It's awesome how CGI folk were able to do what they did back in the 80/90s, with computers lesser than todays home computers. I loved TRON. To think I could possibly recreate or make fan based vids on my laptop, is amazing to me.
Very epic. I remember trying to do a rotating molecule overnight on a a1200 40Mhz. Then waking up and seeing that I had misplaced the light source; looking at a perfectly black animation That was using Real3d though. Very nice looking Tron tank. Thank you.
lol. yeah. one of my first 3d rendering experiences ever was a C64 3d-mandelbrot program. i let it run overnight to generate a single frame. the next day, the screen was just green. i found out i had positioned the camera outside the mandelbrot, looking outwards. xD
@@amigaalive6266 Haha I tried to understand how Mandelbrot worked based off the article in Scientific American Computer Recreations (1985-08 according to my archive). I didn't quite get complex numbers, so something appeared, but I still don't know what.
The PAR! Wow, what a blast from the past. Loved seeing all this, especially in 4K from your camera. All images I have seen on the internet of the Lightwave interface (nevermind the PAR) are very low res. This is great, thank you.
Nice render. I was 10 when TRON came out. I was 3000 miles from home when I had to see it in the theaters while visiting California. Thanks for the memory. Nice work!
I remember from the early 90s how exciting it was to see slowly rendered 3D frames in a time when hardware acceleration wasn't a thing yet. Every rendering was like unpacking a christmas gift.
The making of feature for the first tron is very enlightening for what they had to go through. And not only did they have usually no previews, so the first time they'd see moving images at all was on the full 70 mm print. But at many times, the animators delivered giant exposure sheet tables of coordinates and rotations for every CG element and the technicians copied the numbers by hand frame by frame for each element... Remember, kids. These machines could barely do tweening. So a 10 second shot would have 240 rows of 6 columns of data. But.. We should also remember. That the vast majority of the computer world had no CG at all. Most Shots were just massive stacks of masked Kodalith with clever rear lighting techniques. In a way. That first Tron was the first time Disney really went in and made so much in post. Employed so many roto artists. It was basically what modern Marvel movies have become today.
I was in High School when Tron came out and I first saw it in our Computer class of all places, we were rockin' Pet computers back then. lol Your rendition looks pretty accurate from what I remember. I to will be replacing my fans with Noctua, so quiet and they kind of match the Amiga's beige colour scheme.
Amazing to look back on old school CGI. I used to have an Amiga 500. It has so many bugs using it sometimes, playing with Deluxe Paint 4. Nice to see Lightwave 3d, I'm still using the software these days now, I want to get the latest version, too darn expensive. Speaking of Tron, I did model the MCP a long time ago, and I still have the model haven't continued working on it. Love the animation and how it turns out in a nice resolution screen play
Great stuff ! I started lightwave on an Amiga 500 with an expansion card. We didn't have a printer in those days and we took pictures of the monitor with an analog camera. Those were some good times.
the cpu amigas have are honestly mind blowing. If an atmega had a 32 bit data bus it could almost run a real pc... this is pretty shocking how 200 000 transistors (a low number compared to today with like billions of transistors modern cpus have, a 486sx has 1 million, atmega 2560 maybe has around 2 million, but has 8 bit data bus) and yet those 200 000 transistors could render something, personally thought that these computers would require more processing power to render cgi... and now a 10 year old i7 4790k, a cpu i dreamed of as a kid is now considered "obsolete" to some of people in this world... you learned me something how 90s animations were made, and subbed!
I have a Vampire 4 Standalone in my office at work and it renders Babylon 5 and old LW content all day, I then make MPG videos and DCTV videos for playback on my V2 equipped PAR / Flyers system. I also use After Effects using MAC emulation on the V4 and make some cool animations there. I have recreated the workflow I did back in the day costing thousands in Mac, Amiga Toaster Flyer gear, and PC with a $500 or so Vampire standalone. It's great to revisit these workflows using modern upgrades. I really have to make a video. For example Video Toaster User and Newtekniques magazines had great Lightwave tutorials and I learned so much from those. That alone would make a good video to take on of those articles and show the whole process start to finish,.
I've been toying with the idea of doing Lightwave training tapes style videos. Like we used to buy on VHS. I sort of did that when I first started this channel. But really didn't have a plan,
This brings back the memories! The best I had back then at my disposal was a an stock A1200 and Imagine. Eventually I got an 030 but yeah, overnight rendering! I did a lot with that machine though. I always brought it into Art and Animation lab at BGSU rather than use the Atari 1040 or even the SGI machines that were there, and eventually used it at work developing art and animation for PC games. I now have an Ice Drake accerlated A1200, a 3000 and a Toasterized 2500HD. Actually the only 2 I still need to get are the 4000 and 1000.
@@SledgeFox we are never happy with what we have, are we? Having a A4000 especially one from the Commodore era is excellent, yes the A3000/3000T are the most exciting Amigas in my eyes, but A4000 is probably the best Amiga you can own. It can do all A3000 can (well except Amber), so be happy. I would love A4000, but Im very happy with A1200, it does all I would do with A4000 anyway.
I remember doubting between a 030 and 040. At the time a ran Frontier from the CLI in 50Hz NTSC rather from Workbench in 60Hz PAL since it was a frame or two faster. Oh memories.
My Amiga 3000 was a rock star. First thing I did was nibble away enough of the metal to put the Toaster in it, and it fit and worked. Next was the PAR recorder from DPS, then finally an 040 upgrade. Somehow ALL of that fit in the case. While I did eventually get an Amiga 4000 I never "shined" to it the way I did the 3000. It made me money year after year for quite some time with LW graphics. I should dig it out of the shed and see if it still boots up...
Oddly enough, you mentioning raytracing. The lightcycles, tank and recognizers were created by MAGI Sythavision, who did about 50% of the actual CG in the film (where most of the imagery you see is created through optical techniques with backlit 2D artwork). MAGI is significant for introducing raytracing to CG in 1974 with Sythavision. So in all probability those shots in the film were perhaps actually raytraced, where things like mirrored reflections, and even shadows, are options but not implicit. The base scene sampling tech and then how you handle materials and lighting models are separate issues. And then in the film they were doing optical post production as well (so even back then you weren't looking at raw renders spit to a film recorder or recorded off screen, in lieu of film recorder) so that you got the glows and the bloom/halo off that tank sheen, which wasn't a renderable effect and not even possible with image processing back then.
I mean, technically, all computer animation is Ray traced. It's firing photons off or "rays" and then recording the impact. I was referring more to things like shadow effects and reflection effects. Thank you for sharing that information. I love hearing all of those details. I'm sure everyone else does too. Appreciated!
@@HoldandModifyNot really. 3D geometry is flattened then pixel filled. No rays whatsoever. That’s the foundation. Everything else is then a bolt on, until pixel filling gives way to ray casting :)
@@absurdengineering and raycasting is only one technique within the umbrella of raytracing. A more biased and/or simplified technique than, say, the light transport style you find in something like Octane. But at the end of the day, raycasting is a method of determining visibility, not how light is actually behaving or the look of surfaces.
Ho ho hooo! Flashback when I did a render of such a tank (approximately, I worked from memory) just driving by on an Amiga 2000. It always took maybe 30h to generate a clip. Sleeping next to the hyperventilating machine was no mean feat.
Wow adobe can still handle Amiga formats. Impressive. Cool video. Put a Z3660 in there and use the ARM CPU for rendering jobs, then switch to the 060 on the Z3660 for daily driver use!
ב''ה, it has been a while but IIRC IFF may have been an EA format that immediately became the de facto standard because there wasn't one and it was reasonably designed and they weren't encumbering it. The I was "Interchangeable."
I did a long while ago. So many people have done that now. The new movies and shows too. It's a lot easier with modern tools for most. I have more fun staying with the old look.
y'kew when you're importing the frames into the PVR, there's an option that makes it super speedy... I think it's the 'non convert' or something... oh my memory.
I was rocking a Quadra 700 back in the day and it was packing a 68040 at 25mhz and it couldn't run Doom correctly! I'm pretty sure that was lazy programming as I could run a little app called 'Infini-D' which was fun.
It is kinda ironic how Tron lost best visual effects to some other random film at the time, due to the industry assuming CGI was cheating - BACK THEN, CHEATING???? No, today it is still an art do not get me wrong, but you gotta admit - it is cheaty AF! But they get hella awards for it! The OG got nada!
Hell to the yes! Subscribed, I sure do miss my A500 :) Oh speaking of Newtek, I'm pretty sure my cousins friend worked there when they first opened in Topeka.
That original Newtek office. What a place that must have been! I have a buddy I worked with in Los Angeles who worked there. Also, thanks for the sub and glad you enjoyed!
@@HoldandModify Ya I'm a Topeka boy, unfortunately I wasn't hatched until 82 so a lot of that was a little before my time. But I was around for some of it.
i've no idea why you are doing this hobby but it is obvious you love it. question: can i do this sort of thing on the amiga a500 mini? its my first amiga. i'm trying to make up for being in computer jail since 1989 because of some bs in the 2nd grade and being forced to take the fall for a teacher, because she handed me the wrong floppy disk.
Sorry about your historical bummers. Yes, the A500 Mini should be able. You just need to figure out how to install Workbench on it and other Amiga software. It's an emulator. I have videos for such on this channel. Just not for that product. As I don't have one. There's Facebook and Discord groups for the Mini that are quite helpful i'm guessing.
‼Ehm, not sure why it would get any hotter than it gets after an hour of use. Whether it's doing extreme floating point crunching for six hours or displaying the desktop for six hours, the CPU is using exactly the same wattage and maintains the same temp.
Heat soak over time. Or if it was going to fail. Possible melt down from voltage protection fails, etc. But i'm not good with tech stuff. So more just under educated concern. :)
Technically the Amiga could (and did do) amazing Ray traced video back in the day. Many tv/films used it. As a boy I was intensely interested in 3D and Ray tracing. Wrote a CAD application from scratch in Amiga Basic at 15. Not as nice as this, but this was what I would have loved to end with.
Not really, TV series used it since the LW was a part of Toaster package they already had for different tasks. It wasnt the choice No.1 for filmmakers, it was a budget solution. Even those series quickly switched to SGI platform when the LW was ported, using Amiga just for editing but not rendering. In 90s Amiga was loosing its breath fast... And LW is not Ray tracer, it is a renderer with path traced post effects.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 they didn't switch to SGI, they by and large switched to the Windows NT platform, and the most aware going DEC Alpha platform which offered much higher processing power for the money on the desktop than Indigos and Octanes. Their 3D viewport and OpenGL experience wasn't nearly as nice. By the end of the '90s the Xeon platform started busting heads and with the help of Compaq killing DEC Alpha was able to make SGI and the MIPS platform too slow, too expensive and pushed them into practical irrelevance for CG animation by the early '00s.
@@HoldandModify Was in high school and stuck in a boarding school. Had my math text book and PC manuals as the only reference. Needless to say my rotaions did not use matrix manipulation, and was a bit messy. But it was mouse/event driven and design was in 3rd angle orthographic. Then I could render in perspective with hidden plane removal using (very rudimentary) painter's algorithm. I was not taught painter's algo, nor double bufferering, but thought to use them anyway. No books, teachers, family etc. was there to help. But I was really passionate about 3D. One of the school subjects was machine drawing, which I excelled at too. Went on to become a C++ developer with strong math. :)
@@HoldandModify Considering the hardware and the resolution it is rendering at, that is not bad at all. For similar scenes, I think it was once the higher clocked Pentiums came a long that I started to see render times drop below the 1 minute mark per frame. The late Pentium 3 time when it was down to seconds. So for a meek 68K - 16 minutes is just fine.
@@HoldandModify Yeah I'm not sure that was the smartest move, but I needed something with firepower for my renders and the 3k wasn't doing it at that time. Not sure why, I was working with Dave Hopkins at the time so I trusted his judgment.
Hi HAM, you have some thing a bit wrong. The Tron movie was made on specialized PDP-10 called Foonly F1, and you will not believe but this computer had about same computing power as stock A3000, had same 2MB RAM then stock A3000, 330MB HDD and had a 3MB video buffer, something any stock Amiga could just dream off. Also the graphics terminal had way higher resolution then ECS A3000. One Tron frame in size 6000x4000 pixels took aprox. 20 minutes, now do that on stock A3000... (actually why not, try to render one frame in 6000x4000 using MC68030@25MHz to compare, just for the giggles). I would add the glowing effect to the blue lines on the wall (if its there then it needs to be way higher) to bring this Tron atmosphere. Also Im a bit disappointment that you didnt dig deeper last time. Yes you found which object in the scene caused the corruption, but I was hoping you will find out what happened, why got the entire image in screen buffer corrupted. Was the entire RAM overflowed (well 256MB is a lot), or just the framebuffer and ergo the ChipRAM got overflowed. Would like to know more... And BTW I like your intros, who made it for you (just joking)...?
The tech reasons for that corruption was from the "out of bounds" data that bad mesh produced. However anything more than that, I'd need someone far smarter than myself to figure out. Thank you for sharing that detailed information about the computers used for Tron!! That is good stuff!
@@HoldandModify I know, but simple out of bounds would cause the corruption inside LW scene window like you saw with the other LW version (the zipper lines), but your first issue was that entire screen got corrupted, which is interesting. Do you still have the OG LW file? Is your LW (the screen corrupting version) a "borrowed" one? Can you put both on some FTP for us to download? Maybe we can dig deeper. And please make a short video and do the rendering of the Tron scene with single frame at 6000x4000 pixels on stock A3000@25MHz to see how it fares against the Foonly F1 from 70s, would be great content, dont you think?
@ that object along with everything else in that project are created by me. So it's sharable if I want. Lightwave Amiga has a max res limitation. I need to investigate the limit. I thought it was 8k but it might be 4k. Did you see both my videos about the issue? Or only the initial one.
The Tron stuff you've seen is my creation. Other stuff is included content that came with the Lightwave install. Some is gathered from various jobs I've had. Decades of collecting.
Interesting. My videos have been HDR for some time. Normally don't have an issue. Maybe something got messed up in this export? Sorry. You can play the non HDR via the settings "gear."
@@HoldandModifyat least on my iPad pro 14" which should be tracking color space, tone mapping, gamma etc very closely to spec, your video, at least compared to the menus, other video thumbnails, comments etc are nuclear. For lack of better words, feels like 'HDR for the sake of being HDR'. Respectfully suggest looking at it on ipad pro set to reference mode (or if you have access to a color-critical monitor, that).
@@Integr8d Did you check out some of my others? Wonder if it's all of them or just this one. I edit on an M3 iMac. It's not an HDR screen but FCPx is supposed to give me an idea with its tone mapping. I also play the content on my OLED LG in HDR and while yes this particular video does look HOT. Especially the computer monitor screen. My other videos seem to bet within spec. I shoot video using my iPhone in AUTO mode at 40 60FPS HDR is why.
I had trouble at work today, but found an annoying solution. Im rendering a simple low quality logo in blender on a $5k+ PC. I realized blender was redering on the CPU instead of the incredible Nvidia graphics card . I switched it over to using the GPU and i thought it fried the GPU, it had long beeps the screen went dark. It didn't sound good. After hours of IT unplugging things and trouble shooting. They pluged the graphics card back in and it displayed on the monitor again. But as soon as i tried to render a frame it long beeped and i canceled the render to avoid being down for hours. So today Monday, i switched back to rendering on the CPU, as PNGs. It worked just fine but its taking 100s of times longer. Its frustrating having this GPU and i cant use it.
That's easy, it's just copying the version you can easily find online. The owners of Lightwave are okay with people using "special" version so of Amiga based Lightwave and Toaster stuff. As long as you do not sell it.
@@HoldandModify Does this mean I can install original copy of Lightwave that includes a dongle in winuae or do I have to find a special copy to install?
@@HoldandModify I remember when I was young and we had Amigas in our house I used to buy "Amiga World" magazine which always had some user created Amiga 3D renders. I used to love seeing that stuff. Good to see people using the Amiga in that same way.
if anyone wants to use adobe's crap they can always go for the 10 year old versions, as those are easier to 'find' and there hasn't been any real improvement since then anyway..
This video is so deep in nostalgia....the result of the animation is not even close to what Blender can produce now in real time Eevee yet it took so long to render comparatively speaking. We have come a loooooong way, but.....what have we lost 😥
All that talking and then you finally render it and forgot to do the most important thing: ADD THE VIDEO OF THE RENDER TO YOUR ACTUAL UA-cam VIDEO so we can see what it looks like in first person on full frame!!! Waited all that time and listened to a lot of explanation about file formats and even got a “go F yourself” meme with Wolverine (to we the viewers as a kind gesture) and there is NO “MONEYSHOT!” As the kids say Weak Sauce! Bit? ‘No. No. No. no.” With red spikes.
Oh a fullscreen feed from the computer? That would require a capture device. I guess i could look in to that. I have almost 300 videos and they all start with the same intro...."Most poorly produced, underproduced..." It's not a joke. I'm serious. :)
@HoldandModify if that's how you respond to critisim, then I'm out. This apparently not the channel for me, which is really sad because I otherwise enjoy your content. You know full well that there are major compatibility issues with HDR and that it causes strange color calibration issues for the majority of playback devices. You could save storage space, reduce render time, and make your videos look better. It's a win win. Not cool that you mock people who give you suggestions on how to improve the experience for your viewers (and literally save you time and money as a bonus). You're showing SDR content from your computer screen in an HDR video. That's an obvious no no if you care about content preservation and color accuracy. Instead of asking me why I felt like HDR was bad, you went to childish sarcasm, so have a nice day, but I'm out.
@@awesomeferret Mock? I think your internet filter needs tuning. I was making "light" of your comment. It was not an assault on your words. Sorry it came off that way. Obviously it upset you, I apologize. I've been doing HDR for a while more as a gimmick. You are right though. It's mostly pointless. It looks great on all the HDR displays I have at my house. Even on my iPhone. However it does take longer to edit, import, export. I think it's time for a change. Thank you.
When I saw the title I was hoping what it meant was we were going to see super old CGI rendered in 4K with modern technology
Sorry. I' ve done some videos sort of like that. I thought about doing it. but this is a channel focused on older tech/software.
That's similar to what I thought.
Actually "Corridor Crew" did exactly this. Recreated the Tron Lightcycle scene using modern software.
@@HoldandModify Oh awesome thank you for the recommendation! I'll check out some more videos here first since I still like vintage tech
@@HoldandModify you job is amazing, gained a subscriber!
It's awesome how CGI folk were able to do what they did back in the 80/90s, with computers lesser than todays home computers. I loved TRON. To think I could possibly recreate or make fan based vids on my laptop, is amazing to me.
It's special that Tron. What they did back then.
indeed!
Very epic.
I remember trying to do a rotating molecule overnight on a a1200 40Mhz. Then waking up and seeing that I had misplaced the light source; looking at a perfectly black animation
That was using Real3d though. Very nice looking Tron tank. Thank you.
Oh I have been there! So frustrating. Many over night rendering horror stories. That Tron tank took me a long while to model. Simple but tricky.
lol. yeah. one of my first 3d rendering experiences ever was a C64 3d-mandelbrot program. i let it run overnight to generate a single frame. the next day, the screen was just green. i found out i had positioned the camera outside the mandelbrot, looking outwards. xD
@@amigaalive6266 Haha I tried to understand how Mandelbrot worked based off the article in Scientific American Computer Recreations (1985-08 according to my archive). I didn't quite get complex numbers, so something appeared, but I still don't know what.
I love seeing early CGI style exported pixel perfect instead of on flickery tapes. :D
off camera you would see
me staring at the PARs playback for hours. :)
Except you're seeing it filmed off a TV set with a phone instead of directly in the video, lol.
@@takanara7 It's pixel perfect in comparison to what came before. :D I have some examples on my channel.
@@edgartheface careful though, perfection is often the enemy of interesting
The PAR! Wow, what a blast from the past. Loved seeing all this, especially in 4K from your camera. All images I have seen on the internet of the Lightwave interface (nevermind the PAR) are very low res. This is great, thank you.
Glad to provide! I'm working on screen cap directly from the Amiga as well. My follow up video used it. Still need some tweaks though.
Nice render. I was 10 when TRON came out. I was 3000 miles from home when I had to see it in the theaters while visiting California. Thanks for the memory. Nice work!
I think I was 8? I didn't see it until HBO or maybe VHS rental, heh. Thanks for stopping by!
I always noticed old style rendered animations seem much smoother even at lower framerates
Tron's animation had a thing about it that has been fun to replicate.
I remember from the early 90s how exciting it was to see slowly rendered 3D frames in a time when hardware acceleration wasn't a thing yet. Every rendering was like unpacking a christmas gift.
That's a great way to put it!
The making of feature for the first tron is very enlightening for what they had to go through. And not only did they have usually no previews, so the first time they'd see moving images at all was on the full 70 mm print. But at many times, the animators delivered giant exposure sheet tables of coordinates and rotations for every CG element and the technicians copied the numbers by hand frame by frame for each element... Remember, kids. These machines could barely do tweening. So a 10 second shot would have 240 rows of 6 columns of data.
But..
We should also remember. That the vast majority of the computer world had no CG at all. Most Shots were just massive stacks of masked Kodalith with clever rear lighting techniques.
In a way. That first Tron was the first time Disney really went in and made so much in post. Employed so many roto artists. It was basically what modern Marvel movies have become today.
Yeah the creation of Tron is such an epic legend!
I was in High School when Tron came out and I first saw it in our Computer class of all places, we were rockin' Pet computers back then. lol Your rendition looks pretty accurate from what I remember. I to will be replacing my fans with Noctua, so quiet and they kind of match the Amiga's beige colour scheme.
Good times! You'll love the Noctua. Worth it!
Impressive frame rate, resolution, and color range for the time. This is reminiscent of the CG quality I used to see on the animated show "Reboot."
Ohh man. That show! I worked on some of the early CG "kid vid" back in the day. Not that one, but yeah. What a time. Primordial.
Amazing to look back on old school CGI. I used to have an Amiga 500. It has so many bugs using it sometimes, playing with Deluxe Paint 4. Nice to see Lightwave 3d, I'm still using the software these days now, I want to get the latest version, too darn expensive. Speaking of Tron, I did model the MCP a long time ago, and I still have the model haven't continued working on it. Love the animation and how it turns out in a nice resolution screen play
The current version of LW was just on a BIG SALE for Black friday "week" Was a good deal.
@@HoldandModify nice sad I missed it, maybe next year
Great animation and I loved TRON when I saw it for the first time - and last Starfighter rendered on a CRAY was also cool.
Yeah those two flicks had my jaw on the floor.
Great stuff ! I started lightwave on an Amiga 500 with an expansion card. We didn't have a printer in those days and we took pictures of the monitor with an analog camera. Those were some good times.
That's such a clever idea!
the cpu amigas have are honestly mind blowing. If an atmega had a 32 bit data bus it could almost run a real pc... this is pretty shocking how 200 000 transistors (a low number compared to today with like billions of transistors modern cpus have, a 486sx has 1 million, atmega 2560 maybe has around 2 million, but has 8 bit data bus) and yet those 200 000 transistors could render something, personally thought that these computers would require more processing power to render cgi... and now a 10 year old i7 4790k, a cpu i dreamed of as a kid is now considered "obsolete" to some of people in this world... you learned me something how 90s animations were made, and subbed!
Thank you! I have older videos showing how to use the software and others like it too.
I wanna see a TRON game with entirely accurate visuals. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has opened my eyes to games that look like movies
Tron 2.0 is an OLD game but dang it was great. Would be awesome for a modern update.
@@HoldandModifyi’ve always screamed at the heavens “port all the Tron games to modern consoles, Disney!”
I have a Vampire 4 Standalone in my office at work and it renders Babylon 5 and old LW content all day, I then make MPG videos and DCTV videos for playback on my V2 equipped PAR / Flyers system. I also use After Effects using MAC emulation on the V4 and make some cool animations there. I have recreated the workflow I did back in the day costing thousands in Mac, Amiga Toaster Flyer gear, and PC with a $500 or so Vampire standalone. It's great to revisit these workflows using modern upgrades. I really have to make a video. For example Video Toaster User and Newtekniques magazines had great Lightwave tutorials and I learned so much from those. That alone would make a good video to take on of those articles and show the whole process start to finish,.
I've been toying with the idea of doing Lightwave training tapes style videos. Like we used to buy on VHS. I sort of did that when I first started this channel. But really didn't have a plan,
The nostalgia of seeing Lightwave on an Amiga again after over 20 years.
Is a STRONG one. Heh. Heck its's 60% of the videos on this channel. :)
My record for ray tracing on my Amiga 500 was 53 hours for one 320x480 image.
Holy WOW! If I recall my "barely tolerable" was a 32min a frame render on my A3000.
Awesome! I had one of those Amigas as my first computer. I totally remember Lightwave! That takes me back! What a great video!
Sweet! They're fun machines!
This brings back the memories! The best I had back then at my disposal was a an stock A1200 and Imagine. Eventually I got an 030 but yeah, overnight rendering! I did a lot with that machine though. I always brought it into Art and Animation lab at BGSU rather than use the Atari 1040 or even the SGI machines that were there, and eventually used it at work developing art and animation for PC games. I now have an Ice Drake accerlated A1200, a 3000 and a Toasterized 2500HD. Actually the only 2 I still need to get are the 4000 and 1000.
great collection! I only have the 1000 and 4000/040 but really would like to own the 3000, the most beautiful machine in my view.
@@SledgeFox we are never happy with what we have, are we? Having a A4000 especially one from the Commodore era is excellent, yes the A3000/3000T are the most exciting Amigas in my eyes, but A4000 is probably the best Amiga you can own. It can do all A3000 can (well except Amber), so be happy. I would love A4000, but Im very happy with A1200, it does all I would do with A4000 anyway.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 😁you are right... The grass on the other side always looks greener... Have a great day!
I remember doubting between a 030 and 040. At the time a ran Frontier from the CLI in 50Hz NTSC rather from Workbench in 60Hz PAL since it was a frame or two faster. Oh memories.
I remember in 90s i bought 3D Construction Kit for my C64 ( original software in 90tys Poland it was like unicorn ;) ) ad it blew my mind..
My Amiga 3000 was a rock star. First thing I did was nibble away enough of the metal to put the Toaster in it, and it fit and worked. Next was the PAR recorder from DPS, then finally an 040 upgrade. Somehow ALL of that fit in the case. While I did eventually get an Amiga 4000 I never "shined" to it the way I did the 3000. It made me money year after year for quite some time with LW graphics. I should dig it out of the shed and see if it still boots up...
We need more, we the public demand more from you sir 😊
Brilliant video, keep them coming
Manchester England UK
Northampton England UK joins your demand!
@@ian_b Oldham, greater Manchester to be more precise my fellow Englander
I have heard your calls! Thank you all for your
time too!
Oddly enough, you mentioning raytracing. The lightcycles, tank and recognizers were created by MAGI Sythavision, who did about 50% of the actual CG in the film (where most of the imagery you see is created through optical techniques with backlit 2D artwork). MAGI is significant for introducing raytracing to CG in 1974 with Sythavision. So in all probability those shots in the film were perhaps actually raytraced, where things like mirrored reflections, and even shadows, are options but not implicit. The base scene sampling tech and then how you handle materials and lighting models are separate issues.
And then in the film they were doing optical post production as well (so even back then you weren't looking at raw renders spit to a film recorder or recorded off screen, in lieu of film recorder) so that you got the glows and the bloom/halo off that tank sheen, which wasn't a renderable effect and not even possible with image processing back then.
I mean, technically, all computer animation is Ray traced. It's firing photons off or "rays" and then recording the impact. I was referring more to things like shadow effects and reflection effects. Thank you for sharing that information. I love hearing all of those details. I'm sure everyone else does too. Appreciated!
@@HoldandModifyNot really. 3D geometry is flattened then pixel filled. No rays whatsoever. That’s the foundation. Everything else is then a bolt on, until pixel filling gives way to ray casting :)
@@absurdengineering and raycasting is only one technique within the umbrella of raytracing. A more biased and/or simplified technique than, say, the light transport style you find in something like Octane. But at the end of the day, raycasting is a method of determining visibility, not how light is actually behaving or the look of surfaces.
Ho ho hooo! Flashback when I did a render of such a tank (approximately, I worked from memory) just driving by on an Amiga 2000. It always took maybe 30h to generate a clip. Sleeping next to the hyperventilating machine was no mean feat.
Oh I remember my A3000 warming my room in the winter rendering!
I love my amiga 1000, 2000 and video toaster with PAR ! So ahead of its time! Love this! Thanks for doing this ❤
I think the guys from triple I who were responsible for the CGI in TRON would have been happy if they had had this program back then.
Yeah I can only imagine. Heh.
PAR ... oh my I forgot about that. That was the shit in the day!
Wow adobe can still handle Amiga formats. Impressive. Cool video. Put a Z3660 in there and use the ARM CPU for rendering jobs, then switch to the 060 on the Z3660 for daily driver use!
My A1200 has a PiStorm32Lite in it. It's insanely quick.
ב''ה, it has been a while but IIRC IFF may have been an EA format that immediately became the de facto standard because there wasn't one and it was reasonably designed and they weren't encumbering it.
The I was "Interchangeable."
Do you think you will recreate this at 16x9 with all the bells and whistles on a newer machine and tweak the animation, and textures etc?
I did a long while ago. So many people have done that now. The new movies and shows too. It's a lot easier with modern tools for most. I have more fun staying with the old look.
This is lovely work sir!
Appreciated! Thanks for stopping by. :)
With the computers these day you could probably render the cgi scenes in real time! :)
Absolutely. FASTER than real time actually.
It's so beautiful!
Thank you! It's been fun.
The rendered video was cool looking to me.
Thanks! Working on more for it.
What software is this? I've been wanting to do vintage animation for ages
Lightwave3D running on an Amiga computer. I have a lot of videos covering this. To help folks get started.
y'kew when you're importing the frames into the PVR, there's an option that makes it super speedy... I think it's the 'non convert' or something... oh my memory.
HMMM. I never did read its manual. I'll check for that. Thanks!
this was fun!
I was rocking a Quadra 700 back in the day and it was packing a 68040 at 25mhz and it couldn't run Doom correctly! I'm pretty sure that was lazy programming as I could run a little app called 'Infini-D' which was fun.
Ahh yeah. MacOS back then was a bit....well.
It is kinda ironic how Tron lost best visual effects to some other random film at the time, due to the industry assuming CGI was cheating - BACK THEN, CHEATING???? No, today it is still an art do not get me wrong, but you gotta admit - it is cheaty AF! But they get hella awards for it! The OG got nada!
My gosh, that machine. I had and I let it go. I'm still kicking myself for it. I'm so stupid. I should've kept it. Arrggh!!
I have stories too. Such..shameful Amiga stories. I think that's why I do this now. To atone. Heh.
Oh I loved lightwave when I was a teen.
Hell to the yes! Subscribed, I sure do miss my A500 :) Oh speaking of Newtek, I'm pretty sure my cousins friend worked there when they first opened in Topeka.
That original Newtek office. What a place that must have been! I have a buddy I worked with in Los Angeles who worked there. Also, thanks for the sub and glad you enjoyed!
@@HoldandModify Ya I'm a Topeka boy, unfortunately I wasn't hatched until 82 so a lot of that was a little before my time. But I was around for some of it.
I would love to see the 1998 TCT Network station ID that was used on NewTek’s Video toaster and Lightwave 3D
i've no idea why you are doing this hobby but it is obvious you love it. question: can i do this sort of thing on the amiga a500 mini? its my first amiga. i'm trying to make up for being in computer jail since 1989 because of some bs in the 2nd grade and being forced to take the fall for a teacher, because she handed me the wrong floppy disk.
Sorry about your historical bummers. Yes, the A500 Mini should be able. You just need to figure out how to install Workbench on it and other Amiga software. It's an emulator. I have videos for such on this channel. Just not for that product. As I don't have one. There's Facebook and Discord groups for the Mini that are quite helpful i'm guessing.
‼Ehm, not sure why it would get any hotter than it gets after an hour of use. Whether it's doing extreme floating point crunching for six hours or displaying the desktop for six hours, the CPU is using exactly the same wattage and maintains the same temp.
Heat soak over time. Or if it was going to fail. Possible melt down from voltage protection fails, etc. But i'm not good with tech stuff. So more just under educated concern. :)
Still very cool!
Absolutely!
this is amazing
Love it! The past is the future.
Where is the laser that transports you into the digital frontier?
Ahhh man. That would be cool to figure out! Even using modern software that seems like an impossible task.
Technically the Amiga could (and did do) amazing Ray traced video back in the day. Many tv/films used it.
As a boy I was intensely interested in 3D and Ray tracing. Wrote a CAD application from scratch in Amiga Basic at 15. Not as nice as this, but this was what I would have loved to end with.
Not really, TV series used it since the LW was a part of Toaster package they already had for different tasks. It wasnt the choice No.1 for filmmakers, it was a budget solution. Even those series quickly switched to SGI platform when the LW was ported, using Amiga just for editing but not rendering. In 90s Amiga was loosing its breath fast...
And LW is not Ray tracer, it is a renderer with path traced post effects.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 they didn't switch to SGI, they by and large switched to the Windows NT platform, and the most aware going DEC Alpha platform which offered much higher processing power for the money on the desktop than Indigos and Octanes. Their 3D viewport and OpenGL experience wasn't nearly as nice.
By the end of the '90s the Xeon platform started busting heads and with the help of Compaq killing DEC Alpha was able to make SGI and the MIPS platform too slow, too expensive and pushed them into practical irrelevance for CG animation by the early '00s.
You wrote your own? At 15? That's awesome! What a time!
@@HoldandModify Was in high school and stuck in a boarding school. Had my math text book and PC manuals as the only reference. Needless to say my rotaions did not use matrix manipulation, and was a bit messy. But it was mouse/event driven and design was in 3rd angle orthographic.
Then I could render in perspective with hidden plane removal using (very rudimentary) painter's algorithm.
I was not taught painter's algo, nor double bufferering, but thought to use them anyway.
No books, teachers, family etc. was there to help. But I was really passionate about 3D. One of the school subjects was machine drawing, which I excelled at too.
Went on to become a C++ developer with strong math. :)
Nice, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for watching!
I'm a simple man. I see cool shit, I click.
Appreciated. I have other videos where I show more about how to make these types of "retro" animations too.
I enjoy that!
Thanks! Check out my other videos. I have more like that. :)
Its around 16 mins a frame render with a stock 68k, never tried to render on a aue. Grate vid
16min is pretty
good!
@@HoldandModify Considering the hardware and the resolution it is rendering at, that is not bad at all. For similar scenes, I think it was once the higher clocked Pentiums came a long that I started to see render times drop below the 1 minute mark per frame. The late Pentium 3 time when it was down to seconds. So for a meek 68K - 16 minutes is just fine.
Super nice!!
Thanks!!
I used to have a 3K tower and a toaster with a PAR Card. I traded it for an upscaled A2500.
Woah. I don't know if I would have done that! :)
@@HoldandModify Yeah I'm not sure that was the smartest move, but I needed something with firepower for my renders and the 3k wasn't doing it at that time. Not sure why, I was working with Dave Hopkins at the time so I trusted his judgment.
Hi HAM, you have some thing a bit wrong. The Tron movie was made on specialized PDP-10 called Foonly F1, and you will not believe but this computer had about same computing power as stock A3000, had same 2MB RAM then stock A3000, 330MB HDD and had a 3MB video buffer, something any stock Amiga could just dream off. Also the graphics terminal had way higher resolution then ECS A3000.
One Tron frame in size 6000x4000 pixels took aprox. 20 minutes, now do that on stock A3000... (actually why not, try to render one frame in 6000x4000 using MC68030@25MHz to compare, just for the giggles).
I would add the glowing effect to the blue lines on the wall (if its there then it needs to be way higher) to bring this Tron atmosphere.
Also Im a bit disappointment that you didnt dig deeper last time. Yes you found which object in the scene caused the corruption, but I was hoping you will find out what happened, why got the entire image in screen buffer corrupted. Was the entire RAM overflowed (well 256MB is a lot), or just the framebuffer and ergo the ChipRAM got overflowed. Would like to know more...
And BTW I like your intros, who made it for you (just joking)...?
The tech reasons for that corruption was from the "out of bounds" data that bad mesh produced. However anything more than that, I'd need someone far smarter than myself to figure out.
Thank you for sharing that detailed information about the computers used for Tron!! That is good stuff!
@@HoldandModify I know, but simple out of bounds would cause the corruption inside LW scene window like you saw with the other LW version (the zipper lines), but your first issue was that entire screen got corrupted, which is interesting.
Do you still have the OG LW file? Is your LW (the screen corrupting version) a "borrowed" one? Can you put both on some FTP for us to download? Maybe we can dig deeper.
And please make a short video and do the rendering of the Tron scene with single frame at 6000x4000 pixels on stock A3000@25MHz to see how it fares against the Foonly F1 from 70s, would be great content, dont you think?
@ that object along with everything else in that project are created by me. So it's sharable if I want. Lightwave Amiga has a max res limitation. I need to investigate the limit. I thought it was 8k but it might be 4k. Did you see both my videos about the issue? Or only the initial one.
@@HoldandModify yes I saw both.
Amazing! How the hell did you acquire all these LW projects?
The Tron stuff you've seen is my creation. Other stuff is included content that came with the Lightwave install. Some is gathered from various jobs I've had. Decades of collecting.
Is there some reason this HDR video needs to be driving my display at 20,000 nits?
Interesting. My videos have been HDR for some time. Normally don't have an issue. Maybe something got messed up in this export? Sorry. You can play the non HDR via the settings "gear."
@@HoldandModifyat least on my iPad pro 14" which should be tracking color space, tone mapping, gamma etc very closely to spec, your video, at least compared to the menus, other video thumbnails, comments etc are nuclear. For lack of better words, feels like 'HDR for the sake of being HDR'. Respectfully suggest looking at it on ipad pro set to reference mode (or if you have access to a color-critical monitor, that).
@@Integr8d Did you check out some of my others? Wonder if it's all of them or just this one. I edit on an M3 iMac. It's not an HDR screen but FCPx is supposed to give me an idea with its tone mapping. I also play the content on my OLED LG in HDR and while yes this particular video does look HOT. Especially the computer monitor screen. My other videos seem to bet within spec. I shoot video using my iPhone in AUTO mode at 40 60FPS HDR is why.
epic dude
Hah! Nice. Thanks!
Have you tried running Lightwave 5.6 on the amiga?
There is only LW5 for Amiga. No more dev happened after that. :(
@HoldandModify 😢
Is Blender a modern day equivalent of this software?
Lightwave3D is still made to this day. It's up to version 2024 as I mentioned. Blender is another newer 3D animation software, yes.
@@HoldandModify wow, I had no idea! What a blast from the past. :)
Can't rememeber, but did LW 5.5 already have splines for animation path?
I think that wasn't until 6.0 when we also got individual key control.
A3000 is the best Amiga ever!
Agreed!
I had trouble at work today, but found an annoying solution. Im rendering a simple low quality logo in blender on a $5k+ PC. I realized blender was redering on the CPU instead of the incredible Nvidia graphics card . I switched it over to using the GPU and i thought it fried the GPU, it had long beeps the screen went dark. It didn't sound good.
After hours of IT unplugging things and trouble shooting. They pluged the graphics card back in and it displayed on the monitor again. But as soon as i tried to render a frame it long beeped and i canceled the render to avoid being down for hours.
So today Monday, i switched back to rendering on the CPU, as PNGs. It worked just fine but its taking 100s of times longer.
Its frustrating having this GPU and i cant use it.
That is a bummer.
can you make a video on how to install Lightwave 3D in winuae if with or without the dongle?
That's easy, it's just copying the version you can easily find online. The owners of Lightwave are okay with people using "special" version so of Amiga based Lightwave and Toaster stuff. As long as you do not sell it.
@@HoldandModify Does this mean I can install original copy of Lightwave that includes a dongle in winuae or do I have to find a special copy to install?
@victornassar6634 special as i do not think winuae can see the windows side for those old ports.
Tron!
How long did it take to render the wolverine scene?
lol.... uhhh...128-seconds of editing. :)
@@HoldandModify I remember when I was young and we had Amigas in our house I used to buy "Amiga World" magazine which always had some user created Amiga 3D renders. I used to love seeing that stuff.
Good to see people using the Amiga in that same way.
@jeremylindemann5117 I still have a small stash of Amiga World magazines. :)
I always liked how 90s and 80s cgi looked like, it's one of my favorite aesthetics.
Modern cgi does not appeal to me at all.
Yes there is a look to it. It's like I was trying to say in the video. It's own type of what we call old 2D style games "pixel art"
Lightwave is the best program I never go to use.
Awww lol
I thought this was going to be a SGI video
I ain't that rich.
"...Use the IFF format..."
Oops, there's no such thing as an "IFF format."
* "...Use IFF."
hmmmm.. always learning I am. :)
Render would go faster if you had the floppy drive in the correct position. Just sayin’.
hahah! FACT
if anyone wants to use adobe's crap they can always go for the 10 year old versions, as those are easier to 'find' and there hasn't been any real improvement since then anyway..
TRUTH
This video is so deep in nostalgia....the result of the animation is not even close to what Blender can produce now in real time Eevee yet it took so long to render comparatively speaking.
We have come a loooooong way, but.....what have we lost 😥
For all the steps forward. We do take some back.
god yes this is wonderful
Old CGI is fascinating to me. The software ands old hardware especially.
All that talking and then you finally render it and forgot to do the most important thing: ADD THE VIDEO OF THE RENDER TO YOUR ACTUAL UA-cam VIDEO so we can see what it looks like in first person on full frame!!! Waited all that time and listened to a lot of explanation about file formats and even got a “go F yourself” meme with Wolverine (to we the viewers as a kind gesture) and there is NO “MONEYSHOT!” As the kids say Weak Sauce! Bit? ‘No. No. No. no.” With red spikes.
Oh a fullscreen feed from the computer? That would require a capture device. I guess i could look in to that. I have almost 300 videos and they all start with the same intro...."Most poorly produced, underproduced..." It's not a joke. I'm serious. :)
0/10 nothing isn't made of marble
hahaha or checkerboard!
Please, stop making videos like this in HDR. It's inappropriate for so many obvious reasons.
lol. damn. opinion NOTED. Maybe I should upload 240p max too. Hmm...
@HoldandModify if that's how you respond to critisim, then I'm out. This apparently not the channel for me, which is really sad because I otherwise enjoy your content. You know full well that there are major compatibility issues with HDR and that it causes strange color calibration issues for the majority of playback devices. You could save storage space, reduce render time, and make your videos look better. It's a win win. Not cool that you mock people who give you suggestions on how to improve the experience for your viewers (and literally save you time and money as a bonus). You're showing SDR content from your computer screen in an HDR video. That's an obvious no no if you care about content preservation and color accuracy. Instead of asking me why I felt like HDR was bad, you went to childish sarcasm, so have a nice day, but I'm out.
@@awesomeferret Mock? I think your internet filter needs tuning. I was making "light" of your comment. It was not an assault on your words. Sorry it came off that way. Obviously it upset you, I apologize. I've been doing HDR for a while more as a gimmick. You are right though. It's mostly pointless. It looks great on all the HDR displays I have at my house. Even on my iPhone. However it does take longer to edit, import, export. I think it's time for a change. Thank you.
at least try to make the render interesting. good concept but not the best execution.
It's not my best work by any means. It's more
about having fun.