Last Starfighter Using Old Desktop Home Computers!

I cover importing large format meshes and configuring Mode Promotion to get RTG working with Lightwave3D on Amiga.
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[@manueljesus3147]

The most incrementally improved under produced YT Amiga channel.

[@HoldandModify]

hahah

[@Traci_S_Aaron]

I love this direction your taking with your videos and content. Learning the basics helps us learn the present day software

[@HoldandModify]

That is my intent! Great that it's working. I know it makes more sense to show basics with current software but I think this is more fun yet still relevant (at this level) all while also filling that desire for retro as well. Thanks for the comment!

[@314159265mangler]

Absolutely loving this series! Love CGI, and “old style” CGI as well, because of the nostalgia it evokes. I have been doing CGI as a hobby using modern tools, but never on a retro system. Just got my first ever A1200 and you’ve inspired me to give it a try!

[@HoldandModify]

This hits me with all the FEELS. Awesome! Have fun!

[@SensibleChuckle]

I love how far this has come in such s short period

[@10MARC]

Great stuff! And I like the new format where we see you talking

[@HoldandModify]

Glad you're digging the new format! It's definitely a change for me.

[@cullmaster7361]

Awesome video “Q”. Loving the new way you now present and the in person discussions. Prefer this to the wild arms 😉🤣👍🏻 The Last Starfighter released in 1984 is one of my favourite films. Made me very happy. Cheers 🍻

[@HoldandModify]

Ah 1984! Opps! Thanks and awesome to see my "channel shift" is working...mostly. :)

[@Jordan4Ibanez]

I was here for the start of a big time youtuber. Looks excellent, very informative

[@HoldandModify]

Thanks! I wonder now and then how many have stuck it out or might have come back after those early years.

[@BracerJack]

Just started watching this, I am already excited at 1:26 when you talk about formats. I have yet to find a way to export my animations in Blender, we talking basic spaceships, not IK or even rigged characters into Retro Lightwave, if anyone has the solution, do share. Okay let's continue watching 🎉

[@HoldandModify]

Ohh yeah that will be tough. LW didn't support UVs until version 6. FBX will be your best option. However even that is tricky. Even in our modern times.

[@chrisrobinson9178]

@@HoldandModify Will LW not do wavefront.obj I looking to get some old vista dems into Blender as hightmaps

[@JKC40]

years ago at SIGGRAPH i actually met one of the guys that worked on The Last Starfighter. it was one of those really cool moments The gunstar did have texture mapping, that was one of its revolutionary steps on it. Of course, it was only color textures, but anyway...

[@HoldandModify]

Ohh that's a great share! I always love the stories folks have with this stuff. Thanks for confirming!

[@SledgeFox]

Promoting Lightwave with New Mode was something I never got right back in the 90s. Great to see you solving this. I loved TV Paint! To this day I am on the lookout for a similar program on Windows. Thank you very much for this Video, have a great day! Oh, I barely survived the mens flu... Nurse? NURSE!!! 😂

[@HoldandModify]

Glad you came through! Yay!

[@MonkeyForNothing]

I used Imagine 3d on Amiga back in the day. Biggest scene was 337,000 polygons in the scene. I had 80MB of RAM and a 060. RAM really was the issue here, I was struggling to get it to render. Render time was insane when i got it to render, sure, but the RAM was the real enemy. These days there are modern cards for Amiga with a whole bunch of RAM but back then it was a pain and it was an expensive problem to fix ;-)

[@HoldandModify]

Yeah I had 512mb in this 4000. Now its down to 128mb. I have Imagine3D installed. I started with it but what a struggle to use. Took me forever to understand how to animate in it. Just as I was making progress, LW finally came out with the Toasted and I knew I had found my Unicorn :)

[@more.power.]

Great work Q really enjoy your channel.

[@HoldandModify]

Happy it's slowly coming together. Thank you!

[@preferredimage]

Nice!, yeah they used basic texturing in TLS. You can see it in the stills you used. I used to fight the texture naming problem back in the day where something would overwrite a previously used name unless like with modern LW... I got into a habit if prefixing surface names so GST-whatever and KDN-whatever meant back then you'd never end up overwriting texture names which were scene based, not object based.

[@HoldandModify]

Yes good tips. I mentioned that only after having to "relearn" as I made the video. Heh.

[@preferredimage]

@@HoldandModify Yeah, I'm constantly watching your videos and saying to myself "oh yeah we had to do it that way back then!!"

[@CrisBlyth]

I like seeing your face and this new direction ! yeah .. don’t underplay :) it’s a good channel

[@HoldandModify]

Aww shucks! That's man!

[@MauroSanna]

You are doing it right, Kevin. Your videos are great, and sooner rather than later you will no longer be able to say "underproduced" hahahaha 🙂 I love the new intro and I loved this video too! Keep up the good work!

[@HoldandModify]

I appreciate that!

[@dvuemedia]

In the early 90s, my first boxed 3D sw for Amiga 2000 was Turbo Silver, clunky, but worked. Back in those days 3D rendering was fairly new, and unknown to the general public. When I saw 3D animations on TV and movies, I had a little inside info on how it was done, that was pretty cool. Most 3D sw I got came on magazine cover disks. I have a bunch of Amigas, including A4000 with Video Toaster and Lightwave. I tried to render once a demo scene from Blade Runner that was included with Lightwave, but it run out of RAM, and did not finish. I have 16MB, looks like it's not enough. Maybe someday there will be PiStorm for A4000 and finally I can render that scene on real A4000.

[@HoldandModify]

I've rendered both Bladerunner scenes. One of them, the Spinner and Tyrell building ahould render just fine on a 16mb Amiga. I believe even the other more involved one with the big adboard should too. Segment memory settings would need to be adjusted.

[@dvuemedia]

@@HoldandModify Thanks, Maybe you can do a tutorial how to setup network render farm on a PC, so we can render the scenes faster. I think I saw one video you made. I do have PiStorm on my A1200, so I also could try to render on that system.

[@HoldandModify]

@@dvuemedia The PiStorm would be your fastest way. The one card is faster than 4 real Amiga combined. Heh.

[@aiupscaler]

There were a few shots they did actually render with raytraced shadows on The Last Starfighter. It was incredibly slow but for some shots, like when the gun doors open before the deathblossom, you can see shadows. They felt the extra sense of depth was worth it.

[@HoldandModify]

ohhh that's s neat bit of trivia! thanks!

[@rexxthunder]

I can't believe I worked every day in Lightwave for over 10 years.

[@HoldandModify]

I'm going on year 25. :)

[@rexxthunder]

@@HoldandModify Lightwave was great for a lot of stuff! It had a really good lighting engine.

[@theohughes74]

​@@rexxthunderYou're too modest Mr I worked on Babylon 5 😁

[@SensibleChuckle]

You're a great presenter.

[@HoldandModify]

Why thanks for saying! It was a big step.

[@mikedefoy]

TV Paint was the bomb. I was lazy and never promoted additional screens, it was usually just the main app screen & P96 seemed to work just fine for the P4.

[@robertamaral2349]

I love the show open!!!!!!!!!!!! Don't change it!!!!

[@jimmay8627]

I remember deliberately exploiting the surface name collisions to effect fast per-scene overrides, by saving variants under the same surface names on a single polygon. Just make sure to load the override objects last.

[@HoldandModify]

A classic Lw hack!

[@DavePoo2]

I have not seen The Last Starfighter. 🚀

[@HoldandModify]

OH MY GOODNESS. You must resolve this immediately.

[@coinopanimator]

TVPaint is such a great animation tool today. Still going strong.

[@HoldandModify]

Ah cool. Good to hear! It became AuraPaint at one point, right? Then back to TVPaint?

[@coinopanimator]

@HoldandModify I lost track of it for years but it's only been I. The last few years since I made a career change into animation that I found it again. It still has an Amiga like feel to it somehow like how it handles cut and paste. Hard to put my finger on it and maybe because it's owned by a French company but it can be a little weird.

[@gqwbd]

The Last Star Fighter was done on a Cray right? I remember reading on Adafruits' blog that the first Raspberry Pi was 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1. Nice work. I really need to get my Amiga's set up properly this year. I always am messing around with installations and stuff, which ends up being a bit of mess.

[@HoldandModify]

Not sure but back in 1983/4 it was pretty much the only option. Thanks for stopping by!

[@ErazerPT]

Nice vid. Main issue with "foreign" 3D models will be how bad they are in terms of clean up needed to make them "good", be it basic poly reduction or straight up fixing oddball geometry. On TVPaint, IIRC the last version for the Amiga was provided for free by them a while back, i mean, it was worthless for them on a income angle so might as well get the "free promotion".

[@HoldandModify]

Yes, I had to "remove" the UVS from these models for the export to work. There were bo textures so the UVs weren't critical.

[@imagesh1]

Last week was sked by a client to take some LW tag animations I did in 2009 from SD to HD. Loaded up in LW15 and was rendering in minutes, making new money. :) Then for grins took the scenes into LW2024 and after some messing with surfaces was rendering with all the bells and whistles in Octane on my RTX3090 for that "extra something". Good times.

[@HoldandModify]

That's how it's done! Old work paying off....AGAIN.

[@BracerJack]

Was vector blur a thing back then? Or only regular motion blur with its distinct and obvious frame discernment was available?

[@HoldandModify]

There were film transfer tricks they could do but no, no vector blur. That math and code wouldn't have the CPU power until decades later. Motion blur of any kind was mostly absent from early CGI.

[@Ziplock9000]

Great video again. What camera are you using?

[@HoldandModify]

Thanks! Sony Alpha-6700 with a 35mm PRIME. Got it at Best Buy for a Black Friday type deal. I don't have affiliate links for stuff. :)

[@DaneArcher]

One word: "Brilliant." I've been tinkering again with Imagine 3.0, haven't been serious with that since what, 2000? 2001? On the fence about whether I should get into Lightwave (where apparently every other Amiga 3D folk are.) I've got the Vampire 4 Standalone and an Amithlon machine that both need a workout, so maybe I'll dive in after watching this. Okay. Maybe more like one hundred words, but only one needed to sum it all up, so...

[@HoldandModify]

imagine was my first 3-D software on the Amiga used 2.0 and 3.0 but oh my gosh, such a pain to animate and when LW finally came around to where I was able to use it... it was such a refreshing dream. I even tried Caligari and it was better but still not LWs ease of animation and effects.

[@DaneArcher]

@@HoldandModify Yeah, Imagine has it's "charms," but then again the easiest program to use is invariably the one you already know. Quinquagenarian stubbornness just adds to LW's learning curve. You're making it look sensible though, so thanks. Really liking the new format, by the way.

[@HoldandModify]

@@DaneArcher Awesome, and thanks! Hopefully as I detail more of it, the fog can be lifted for others too.

[@hardwire666too]

Yes, Photoshop 1.0 wasn't until 1990 and was another 4 years before it came anything close to what anyone today would recognize as Photoshop.

[@HoldandModify]

Ah ha! So yeah right around my entry with Amiga.

[@sirretsnom3329]

General question: So would using an Amiga Emulator on a modern PC improve the rendering speeds?

[@HoldandModify]

Greatly. It's not 1:1 but it's super, duper, faster.

[@vladimirsavkovic7701]

Yellow? That's definitely green...

[@HoldandModify]

Yeah it's a puke green/yellow...pea color? idk

[@vladimirsavkovic7701]

@@HoldandModify I think it's the capture doing it. The buttons in LW itself do look yellow.

[@brown_recluse_human3458]

Funny you should mention you don't understand photoshop and the 2d stuff. I'm a graphic designer and I work predominantly in Illustrator and Photoshop and while I've dabbled in 3D, I could never understand it. I tried blender, zbrush and some others all to no avail. But it's fine, I find 3D fascinating nonetheless.

[@HoldandModify]

Then you understand! yeah it's always irked me my brains lack of coordination with my hands. I just can't think in 2D. I'm also terrible at designing things. i have no language or theming skills. i always must start with some one else's example.

[@epremeaux]

ZZ_TOP lol I caught that joke.

[@HoldandModify]

:)

[@akfreed6949]

I didn't think they used consumer level personal computers for the movie . The director is awesome as Micheal Myers of HALLOWEEN fame . I think its funny that big Commodore 64 fans trash the ATARI ST line of computers even though it was made by the main developers of the 64 . Also they like bragging about how better the AMIGA is to the ST . The Commodore AMIGA is an ATARI computer with a Commodore badge on it . The AMIGA was made with ATARI patents .

[@HoldandModify]

lol! Thread war! Amiga/Atari! Also I know they didn't use off the shelf for the film. I was commenting how that came later for early CGI FX in TV shows. :)

[@kborak]

You of all people know better. Its CG. Stop with the I.

[@HoldandModify]

lol! Imagery man. IMAGERY! :)

[@Prosonic]

keep the old one

[@HoldandModify]

Hah. Well, that's an option too. I think it's a good one, still.