Haven’t talked to you in nearly ten years, and now I run across an article on your blog at random. Life’s screwy like that sometimes.

Thanks for the flashback. The Juggler was the start of something that only exhausted itself when I saw the first ads for Babylon 5 and realized that the state of the art had passed me by. Time to pack it in.

Ironically, I learned my initial skills using VideoScape and Modeler 3D, which was written by the same guy that wrote the modeler for Lightwave on the Video Toaster a few years later.

I had abandoned VideoScape in favor of Turbo Silver (and later, Imagine) because they did actual “ray tracing”, but the Lightwave people realized that you didn’t need to ray trace to make it “good enough” to look GOOD. And boy they were right.

Also ironically, I usually did my base models in Modeler 3D then imported them into Imagine. Modeler’s absolute metric scale made more sense to someone that had taken “classic” drafting classes in college.

Ah, good times.

@Flack:

Actually, Amiga users *did* multitask while ray tracing. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. and worked well. I and at least three people I knew in the San Diego area would have renders going at just about any hour on the same machine that served up BBS logins – and in one case, an echomail hub for the neighborhood!

I did my first rendering on a 486 DX4/100 using some piece of shit shareware program. I didn’t get as far as you did; I pretty much stopped with rendered versions of my name rotating around in space, complete with lense flares and light sources. Even if the output seems stupid now it was awesome to work with 2D materials and somehow create a 3D object.

One thing I think people tend to forget is that for years and years there was no such thing as multitasking. Whether you were rendering something or running a BBS or downloading a file, your computer was dedicated to that task.

Another thing I don’t think people get (unless they were there) was that a lot of early hacking wasn’t done as vandalism or in search of fame but rather in search of resources. I never wanted to crash a college server — I just wanted to abuse their seemingly-limitless bandwidth for my own nefarious needs. I didn’t want to format their drives, I want to store shit on them. Back when games were measured in megabytes or even kilobytes, having gigabytes of storage at your disposal was like the Goonies finding One-Eyed Willie’s sunken treasure.