/3/ - 3DCG

[Anonymous No.772371]

Screenshot from Sanitarium (1998)
Anyone know what they would have used in 1997 to create this kind of render? There is something magical about old adventure game / late 90s prerendered era CGI / backgrounds that are very grungy simplistic looking but have otherwise realistic cpu based raytracing. Apologies if this topic has been brought up before, I do not browse this board often but I have seen people on here identify some obscure shit. A combination of low resolution textures, very metallic and bumpmappy workflow but not anything lowlopy as its known today (nostalgiabait). I mean these renders tried to be as realistic as they could be for the time. I've got nothing against blender but I am trying to avoid recreating this look in modern software and instead trying to hunt down the exact kinds of software that would be used to play around with it for fun.

[Anonymous No.772373]

>>772371
more examples

[Anonymous No.772376]

>>772371
Most of those games used still assets that weren't being animated. Think of Resident Evil.

[Anonymous No.772379]

Op again, found an interesting piece of software called imagine3d amiga/dos/win32
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aASbggmQ6BJSQ6tLqGOblDZjUTf83zxh
Funnily enough it takes .3ds, might have to learn 3ds after all
Made a delicious scanline phong torus
But out of curiosity, the search continues

[Anonymous No.772387]

>>772371
DreamForge Intertainment used 3D Studio MAX R2 with a range of commercial plugins in the production of Sanitarium. Rendered using the built-in scanline renderer.

>>772373
Square used used Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator(version 6 or 7) in the production of FFVII, running on SGI IRIX.

>>772379
Imagine 3D disappeared from professional use when the Amiga died. It was developed until the end of the millennium, but by 1995 former Amiga artists had migrated to 3D packages on other platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WslSzQydnNs

[Anonymous No.772406]

>>772387
Thank you! This is the kind of information I was looking for

[Anonymous No.772501]

3D Studio Max goes all the way back to it's development stage to 1988 and it was already in use for game dev by 1996.

[Anonymous No.772507]

>>772501
I had the privilege of working with MAX since R 1.0 but the scanline renderer was pretty weak for a pretty long time. Brazil came along in 1999 but was so slow it was unfeasible to produce anything with it on a single workstation.

[Anonymous No.772512]

>>772501
>3D Studio Max goes all the way back to it's development stage to 1988
Can you read ? That was 3D Studio, a DOS program. The first MAX was 1996 for NT. Completly different from DOS Studio, if was just the same developers but the code was entirely new, object oriented.

[Anonymous No.772515]

>>772512
Yes, 3DS DOS still had destructive modeling. Version 1 was the first proper 3D tool on PC I ever used. Before that Amiga stuff only.
3DS DOS was so well supported with plugins and so entrenched in studios, it was used well beyond the release of MAX, especially by game developers. Well into 1997. Still got my R4, came on floppies and on CD...and the typical parallel port dongle.

[Anonymous No.772519]

>>772515
I used Lightwave at that time, first on Amiga then on PC.

[Anonymous No.772520]

>>772519
Yeah... Lightwave was my main tool for a long time, into the early 2000s. It actually was kinda required to work in broadcast and VFX since no one used MAX there for many years to come. Good tool, kept alive by its plugin ecosphere but NewTek ruined it again and again by doing nothing with it.

[Anonymous No.772529]

>>772520

You can't always blame the development team if the company runs out of development money. I mean why is Blender so popular with 2.8 and onward? It's because the EU has given them $10 million twice in the last 5 years. Not too many private developers have that kind of money to play with. That's why Modo had to sell out to Foundry. That's why XSI got devoured by Autodesk. It's a brutal business.

[Anonymous No.772534]

>>772529
>It's because the EU has given them $10 million twice in the last 5 years.
WTF? My taxpayer money is going to fund those cultists?

[Anonymous No.772543]

>>772529
Well, in that case it was 100% NewTeks fault.

The creators and key engineers proposed a complete modernization of Lightwave in 2001, the management disagreed. So Allen Hastings, Stuart Ferguson, Brad Peebler and half of the LW staff left to form Luxology later on. Years later NT fucked up another attempt at modernization by shelving the Lightwave CORE prototype, tacking some of its features onto the next versions of LW.
And now with LW2020 out even more developers left the company.

I was done with NewTek after 2005. XSI was fun while it lasted, now it's Maya and (again) 3ds. Let's see what's next.

[Anonymous No.772735]

>1999 3ds 3.1 demos look better than modern blender
oh nonononono hahahah blendlets what the fuck happened?

[Anonymous No.772736]

>>772534

kek

[Anonymous No.772738]

poasting more epic project renders that came with the software

[Anonymous No.772739]

>>772738
er the projects came with the program but these renders are brand new

[Anonymous No.772744]

an ik example from R3.1

[Anonymous No.772747]

[Anonymous No.772752]

>>772744
LOOK AT HIM GO

[Anonymous No.772757]

>>772735
I found the default scanline renderer of 3D Studio MAX rather lacking for the first few years. Good for game cutscenes, but not something I wanted to use for broadcast/vfx stuff. Plugin situation on the other hand was top, as were the modeling tools. It took the arrival of Modo for me to model in something else.

[Anonymous No.772775]

>>772757
surely this would have been good for the time, especially in vhs?

[Anonymous No.772812]

>>772775
Yes, at broadcast resolutions that's usable. Still...the movies that used MAX for any type off effect work until 2000-2001 are probably countable on one hand.
Others simply occupied that field at the time. Lightwave for TV, Softimage and EIAS for high end stuff.

[Anonymous No.772855]

>>772812
I installed 3.1 from two different sources and it looks like reactor (havok) physics are broken in the scenes they include as examples. Was reactor physics included in 1999 or something you had to buy separately as a plugin? Also do you happen to know of any pdfs I can find to learn early 3ds? Im eyeing a used book on amazon that even has the cd with it but its $50. Suprised at just how little material i can find online. The reason i want to learn old 3ds first is it doesnt seem like it changed a whole lot and modeen tutorials are such garbage compared to old books. I feel like ill eventually end up at 3ds 2021 and it wont feel so alien anymore

[Anonymous No.772914]

>>772855
No idea why the content would be broken. Reactor was fully integrated into MAX, so no separate plugin. Character Studio however was a separate, paid extension until R4.

Most of the books(Inside series by New Riders Publishing) are on archive.org. Finding the companion CDs with tutorials and lessons however is more difficult.

[Anonymous No.773073]

>>772371
I know that Konami used Cinema 4D for Silent Hill 2, which released in 2001, meaning it prolly was their tool of choice at least the previous 2 years.

[Anonymous No.773134]

>>773073
Several tools were used in the production of that game, including C4D. Japanese studios rarely used only one 3D application in their production pipeline.

[Anonymous No.773135]

>>773134
PS:
>prolly was their tool of choice
Unlikely, but many tools were employed. C4D always saw limited use in Japan, back then and now. One of SEGA's, Capcom's and Konami's main 3D tools throughout the 90s was Softimage and they pretty much transitioned smoothly to XSI when it came along(like many Japanese studios did).

[Anonymous No.773149]

>>773073
>azns using c4d
>in 2001 nonetheless

[Anonymous No.773175]

[Anonymous No.773176]

>>773175
Wow, that's some nonsense right there.

Also that shitty meme needs to die already.

[Anonymous No.773178]

>>773175
What's wrong with that?

>>773176
>Also that shitty meme needs to die already.
Agreed. There's no substance to it.

[Anonymous No.773186]

>>773176
In my opinion mentalray being included as a standard pushed gamedevs to eventually beef up videogame graphics so they were closer to something more 'realistic' as opposed to the cartoony surrealism of scanline
Eventual progression to 'what you see is what you get' got rid of this intermediate step of crafting worlds without seeing what they would look like, akin to taking a film picture rather than chimping the screen of a dslr. Just because people cant easily describe why they feel that way doesnt mean soul vs soulless has no merit. Technicalities aside soulless art seems to boil down to 'Things become soulless when they become streamlined so they can be easily replicated or mass produced', aka most of Unity assets from the asset store. Just look up any blender low poly tutorial and youll see the blind leading the blind in what they think is lowpoly 3d, not even bothering to do any texture work. This shows that they merely have a fleeting interest in the art, or a disingenuous interest (women learning absolute basics to put on their resume). Id say devs having this new option to see their scenes in a better (for the time) renderer eventually made them go 'why the fuck isnt the game this good' and 'this is bullshit i just want to do less work when it comes down to viewport vs final result'
Tldr: tech improved and we went from artistic guesses of reality to blurry blended and soft rendering modes, and these typically make the light source less obvious, its more soft and scatters all over, its less like the sun that we are biologically programmed to like, and everything now is soft, floaty and has no sense of time of day anymore.

[Anonymous No.773216]

>>773186
Just stop it.

[Anonymous No.773237]

>>773216
>Just stop it.

[Anonymous No.773253]

How'd they get that wire to pug into that botton?

[Anonymous No.773281]

>>772735

Lads, i need help. Does anyone know where i can find the the 3ds max 3 "extras" CD that that came alongside the program? These "Polyfighters" were on it, their workfile too. It was full of tutorials and even included a short film about these bug characters raiding a fridge that i found really impressive back in 99. I've been trying to find it for years now... It is not on CGpeers

[Anonymous No.773381]

>>773186
Hm, I used Mental Ray long before it was available for 3DS, back in the SI days. Was that also "soulless"? I mean even in 2003 you could easily use your standard 3ds materials in MR, as there was only the standard material workflow, no physical based materials or the like.

Whatever, I need sleep.

[Anonymous No.773477]

i just came across it recently while compiling everything for 3.1 and 6
this is what you are looking for
https://archive.org/details/3D_Studio_Max_3.1_Discreet_Autodesk_Inc._12806-016806-0101
some installs of 3.1 on archive.org come with these extras, personally ive included them into my ultimate 3ds max 6 vm environment as a legacy thing, you can also open them up in 6 without any problems they all just work after you save them once

[Anonymous No.773478]

>>773477
>>773281
whoops, forgot to give you a (You)

[Anonymous No.773485]

>>773477
>>773478

Hey thanks, i actually stumbled upon that page yesterday shortly after writing here, looks like it was added somewhat recently because it was impossible to find before. This CD brings up so many weird old memories. After seeing all the little clips and renders included there i was stunned that a pirated CD i got on a whim turned out to be a super serious piece of software you could do actual hollywood-quality CG with. I'd open those .max files for the various examples and get overwhelmed at how advanced the setups and rigs were to make them do what you see on the final render. It's likely the very thing that made me go for a career in 3d. What made you look for max 6 in particular, was that your first version?

[Anonymous No.773514]

>>773485
>hollywood-quality CG
>with out-of-the-box 3ds

[Anonymous No.773532]

>>773514

You laugh, but this is what Pixar movies looked like in 1999

[Anonymous No.773536]

>>773532
RenderMan ran circles around anything you could do on off-the-shelf software, well into the 2000s.

There is a reason MAX was adapted late in VFX. It took its 3rd party renderers to mature beyond a certain point. Scanline renderer was nowhere near production-ready, but that was also Maya's problem for a very long time.
It was good for everything game-related in those days...buy beyond that...

t. MAX user since R1

[Anonymous No.773556]

>>773485
thats the thing i have 3ds 2021 pirated and have no idea what to do with it. modern tutorials are awful and modern books require 20 years experience in chapter one. i went with 6 because i could find books on ebay with cdroms intact that go into what every single icon stands for, although i almost went with 3.1. my endgoal is to make a turn of the era looking point and click adventure game with plenty of prerendered backgrounds and fmvs.

[Anonymous No.773557]

>>773556
Good luck anon

[Anonymous No.773558]

>>773557
thanks senpai

[Anonymous No.773559]

>>772371
Looks a lot like Autocad's old native raytracing renderer.

[Anonymous No.773561]

>>773559
It's 3D Studio MAX R2, as mentioned in a 1998 issue of Game Developer Magazine.

[Anonymous No.773587]

>>773536

Well alright, it *felt* like you could do it from the perspective of a kid who's seeing this type of software for the first time. Technical wank over lighting and materials aside there's not *that* much of a difference aesthetically in the finished product.

>>773556

They added a lot of new modelling tools with 2010, so i would probably have gone for that if i wanted to learn it. 2009 was the last version of max i used before i moved to Blender. 6 might actually work for what you're going for - even though it introduced MR it still relied heavily on the scanline renderer at the time.