Commodore Amiga - 3D Animation in the early 90's

[@alan19844]

I always felt Amiga was ahead of it's time back then. I spent many, many hours and late nights enjoying it!

[@Crossy123456]

Some people sell Scenery Animator on the net. Please note that I am NOT the seller. However, my video is used by these companies for advertising. This happens without my consent. I take no responsibility for the sale of these products!

[@immortalsofar5314]

And here we are benchmarking blender rendering that takes 35 seconds less on a top-of-the-line machine and yet we had our imagination and the doggedness to wait 65 hours to do the job. I think I'm wasting almost all of the potential of my machine, humble though it is. Back in the day, I waited 26 hours for my C64 to build a dictionary of words in some text files on a disk, then 8 hours when I wrote the bottleneck in assembler and finally 20 minutes to do all 6 disks when the whole thing was written in assembler and I thought only waiting 20 minutes was amazing! We squeezed everything we could out of these old machines and it was great!

[@andrzejkrzeminski3270]

amiga,i still love u and forever! now its just numbers....but how i loved it back then ;-)its when technology came to change our imagination!!!!! amiga FOREVER!

[@MaverickM1]

Good to know, if you pull the screen down completely while rendering it will considerably speeds up the render, even on A1200. (Not scenery related, it is an all-rounder boost from the past. :). The video hw won’t read the slow chip ram and that will speed up many things using dma. The higher the resolution/more the bitplanes (colours) the more the benefit is. Good old screen drag feature.

[@user642a2]

Amiga was miles ahead even from the modern PC's . Microsoft destroyed everything and kept technology 30 years behind. He saw 3d games on PC's 10 years after amiga.

[@valenrn8657]

PC's Doom killed the Amiga. LOL Business PCs were running Microsoft Xenix with multi-tasking/multi-user OS. IBM distracted MS from Xenix into the OS/2 project. OS/2 split from IBM has to lead to MS Windows. By 1984, Microsoft’s Xenix had become the world’s most popular Unix variant

[@mantax55]

Reminds me of the cover of Black Dog Production’s «Bytes»

[@DS-pk4eh]

65 hours? How about 10 days? I was using Real3D (ray traced modeling and animation software) and had A1200 at the time with a small HDD. I was working in TV station and had TV show similar to Computer Chronicles. We brought Amiga to show them and they were amazed. Then we did a couple of animations for the marketing ads. Even though they were not so complicated or in super high res (compared to today), they would take days to finish. Amiga is the best computer that I had (well have as I bought them again ;-) )

[@jestronixhanderson9898]

I had no money but rendered on my amiga 500 with Imagine and vista. I used an a590 for ram and HD, with 3mb ram I could actually render small animations and still frame interlaced shots. My school had an a3000 that they never used, infuriating it was as the art department wouldn’t even let me do renders over a weekend on it. Go figure it was the art department, they actually thought it would overheat and die! Lame excuse.

[@simone2059]

The music simply awesome, old times....

[@aidan5125]

There's no doubt about it, if you give an amiga sometime, it can generate some pretty impressive 3D imagery.

[@AleksanderZ]

I had Amiga 500 - 1 frame was beyond my patience ;)

[@pawprintlogic]

I'm still playing with it on my A500. Added an ACA500 plus accelerator and the rendering is quick now at 42mhz. I need to find a manual to this so I can understand the software more. If anyone knows, let me know please.

[@valenrn8657]

NVIDIA RTX has real-time raytracing.

[@bswierko]

Some nowadays render engines like Corona for animations are actually slower :)

[@another3997]

@@valenrn8657 Yes, but good luck interfacing your RTX card with a 35 year old Amiga 500, or even a 35 year old PC. 😁 In 10 years time, today's fastest RTX cards will seem laughably slow and primitive, and retro enthusiasts will build up retro computers, and put in those retro, "high end" RTX cards.

[@valenrn8657]

@@another3997 That's a flawed argument when the modern X86-64 PC ("UEFI with CSM) can still run MS-DOS from the 1984 era. The fastest RTX cards still have MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA compatibility mode. Retro is built-in with an X86 PC. kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWbJoomHfqmtZ7s Modern PC boots into MS-DOS to run DOOM. I have installed a PC Speaker on my X570 motherboard. 68K CPU didn't evolve like X86.

[@KC9UDX]

@@another3997 and everyone forgets what a big deal it was when Wolfenstein 3D did real-time ray tracing in 1990.

[@KC9UDX]

And quality was better only because 1) You didn't allow for errors because it would be disastrous to have to fix it and try again for 65 hours 2) If it turned out bad after 65 hours, it prolly got scraped because no one wanted to try again

[@Thunderstormworld]

I have this program on my Amiga

[@sebastemusic]

This is beautiful

[@MaxAbramson3]

That would've all rendered in real time on the Hombre chipset, using the powerful PA-RISC 7300. It's too bad that Commodore management kept using their meager cash reserves to pay out huge bonuses to themselves instead of investing in newer, better hardware. That company could've been turned around right up to 1994 when they declared bankruptcy.

[@another3997]

Maybe, but where is PA-Risc now? It would only have been a temporary respite for Commodore, just like PPC was for Apple. The x86 architecture has the advantage of huge market share, economies of scale and backward compatibility. Apart from ARM, all the other CPU architectures have either died off completely or moved in to embedded or supercomputing markets.

[@MaxAbramson3]

@@another3997 COMMODORE would've survived into the 21st century at least. Perhaps Amiga would've been the great digital hub.

[@MaxAbramson3]

@@another3997 PA-RISC was still viable to the late 2000's.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

@@another3997 Agreed. The mid 90s was a wild ride for the x86 platform with incredible hardware and peripherals coming out for cheap. I bailed on the platform because of the superstores that had ridiculously low priced and wide, powerful, options available for the PC, while my whole town only had one dinky Amiga store with less than a few hundred square feet of space and everything at retail price. I even had a 386 bridgeboard and ended up using that PC side so much just because it had way better terminal software than the Amiga.

[@angelmesa9530]

Good Job!

[@stillbuyvhs]

Voxel height maps?

[@CaptainPrice01]

Looks like it was made in Vista Pro

[@ShwappaJ]

Can you imagine what Oblivion and Final Fantasy 7 would look like on this thing?! Damn, this looks better than anything from either the SNES or early Playstation!

[@dariodzimbeg]

vista?

[@Crossy123456]

Pro?

[@dariodzimbeg]

pro!

[@AlessandroCussino]

Voxel graphics ?

[@juniorsilvabroadcast]

This is actually 3D.

[@cubdukat]

Fractals, actually.

[@chvd00]

How could I get this software?

[@Crossy123456]

This application is already 24 years old and has not been further developed. You may still find Scenery Animator somewhere on the net or maybe in AMIGA forums. Unfortunately, I can not help you there

[@bswierko]

www.planetemu.net/roms/commodore-amiga-applications

[@punkhell9588]

ａｍｉｇａ

[@paul2062]

this shit aint realtime, this cant even be done on a playstation 1

[@another3997]

Where exactly does anyone claim this is real-time? It's clearly stated that the animations took many hours to render, and the resulting animations are then just being played back. Sometimes I'm amazed at how stupid people can be. 🙄

[@paul2062]

@@another3997 alright pal hide behind your keyboard. I'd rather be stupid than a coward.

[@another3997]

@@paul2062Well, you definitely qualify as stupid. I don't need to hide behind anything. Explain exactly why I'm a coward? You make a stupid comment on KZbin for all to see, and someone pointed it out to you. Who's fault is that? But unless you've invented a way of physically transporting matter via KZbin comments, all anyone can do is use the keyboard to type a reply pointing out your idiocy. If you give me your address, I'll send you a personal note too, handwritten and with a nice picture of me sticking two fingers up at you.

[@ShwappaJ]

They never said it was real-time, it literally said 65 and 21 hours