A look at the 3d programs on the Amiga.

A quick look at Blender, C4D, Lightwave and other 3d programs on the Amiga.

[@fx_node]

what I learnt lightwave with from a VHS tape kzbin.info/www/bejne/hHiyoHhjobuUos0 this is fun kzbin.info/www/bejne/imfZhox3grB3a6M How to setup the emulator kzbin.info/www/bejne/hXeohoSpoJmiqZo

[@DarrenJohnMusic]

I started with Sculpt 3D, Turbosilver and Videoscape 3D on a decked out Amiga 2000. After upgrading to a video toaster and Lightwave I eventually remortgaged my house to buy a used SGI 4D20 with Vertigo animation software. (True story). Those days were the golden age of 3D animation. I am blessed to have been a part of it.

[@studio-vncnt]

LightWave is alive again! Development was shut down after version 2020 but LightWave Digital (UK) released version 2023 for both Windows and Mac. Now including the Octane gpu renderer, Turbulence FD, a live link to Unreal Engine, and more! Thanks for demonstrating that early version of LW.

[@LewisRowe-id6kr]

Really interesting! I had been curious about the early pioneering 3D apps on the Amiga, so thanks for posting this. I never had an Amiga (wish I had), but I started out on Infini-D and Lightwave on the Mac around 1997. This is nostalgic as it brings back the memories of how it was exciting to discover the new possibilities of cgi.

[@gueratom]

Thank you so much! I had never seen any 3d modeler run on AmigaOS but heard a lot about it. Really interesting to see these pioneer programs.

[@TemalCageman]

The Pilot episode + the first season was very much Amiga computers + LightWave. :)

[@sandrodellisanti1139]

Ciao, in 1990 i buyed Reflections for my Amiga 500, remember to Render a simple Scene on the Amiga, more than 10 hours for a picture 😄

[@vertigoz]

I started on Imagine 3D which I got on CU Amiga and latter upgraded

[@endertainer007]

Nice to see Traces running there

[@WyMustIGo]

I worked for Impulse back when we ported Imagine 3D to the PC. I also worked on their non linear video editor named "The Edimator". It was a cool place to work back in the day, and I left Impulse in the late 90s to work for Adobe. If I remember correctly, Scott Kirvan (Impuse) and Dan Silva (D-Paint) were the ones who worked on and sold the first Ray Tracer engine that was used in 3D Max (which did not ray trace at the time). It was very fun to work with companies such as that back in the late 80s and through the 90s. I left the industry in the mid 2000s after we completed Paint Shop Pro 8 and then 9 while I was working for JASC. Those were the good days!

[@BenVost]

I remember Imagine's problems with XMS and EMS on the PC when it first launched 🤭

[@cjadams7434]

Lightwave is back from the dead “again” - New ownership!! Vizirt sold it to people that Love Lightwave3d!

[@johnsarahgonzales342]

never had the Amiga experience. I began on the Mac with Strata 3D and Electric Image. Which were excellent tool sets. when I was invited to go work with a forensic animation service, they were using Lightwave on a Wintel box. I have to confess, I was blown away and fell in love with it. coincidently, LW was porting over to the Mac so it was a no-brainer.

[@FuZZbaLLbee]

I started with Real3D on the Amiga. The old one with the blue interface.

[@fx_node]

I made the enterprise in it on the a500. I only had the demo at the time and could not save :(. This is all running in winuae as a 1200 040

[@mattperson7293]

@@fx_node I remember rendering the demo candle on small table scene. Got it going just before Sunday dinner and it still wasn't done by the time Poirot was on. I switched to Imagine 3 after that.

[@artao5]

YES! Caligari .. That was my very first every 3D software, in 1991. Then, later in the 90s, I used a lot of its progeny, Caligari True Space. I loved that software. Used Lightwave at the same time; the separated modeller and layout I found annoying. But I still loved it.

[@franciscoathens924]

great memories using first Imagine, Sculpt4D and also Vista Pro to create landscape fly through animations rendered to DCTV format and recorded real-time on VHS! I got my first paying graphics job this way in the early 90s. The Amiga was a real enabler for artists using technology!

[@audiogus2651]

Great video! I started in the 80s with videoscape3d, then used Caligari32 and Lightwave, been working in games ever since. Sigh, I miss those olden days.

[@flippingdiode]

I never had an Amiga, but I started 3D art with Lightwave. Personally a kind of sweet and sour memory...

[@MarkDale]

I still have My Amigas now. One is an A1200T with PPC + BVision. I always dreamed of having an A4000 or even the later tower version, so I wouldn't say the Amiga was entirely a kids computer. It was establishing a niche in video production using Lightwave and the Video toaster until commodore went bust. I'm currently getting back into the Amiga scene with the Pistorm accelerators so all the 68k software you demonstrated runs alot faster a bit like it does on WinUAE. It's really fun seeing were the Amiga could have gone in the future if it wasn't for commodore. Amazingly they are still developing for the Amiga now. The Amiga was way ahead when it first came on the scene. It could have easily competed with PC and Mac's with it's Multitasking OS that even Ghz computers struggled to do the same thing.

[@fx_node]

Just bought a "new" 1200 and plan to put a pistorm in it.

[@3DJapan]

It's always fun to see early LightWave. The new owners have really big plans for the next version and moving on. It's an exciting times to be a LightWave user.

[@KarriKoivusalo]

I really hope so! Lightwave development went totally stale due to some *bad* management in the early 2010's.

[@nebuchadnezzar916]

I used Imagine on the PC to model and animate characters and weapons for a Quake2 mod.

[@maarkaus48]

Fantastic. I have my old Amiga 1000 sitting next to my PC. I bought ANIMATE 3D (where I would create things one triangle at a time, by moving points,) when it was first available in my area and did some basic stuff in that, then moved onto Imagine. My university had Imagine on some of their A3000's and they were a LOT faster than my 1000, or 2000. I really wanted to use Lightwave but no one I knew had a copy or access to it, except 1 computer at school. Such fond memories. Thank you for sharing this. Edit: BTW I still have that cover-disk somewhere. That is the copy I used for many things. Eventually I went to school for Softimage, now I am studying Houdini. Things have changed so much it boggles my mind.

[@hd-be7di]

"where I would create things one triangle at a time, by moving points" ARE YOU MAD SIR

[@maarkaus48]

@@hd-be7di Mad or ignorant. Not sure which. It was what I figured out by reading the manual and just mashing through (Manual I still have, along with the program). I am sure there was a better way, but being a kid, in a basement, with no one around to give advice on it, it was the way I muddled through. It helped to be a bit obsessive. Made a cool, low poly head however.

[@hd-be7di]

@@maarkaus48 Oh that makes more sense thanks for clarifying :D

[@thegreathadoken6808]

Good bit of Amigaring. Thanks.

[@JohnSmithZen]

First 3D program I ever used was "Sculpt Animate 4D" on the Amiga at school.

[@kuklama0706]

I just realized that layers in 3D are what normal people call parallel worlds.

[@justinertia6835]

Yes, a blast from the past. So I got into 3d with Amigas. I used Real3d, and remember Imagine, but it was Lightwave that became all rage for us 3d'ers at college when the infamous Newtek Video Toaster Dongle crack came out from Warm And Fuzzy Logic. You could emulate the toaster, but just use the Lightwave part of it. Newtek also had Kiki Stockhammer - making sure Lightwave was all together the sexiest 3d app!

[@AndyAlderslade]

I had Cinema 4D for my Amiga 1200, I never really got the hang out of it - so hard to learn stuff those days. I remember setting renders of Vista Pro going before school and then coming home to find it had crashed!

[@Ponlets]

makes me wonder about some of the old 3d effects in vfx because i always kindof thought of them all as open gl or something due to the lack of shading (compared to ray tracing for shadows and all) its interesting to see that they were using an older thing that is like open gl but older the space ship render you did kindof gave me mild nostalgia lol (not sure why)

[@hd-be7di]

Omg... It's like a trip back to the prehistoric stone age of 3d graphics apps

[@chelovek-jpeg]

i like this cow model

[@johnsmith1953x]

What about Forms in Flight? Turbo Silver? VideoScape?

[@Pixelfondue]

Thanks for making this - big trip down memory lane. What emulator are you using?

[@fx_node]

the emulator was www.winuae.net I bought the roms from here www.amigaforever.com

[@Pixelfondue]

thanks@@fx_node

[@ButtaDawg6969]

imagine using modern z brush in 1990

[@nonlinearsound-001]

Sculpt Animate worked but had a strange UI that I never really understood. I stuck to Real3D in the end. Really nice UI and renderer. I remember it even supporting NURBS and Boolean operators and stuff. It was nice.

[@jinchoung]

ahhh lw. interesting how off the rails things got. just as well tho. I had to go maya for work anyway but really came to grips with 3d with lw.

[@BenVost]

Blimey! I didn't think anyone had ever heard of C-Light, I've certainly never met anyone. It was my first 3D program, too

[@mtrivelin]

Ah, the nostalgia! :) I recently found a CD with several Lightwave scenes that I made in my first years of learning 3D (1993 to 1996). Obviously I couldn't resist and downloaded the latest version of Lightwave 3D for PC and, to my surprise, all my old projects loaded perfectly and rendered images without any problems. Which got me thinking... Is LW so good that it's still compatible with works created 30 years ago... or is LW so outdated that nothing has changed in its code in 30 years? :) Now I need to create a video portfolio on KZbin with these animations, which I never had the opportunity to share before. I think I'll call it "My Little Lightwave's definitive portfolio - 1993-2023"

[@raybeer549]

Same here. I've got all the scene files of an animation i did back in 1998ish. It was about a four minute scene I believe with an animated dragon. I'll have to share it sometime.

[@alantaylor2694]

Cool vid. I used Imagine from the cover disc too! I really got into it and me and a mate went halves for Lightwave (6?). I'm still a registered user of Lightwave 9 on my OG aluminium iMac! Man I love Lightwave. Generic Panels anyone?

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

I think (can not remember exactly now) I started with Real 3D... It was clunky but when I slowly learned more and more I could make stuff that actually looked OK (usually by bodging stuff that the program was not really meant for it seemed but results was really cool). But the animation part was a bit awful (if I remember right)... as I can not really draw stuff (well I can but it takes sooo long) I used it mostly for rendering cool sprite/BOB animations for games I never finished 🙂 Then I think I got Imagine on a coverdisk and thought wow this will be so much better, and I have seen some results (and it looked amazing)... But I could not get used to it, and I never learned it... Somehow I got a copy of Lightwave (can not remember which version) and gave it my best shoot... It was truly amazing, the animation part (with keyframes) was just soo cool and I really really liked Lightwave but it was a bit late in the Amiga years for me... So never mastered it sadly... I made a couple of short clips (I had my friends/neighbors running Screamernet on all their networked computers)... I loved AREXX also, made lots of standalone programs with it, and made lots of programs/macro type things for DPaint, Dopus, and so on and on... And when (I never had any real manual for Lightwave) realized Lightwave had great AREXX support I was just mindblown... I could do anything (again I'm not a good modeller/artist)... Like a working solar system, convert different data to be rendered (DEM maps?) and so on and on... you could expand Lightwave indefinitely with AREXX actually connect it to any program (with AREXX ports) and write any plugin you wanted easily... ---edit That Real 3D you are showing was much later then the one I used (I think mine was made for Kick/Workbench 1.3) and the later one you are showing are +2.04... I wished I had that one :-) ---edit2 Never used or even seen Caligari... Looks awesome! made for higher end Amigas because of the full frame line draw I guess. ---edit3 🙂 I know this is not a 3D program (but neither is DPaint :-) but was there not a program called Artstudio and it was also on a coverdisk... Image manipulation program? filters, and stuff. I liked that a lot... And there was also a morphing program that was just awesome... Took a photo of my friend and morphed him into a Chimpanzee (and made a large IFF-Anim in 16 color grayscale on my A500 I remember) I was super happy and thought he would be impressed like hell, but he got really mad haha...

[@opal8402]

so they made jimmy neutron on this? fuckin awesome

[@mattperson7293]

No, LW was on PC by then and quite a bit more advanced.

[@DennieSparkman]

What OS version are you running these 3D programs on? 2.0?, 3.1?

[@fx_node]

3.1

[@visitor82]

Interesting but it will be great if you little train to show each render results of each application.

[@Oli1974]

You forgot cadPRO, aka multiCADD or 3D Constructor ;)

[@johnsmith1953x]

What about Forms in Flight? Turbo Silver? VideoScape?

[@flonkplonk1649]

Reflections

[@xanvision]

You forgot Tornado 3D

[@fx_node]

I never used that one. I need to do an update to this video. There are few others Aladdin4d, Xcad, Hash, Visa, pixel3d

[@xanvision]

@@fx_node It's worth to try it. It was the most advanced 3D package never released for Amiga: realtime render preview, fluids and particles sims integrated, etc...

[@amigaalive6266]

@@xanvision yeah, Tornado3D was really something, it came out of nowhere, and had everything. But it looks as pretty much nobody used it.

[@flonkplonk1649]

and Reflections 2.0 !A nice entry level 3d program..

[@xanvision]

true! memories unlocked!@@flonkplonk1649

[@kirishima638]

I’ve always been impressed by the Amiga’s capabilities but it was always let down by the UI.

[@emersonlopes83]

Amiga GUI lacks elegance