takes 4 minutes to get a 4k frame.
"The original "Tron" film's CGI was rendered at a very low resolution, essentially considered "low-res" by today's standards, as the technology at the time limited it to a resolution that could be effectively recorded onto film, which was primarily around 512x512 pixels per frame; this was then scaled up to fit the larger film format when projected in theaters." Back in the 90s, reviews of MPEG1 and MPEG2 encoding software had benchmarks that measured in minutes per frame.
@CantankerousDave Oh how interesting, even back then they were upscaling CG renders for film. Obviously it wasn't AI upscaling, something to do with the optical printer I presume?
Flight of the Navigator, many years later I learned that the computer animations were done by Omnibus - what happened to them, I wonder? Never again heard of them.
Hey Q. Cool content. Hey few years back when I was working at Area51 I got the chance to work on the family guy Tron parody. With the legendary Glenn Campbell
awesome video! I’m happy that the algorithm gave me this, I watched a video about how they made Tron, or at least some sort of behind-the-scenes. Anyways, I have subscribed, this seems like a pretty cool channel, and the comments are wonderful to read too. 😊
I'm very pleased watching your animation work. So you're using Lightwave 5.0. I've been using that software for a while. Someone gave me a copy, trying to learn, and I've been doing many animations I could, but I can't handle the computer fans running over night that makes it hard to sleep. But now I'm still using 7.0. I wanted to get the latest software, like I said, it's too damn expensive. Look at your 3d animation work, which expires me back when I was in high school. Taking animation class, Lightwave 3d was the first software that got me more into. Have you seen my short animation of Metroid 64, Samus short walk? I'm trying to look more like the graphics of the Nintendo 64
That's fantastic. Wow. Hey you don't need the latest. Not have fun and express your vision. There's always ways. I plan on more "newer" Amiga LW videos as my old ones are great quality.
nice to see you i love your videos good to have a face to go with the voice i find light wave fascinating even though i don't use it is nice to see what can be done on the amiga
I love these videos, we should normalize folks using power-user level software as it’s actually fun if you can find a good enough guide. I personally prefer 3d studio max r3.1 of all the old cgi tools due to it working on windows 98 but Unix/amiga stuff is fascinating
@@HoldandModify can you get any of the old lisp machine software to run Theoretically, we could emulate a symbolics 3650 lisp machine and run whatever wavefront called their software back in the day and make some insane stuff, heck a connection machine cm-2 if you stumble upon one or maybe SGI i do think these old machines stimulate more out of the box thinking.
@ I would not even know where to start for that someone would have to create that emulation software. I'm not familiar with any of that environment. :/
@ they’ve made a symbolics emulator now that works and mame emulates the sgi indy now It’s uncharted territory for me but if you get it running there were versions of software similar to what we use on pc/amiga
Currently watching an episode of Computer Chronicles that has a segment on CGI in movies, but it's Antz. (TBH, I much preferred the primitive CGI of Tron to the slick stuff in Tron Legacy. And the music of Wendy Carlos over Daft Punk's. Slicker, prettier, but no soul.)
Thank you. Although all my videos are shot on iPhone. And if you go waaaay back to my early barely watchable videos. I use to make a point about never editing! Hahaha. Oh how far I've come. :)
@@HoldandModify absolutely nothing wrong with that, they’re great cameras. Just, most people who shoot on their phones and edit, don’t retain the HDR either! I’m considering using mine as a secondary camera along with my RX100. Getting back into trying to make videos about my art hobbies for the first time in… 12 years! But I just used a single camera when shooting the first new one. Not edited it yet. But I suppose I’ll have to convert the phone HDR to SDR (potentially still better than shooting right in SDR), unless I master the SDR from the camera to go along with the phone’s HDR. (Or unless I don’t shoot on that camera. But it has a nice lens, optical zoom, and a subtle diffusion filter that makes lights look great!)
Amiga 600 owner here from Germany. Nice video! What CPU is in the A3000? I got a 68020 at 16MHz in my little 600 with some additional fast ram and CF HDD. I also got it recapped recently.
@@HoldandModify Never heard of Imagine3D. Sounds very 90s-ish 😁 A retirement goal of mine is to collect about 6 or 7 vintage Macs, along with a PII or PIII workstation, maybe two, to run all of those aforementioned apps and see what I can do with them today with my 15+ years of VFX experience.
If you use something like Amiberry emulator on a Raspberry Pi you can not only specify any Amiga that was ever made but you can overpower them to a ridiculous degree. So rendering with Lightwave could be as fast as modern software. Certainly faster than an actual A3000. But sometimes the software doesn't like being super charged and you may experience more crashes.
If you’re worried about tracing time, why didn’t you use an omega emulator and just pump the clock all the way to the top and you would’ve cut your render times down by a third or a quarter at least
actually, I first tried to do this video on my A1200 which has a pistorm in it which is very very quick but the capture card wasn't working properly. also for this type of video I really wanted to use real hardware as it's more fun! We learn things like. "wow. this is slow." haha
Hi Q, you still didnt take on my request, be so kind and render the Tron scene at 6000x4000 resolution on OG A3000 (no turbocard) so we can compare it to Tron render time in late 70s. The frame took aprox. 20 minutes back then.
I looked in to this. Lightwave3D needs to allocate CHIP MEMORY for its frame buffer. Amiga has 2MB of CHIP RAM. It cannot allocate enough ram at that resolution. You would have to break up the frame using Limited Region I suspect, and piece it all together. TEDIUS. LW does have segment memory but that is not for frame buffer. That's for FAST RAM management. One thing we can do is render at a lower 1:1 version of 6000x4000. Then use the simple math to scale to get an idea of the render time. We do this all the time even today to get an idea of final render time. Without having to "wait to see" how long it would take. So at a scale factor of "10" we render at 600x400. Then multiply that render time by 10 for the horizontal and vertical pixels. A total factor of 100. With that, the Tron render on my 25mhz A3000 at 600x400 took: 36min. So at 6000x4000 we can safely assume the render time would be around 60 hours!
@@HoldandModify dang you right, I forgot the major Amiga architecture limitation. Im sure you meant factor 1:10 but I know what you mean. 60 hours a frame (give or take) means the Foonly F1 had much much higher computing power than a decade newer A3000 (if we can believe the 6000x4000 frame rendered in 20 minutes). WOW. And they had not just one Foonly to render the Tron if I understood it right. Also those Evans&Sutherland graphical terminals from 1974 were almost out of this world when compared to A3000... So it looks like the makers of Tron would not really benefit if they had Amigas back then, at all...they had much better gear.🤔
To be honest, i prefer bits and pieces of both the new and old CGI. I prefer the old look overall, but not the original "chalk like" material, more like some "harsher" ABS plastic. I also prefer the new cycle translucent traces, along with the new upper and bottom light "trims", but not that big and certainly not that diffuse. Think the original had the aesthetics right, just not the details, for lack of computational power or software capabilities.
I don't mind long videos. I really don't. Especially when it comes to Amiga and Lightwave and other Amiga software. But, I'm weird. I want to make an entire Sci-Fi Show on an Amiga like Babylon 5. I know, I know only the pilot was done on linked together Amigas. Then later on linked together farm of PCs. I know, I know Debbie Downer. Sheesh. But, A good Amiga with Lightwave and Video Toaster and some mods with modern tech like Pi Storm etc and DCTV perhaps. Yeah. I dunno am I too Nerd for this? Lmao.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I only got to Lightwave in the early 2000's and was writing a tool that exported data out of it into Maya. I myself started with 3D Studio R3 around 1993. You couldn't pull me away from CG onward. I copied cinematics I've seen in computer games, and one of my biggest regrets is in not being able to preserve any of my works I spent countless hours making. I remember every pixel, like it was yesterday. And yet, my renders are lost to time. My brother was making 3D as far back as 1988. I inherited his hardware and his interests. Started with 2D and then moved my way up.
Yeah I feel VERY fortunate that some how I managed to save my first computer art. Even back from my very first in 4th grade! Thanks for the story. I dig it when people share all the old tales.
My story is very similar as I also started in 3ds in DOS in 1993 and never stopped since. Never went into programming, though, nor changed from 3ds (now "Max"). Those were the days...
@@vladimirsavkovic7701 It was magic. My brother showed me "ray tracing" which was the emerging new tech and I misheard him say it. For a number of years I called it "rat racing". 3D became a career, because I was obsessed with computer graphics from the moment I saw it. I wanted to make game cinematics at first, but went into film instead. Still doing it full time more than 30 years later.
@@enilenis I had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the world (western balkans, then lived in a few places around the world, ending up in Russia for 25 years) so there was never an option for me to go into film or game cinematics and stuff. Had to learn literally everything by myself then endure about a decade of being told and shown how useless and pointless my chosen "career" (more of a "trade") was. Then demand for it finally picked up in the 3rd world I still inhabit (luckily, I'm back in the western balkans) and now I can finally make a more-or-less bearable living out of it. Just had to never give up. Since I can't do anything at all else nearly as well as I can do 3D, quitting was never an option.
I have the exact same regrets over homemade movies from the 90s and 00s that I've lost. Sometimes I wish I could recreate them but... it'd never be the same.
Agree, great to see the man behind the voice mixing it up. Thanks for sharing these CGI videos!
Was spooky to do but it seems like it's time. I've always felt I could convey more than with just "waiving hands." ;)
That was a fun wee introduction to multi-point lighting. Of course most real filming uses 3-point, rather than 2-point, but yeah!
Yeah I've some on that as well. I need to update a lot of my older videos. They're quite....old. :)
if funny how renderers keeps getting more complex and realistic and thus ensuring that you can still... experience that single frame overnight rendering speed on modern hardware with modern software... it just looks a bit better now than 35 years ago
ABSOLUTELY
I have a Lightwave 3D shirt from the GDC a LONG time ago that says "Piss off! I'm coding" on the back. I had to watch a 30 minute demo to get it, but it was an interesting demo & after the first day of the conference you're usually looking for things to do if you're not attending a lot of talks.
I've not heard of that! Nice!
i got my hands on an a400t last year, and i wanted to try doing basically exactly this. to learn how to render with the older hardware for fun. these videos help a ton as far as learning how the interface works
Glad to hear! Have fun!
I love these graphics.
They have a look! It's nice.
Yes yes YEEES!
Retro CGI for the win!!!
Keep them coming!
‼️For maximum effect, you have to comp it into a Cineon recorder and then shoot the film down to the lab and wait two or three days to find out how it looks on the big screen 🙂
Haha, good idea!
WOW. i stumbled upon your channel just now and you got great content AND SURPRISE this video IS IN HDR!!! thank you for literally brightening up my morning :D. awesome information here AND production quality!
HDR'rrr Heh. Glad you found me! There have been a lot of new folks I've noticed. YT finally turned my light on. :)
8:50 Spinning light trick!
I remember when DD had a trick setup by Richard Wardlow to do that, and when I first heard of it, I set up my own version of it in 2002/3 that scanned latlong skydome image RGB data into orbiting spotlights for environment lighting - the speedup vs. straight radiosity was substantial (though I couldn't completely save the rig due to bugs in that version of Layout - I had to reconstruct it each time).
yup!
How does it work?
@@yori4434 Lightwave motion blur works by rendering subframes at intermediate "slices" or steps of time, the number of which are set by the antialiasing settings - 5 steps for Low, 9 steps for Medium, 17 setups for High and 33 for Extreme.
So a sphere flying by the camera will get "stretched" into a line.
If a *light* is moving, it also gets stretched - and so does its light. A moving point light becomes a linear light.
So, by carefully controlling subframe animation of a light, it can thereby be "expanded" using the motion blur. But since each pass is rendered by the light in its original form, the rendering speed stays as it would be if the light were not moving. IOW, you get the soft shadows for "free" by exploiting the motion blur process.
My rig used a set of spotlights parented to a null, pointing to it, and arranged along what amounts to a line of longitude on a sphere. I then spun it around at the right speed to match the AA and motion blur settings, and voila - cheap environment lighting with nice soft shadows. I also had a hack to read RGB values from a spherical image map and fed them into the light's color on the fly as they spun, but that was the part that wouldn't save because of bugs.
@@jimmay8627 Whoa! Now i get it, thanks! o:
I love Lightwave 3D. I started with 7.5 when I was a teen on a Celeron 500Mhz with 64MB of SDR Ram and ATI 8500 All in One vid. Never used a physical Amiga but one of these days I am hoping to be able to snag one. Before getting Lightwave I messed around with Bryce3D and a couple other simple 3D software but Lightwave 7-7.5 was my first full fledged 3D software experience and I still love it today.
I've been using it all this time. Its a torrid love affair. haha.
Q great to see the man behind the voice. You look great cheers for an excellent episode.
Hey thanks for that! Glad it was watchable!
i LOVE retro CGI that ACTUALLY looks synthetic and doesn't want to pretend to look photorealistic. Because actually synthetic looking computer generated images were always more fascinating to me. And i always wanted to create something like that my own but always found 3D software to be sooo freaking complicated and un-intuitive. The look of TRON is something that will never lose any its fascination because of its use of primitives and the amazing designs of Syd Mead. The metallic plasticky shiny surfaces flat surfaces is really what makes so so iconic and it's really hard to re-create that with modern 3D software that always adds too much modern shaders.
It's really impressive to see what a mid-late 1980s home computer could pull off in terms of CPU power to render 3D images. I mean the Processor of the Amiga wasn't even meant to do it but i really love that they actually did it anyway. Sadly i never had a Amiga in the 90s but would have definitely felt like a freaking king with one and would have probably done something like that at one point, beside using Pro Tracker to make music :) I mean Eric Schwartz used the Amiga and Deluxe paint to freaking make animated shortfilms. Working on a PC nowdays never gives me the same feeling of "everything is possible and only limited by your imagination" like working with an Amiga does. I later fiddled around with Emulators and even if it's not the same as working with real hardware, you still get the whole look and feel experience of what working under a Amiga workbench environment must have been like and i wonder if Lightwave ever worked with AGA Amigas and the later hardware addons like the Vampire or ACCA.
Lightwave Amiga works with all the latest hardware that has come out for Amiga folks. My A1200 has a piStorm cpu type card in it and it's insanely fast.
Holy crap FORGE I forgot all about that cool procedural!
yeah it's pretty awesome even now!
Great to see you in person, playing around with Lightwave and running into our normal little problems like fiddling with the wrong object and finding that out later after hours of rendering... Wasn't it great fun? Have a great day!
Always! Thanks man. And thanks for your continued viewership! You're one of the O.G.s!
@HoldandModify if only I knew what O.G. stands for? 😁
@ Original Gangsta! (original member) :)
@@HoldandModify oh thank you, I am most honoured! You english speakers and your abbreviations. 😁
I just want to let you know how much I appreciate these videos. The history of CG software fascinates me, I only began using Blender in 2008, but I love stuff like this. The original Tron really captured my imagination as a kid, so much so that I also modeled a light cycle, but from Legacy, as a way to practice hard surface modeling. Keep making these and I'll keep watching, thank you!
I wonder what resolution they rendered the original Tron at, they had to do surprisingly large image sizes to match the size of film stock and to get around not having anti-aliasing. I know on The Flight of the Navigator it was done at 6000x4000 and took 20 minutes to render a frame. Knowing that makes me feel better when it takes 4 minutes to get a 4k frame.
"The original "Tron" film's CGI was rendered at a very low resolution, essentially considered "low-res" by today's standards, as the technology at the time limited it to a resolution that could be effectively recorded onto film, which was primarily around 512x512 pixels per frame; this was then scaled up to fit the larger film format when projected in theaters."
Back in the 90s, reviews of MPEG1 and MPEG2 encoding software had benchmarks that measured in minutes per frame.
@CantankerousDave Oh how interesting, even back then they were upscaling CG renders for film. Obviously it wasn't AI upscaling, something to do with the optical printer I presume?
Flight of the Navigator, many years later I learned that the computer animations were done by Omnibus - what happened to them, I wonder? Never again heard of them.
Get this man an SGI machine!
My buddy had one years ago. I've never gotten to use one though. :(
Great show, nice show breaks when showing steps inside the software.
Always learning I am. Thanks for checking it out!
Thanks for the video mr.Q, always a pleasure to watch!!
thank you and we keep the dream alive!
Yeah, nice to see you. Great stuff
Hey Q. Cool content. Hey few years back when I was working at Area51 I got the chance to work on the family guy Tron parody. With the legendary Glenn Campbell
I think I recall this! Yeah man that was great!
Nice to see ya man !!
Well I had to prove I wasn't Ai. :)
awesome video! I’m happy that the algorithm gave me this, I watched a video about how they made Tron, or at least some sort of behind-the-scenes. Anyways, I have subscribed, this seems like a pretty cool channel, and the comments are wonderful to read too. 😊
YAY! Yes I noticed and thanked YT for finally turning the light on for my channel. I also thank YOU!
this is too fun!! Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm very pleased watching your animation work. So you're using Lightwave 5.0. I've been using that software for a while. Someone gave me a copy, trying to learn, and I've been doing many animations I could, but I can't handle the computer fans running over night that makes it hard to sleep. But now I'm still using 7.0. I wanted to get the latest software, like I said, it's too damn expensive. Look at your 3d animation work, which expires me back when I was in high school. Taking animation class, Lightwave 3d was the first software that got me more into. Have you seen my short animation of Metroid 64, Samus short walk? I'm trying to look more like the graphics of the Nintendo 64
That's fantastic. Wow. Hey you don't need the latest. Not have fun and express your vision. There's always ways. I plan on more "newer" Amiga LW videos as my old ones are great quality.
Mr Omnipotent. Great show. Thanks
Haaaa yes! And thank you for checking it out!
nice to see you i love your videos good to have a face to go with the voice i find light wave fascinating even though i don't use it is nice to see what can be done on the amiga
Thanks! It's a big step but at least folks now see I do look somewhat like my avatar. :)
Cool video! I have an Amiga 500, but I never did get this kind of software for it or any of my computers.
A500 was my first Amiga too! I quickly realized I needed more to do what I wanted. That's when I grabbed an A3000.
@@HoldandModify: Cool, yeah. I wish I could've afforded a 4000T back in the day... or even now!
Good stuff Maynard! (Reference to an 80s commercial)
Hah! Oh yeah I remember.
Good ol Jim Varney.
"As best I could..."
* _"The_ best I could."
I barely graduated High School. Which is why I found a career in visual effects. :)
Video toaster has used many of the TCT Network stuff
Wow, 5.5 don't have Area Light huh, and here I am playing with 5.6 thinking they are almost the same ;p
ludicrous how amiga had raytracing in early 90s
Earlier than that even! Turbosilver and Imagine.
I love these videos, we should normalize folks using power-user level software as it’s actually fun if you can find a good enough guide. I personally prefer 3d studio max r3.1 of all the old cgi tools due to it working on windows 98 but Unix/amiga stuff is fascinating
I still do CGI for a living and I use modern tools, but I PREFER these older ones for creativity and fun.
@@HoldandModify can you get any of the old lisp machine software to run
Theoretically, we could emulate a symbolics 3650 lisp machine and run whatever wavefront called their software back in the day and make some insane stuff, heck a connection machine cm-2 if you stumble upon one
or maybe SGI
i do think these old machines stimulate more out of the box thinking.
@ I would not even know where to start for that someone would have to create that emulation software. I'm not familiar with any of that environment. :/
@ they’ve made a symbolics emulator now that works and mame emulates the sgi indy now
It’s uncharted territory for me but if you get it running there were versions of software similar to what we use on pc/amiga
Have you posted a final rendered version of your light cycle scene, I would like to see it? Take care.
I have not. Day job has me slammed and any free time I can eek out I male these videos. Hopefully get to it.
Currently watching an episode of Computer Chronicles that has a segment on CGI in movies, but it's Antz. (TBH, I much preferred the primitive CGI of Tron to the slick stuff in Tron Legacy. And the music of Wendy Carlos over Daft Punk's. Slicker, prettier, but no soul.)
I like both, but everything about the original film still dominates.
Whoa! HDR!
A lot of my videos are. Why? BECAUSE I CAN. :)
@@HoldandModify it’s fun to see used in a video that’s actually been edited, rather than a direct smartphone handheld upload :)
Thank you. Although all my videos are shot on iPhone. And if you go waaaay back to my early barely watchable videos. I use to make a point about never editing! Hahaha. Oh how far I've come. :)
@@HoldandModify absolutely nothing wrong with that, they’re great cameras.
Just, most people who shoot on their phones and edit, don’t retain the HDR either!
I’m considering using mine as a secondary camera along with my RX100.
Getting back into trying to make videos about my art hobbies for the first time in… 12 years! But I just used a single camera when shooting the first new one. Not edited it yet.
But I suppose I’ll have to convert the phone HDR to SDR (potentially still better than shooting right in SDR), unless I master the SDR from the camera to go along with the phone’s HDR. (Or unless I don’t shoot on that camera. But it has a nice lens, optical zoom, and a subtle diffusion filter that makes lights look great!)
Fun Stuffs
"More softer"? 😆
Damn Q I'm not used to seeing your hands attached to your body😂
lol! (WAIVES)
Hey! It's Q. In person, no less.
IN WIDESCREEN ;)
It's just a raytraced animation!
@@daishi5571 lol
Amiga 600 owner here from Germany. Nice video! What CPU is in the A3000? I got a 68020 at 16MHz in my little 600 with some additional fast ram and CF HDD. I also got it recapped recently.
Mine came with a 25mhz 68030. However this one in the video is using a Phase5 50mhz 68060.
Do you use or demo any other "vintage" 3D apps, like 3DS R4 or Infini-D or Stratavision or EIAS or.. etc?
I did not. My experience with vintage apps other than LW are limited. I've shown Imagine3D, and some others though.
@@HoldandModify Never heard of Imagine3D. Sounds very 90s-ish 😁
A retirement goal of mine is to collect about 6 or 7 vintage Macs, along with a PII or PIII workstation, maybe two, to run all of those aforementioned apps and see what I can do with them today with my 15+ years of VFX experience.
Can the modern upgrades like vampire make the rendering faster?
Yes very much so.
If you use something like Amiberry emulator on a Raspberry Pi you can not only specify any Amiga that was ever made but you can overpower them to a ridiculous degree. So rendering with Lightwave could be as fast as modern software. Certainly faster than an actual A3000. But sometimes the software doesn't like being super charged and you may experience more crashes.
If you’re worried about tracing time, why didn’t you use an omega emulator and just pump the clock all the way to the top and you would’ve cut your render times down by a third or a quarter at least
actually, I first tried to do this video on my A1200 which has a pistorm in it which is very very quick but the capture card wasn't working properly. also for this type of video I really wanted to use real hardware as it's more fun! We learn things like. "wow. this is slow." haha
Hi Q, you still didnt take on my request, be so kind and render the Tron scene at 6000x4000 resolution on OG A3000 (no turbocard) so we can compare it to Tron render time in late 70s. The frame took aprox. 20 minutes back then.
hmm so a 25mhz 68030. That would take some time. Let me plan a bit and i'll look into it. thank you.
@@HoldandModify Im not in a hurry, its for fun and giggles project.
I looked in to this. Lightwave3D needs to allocate CHIP MEMORY for its frame buffer. Amiga has 2MB of CHIP RAM. It cannot allocate enough ram at that resolution. You would have to break up the frame using Limited Region I suspect, and piece it all together. TEDIUS. LW does have segment memory but that is not for frame buffer. That's for FAST RAM management. One thing we can do is render at a lower 1:1 version of 6000x4000. Then use the simple math to scale to get an idea of the render time. We do this all the time even today to get an idea of final render time. Without having to "wait to see" how long it would take. So at a scale factor of "10" we render at 600x400. Then multiply that render time by 10 for the horizontal and vertical pixels. A total factor of 100. With that, the Tron render on my 25mhz A3000 at 600x400 took: 36min. So at 6000x4000 we can safely assume the render time would be around 60 hours!
@@HoldandModify dang you right, I forgot the major Amiga architecture limitation.
Im sure you meant factor 1:10 but I know what you mean.
60 hours a frame (give or take) means the Foonly F1 had much much higher computing power than a decade newer A3000 (if we can believe the 6000x4000 frame rendered in 20 minutes). WOW.
And they had not just one Foonly to render the Tron if I understood it right.
Also those Evans&Sutherland graphical terminals from 1974 were almost out of this world when compared to A3000...
So it looks like the makers of Tron would not really benefit if they had Amigas back then, at all...they had much better gear.🤔
@@HoldandModify and BTW Q, thank you for the effort, it was a fun project to read...
It's all about the maps. Use photoshop and put multiples on everything.
To be honest, i prefer bits and pieces of both the new and old CGI. I prefer the old look overall, but not the original "chalk like" material, more like some "harsher" ABS plastic. I also prefer the new cycle translucent traces, along with the new upper and bottom light "trims", but not that big and certainly not that diffuse. Think the original had the aesthetics right, just not the details, for lack of computational power or software capabilities.
Going back and looking at the original film. I fell in love with their style all over again.
I don't mind long videos. I really don't. Especially when it comes to Amiga and Lightwave and other Amiga software. But, I'm weird. I want to make an entire Sci-Fi Show on an Amiga like Babylon 5. I know, I know only the pilot was done on linked together Amigas. Then later on linked together farm of PCs. I know, I know Debbie Downer. Sheesh. But, A good Amiga with Lightwave and Video Toaster and some mods with modern tech like Pi Storm etc and DCTV perhaps. Yeah. I dunno am I too Nerd for this? Lmao.
Everything you've said is epic! Yes! I wish I was retired and could do these things. lol
Man these sound painful to work with, how did 3D artists survive in those days
I've been doing this for 35-years. It took a lot of booze. Nowadays at my age, we cope differently. Like.. making YT videos. :)
@HoldandModify I was drinking every day for a year man I don't wish that upon my worst enemy.
The original look. Cg looks better than that photorealism bs
Haha, well, hmm. I have not a final opinion yet although my channel here seems to. :)