When Amiga was released it was about 10 year ahead of Windows. Multitasking just blew my mind. Windows halted and lagged while formatting a hard drive. While on Amiga formatting a disk and processing stuff in the background while playing with deluxe paint was no problem.
I helped write the manual for when Imagine for Dos switched over to Imagine for Windows. I also owned one of their 3d digitizers that was run with a stripped down version of Imagine for Dos. Good times.
ruclips.net/video/EeeSsY2oak8/видео.htmlsi=9J7AvLUVbkd3SP0h @@HoldandModify We made this in 96 or 98, not so sure anymore. Imagine for windows, Light wave, premiere, and a personal animation controller the guys at impulse made and sold. It was in all the Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos nationwide. Good old days...lol
The dude (Jenshi) made free models and posted them in 1994. Before the Web which was invented a year later. So someone must have used Gopher or BBS to get the files. Crazy to think about how cool that was, at least to me, who remembers those early days of the Internet before the World Wide Web, which we all just call the Internet today.
@@Oli1974 CERN released the WWW software to the public domain on April 30, 1993. But it took a couple of years for it to proliferate. For instance Netscape Navigator which is really the first widely used browser came out In October 1994.
Also used Imagine a lot. It was part of our “poor man’s Video Toaster” setup in the computer club. A heavily upgraded A2000 for the time (030/25/68882, 6MiB, SCSI HDD 120MiB), DVE-10p Genlock, two SVHS recorders, manual AV mixer and Scala MM200, DPaint IV, AdPro and Imagine 2.0. I later was allowed to take this whole setup home when we started using DV cameras, PCs and Adobe Premiere. I edited my home videos until 2001 with this. I played around with Real3D as well and 3DS Max on the PC but I found that Imaging was most intuitive to me. The workflow appealed to me as it was divided into the separate editors. 6 MiB of RAM weren’t much even by the standards then but it was usually enough to do intro animations and some nice effects.
Great Vid “Q” 👍🏻 I always liked CGI. I remember seeing the Last Starfighter back in ‘84 and what had to be done just to bring the spacecraft such as the Gunstar with the Cray II Super Computer. Fast forward a few years and the Amiga could do nearly the same with B5. 🤯 Thanks for the quick DOPUS tutorial 😉
Imagine 2.0 was my first foray into 3D as well. Here I am 30 years in the industry, currently moving my workflow over to unreal engine. Like all the amiga users I knew, I spent a lot of time on Lightwave. Lightwave was awesome.
I got Imagine 2.0 on a coverdisk as a kid. I was completely obsessed. I made cars, animals, fruit, planets and a rather detailed starship Enterprise. I even paid to upgrade to Imagine 3.0 so I could use the inverse kinematics. I never really figured out how to use it though.
Started off with Sculpt 3d on the Amiga myself, then later the 4D, then Imagine. Was mind blowing at the time the results you could get from effectively a home computer. We all had no idea how things would change did we 🙂 Young - uns, this current era of AI generated stuff is only the beginning, it's going to be a wild ride from here. I hope I'm around to see some of it.
It is really cool these 3D programs existed back then. We are soo spoiled these days with instantaneous rendering on GPU's with gigabytes of VRAM, and CPU's which mostly sit idle 99.9% of their life.
I had no idea until I saw the Imagine title screen... It was made in MN! (I grew up in MN.) I had a friend that recently retired from NASA that used Turbo Silver and later Imagine.
I remember my first 3d animations I created back in 1994 was on an Amiga 4000 Video Toaster with Lightwave as part of a video production class in High School.
Imagine was my fav gfx program for many years, had a blast animating and rendering, it became my main tool on PC after they ported it. Did some amazing billboard early photo real advertisements with it.
My path started on my Atari 1040ST with Cad 3D and the entire Cyber suite. I then went to the Amiga and started with Sculpt 4D, then, Imagine 2.0, Cinema 4D, Aladin 4D, Real 3D, and finally Lightwave. After discovering Lightwave I never looked back. Then jumped to the PC and continued using Lightwave and still do today.
my first foray into 3d came with Data Becker Reflections 1.6 and the accompanying animator. It took ages to raytrace an object, but had features that were rarely seen later in much more expensive products (like the "crumple" function to generate a crushed look on surfaces). Later I used Caligari (not Truespace, the original Caligari) and with the Supra Turbo my old Amiga 500 could almost animate stuff inside the program in realtime. It was insane, and my mind was completely blown to make concept art in 3d with this tool, and fast! Sadly, I never got into Lightwave, because soon I moved over to PCs and 3DS (version4) and Bryce2 became my passions for a long time.
Caligari3D was the last Amiga app I tried before finally getting Lightwave3D on Amiga. It was decent. LW though, wow. Just awesome! Thank you for sharing your history. I love it when folks share. The stories are great!
Yeah, I remember Imagine, videoscape 3D, Real 3D, Sculpt 4D and of course I settled on Lightwave. But I wish I'd kept hold of the floppy discs Tobias Richter sent me containing his 3D models of trek ships for videoscape...... Lost in the past somewhere. But that got me into 3D and Lightwave and I still use it now. Everything is better than Povray!
@@HoldandModify When I think back, it was pre-internet. pre-BBS at least for me. We were still swapping discs at meets and school. I posted a letter to Germany as a kid! Praising him for his excellent animations and said I'd wanted to try the same but didn't have any models.... I got a reply thanking me for my kind words and included some floppies containing many of those classic looking TOS era ships.... Tobias really did make a big deal out of his love of CGI!!
Imagine is great. I still stuff i made back in mid 90's :) I'm just glad that i made full backup of my A4k system before i sold it 1998. Somehow it has survived in my hard disks since then. I started to tinker with actual Amiga hardware again in 2016 so it was nice to have my old Amiga backups in working order :)
Back in the 90s, I cut my 3D teeth on Imagine and used it for at least 8 years (along with LightWave). After watching this video, I don't know how (or why) the heck I used it for as long as I did. 🤯
I remember TS/Imagine. Using it was a hard lesson in waiting and disappointment. Before Imagine2 if you didn't add a light to your scene, it would happily render along in pitch black. Thank god Lightwave came around.
My A2000 with the 68040 Card still stands a few meters away from me, packed in a box. I also started with Turbo Silver and made all updates up to Imagine 3.0. Everything should still be installed on the system... I also used a DCTV video enhancer, unfortunatly I never got the chance to use it for profit.
I found out from some used diskettes for Amiga, a copy of Finnish modeling software, Real3d. I made some animations, and yes of course version of Star Trek's Enterprise. I do say rendering even small animation with Amiga 500 took a LOT of time...
Now I feel old. I started with DBW-Render in 1987... Then Turbo Silver, Imagine, Lightwave and others. I kept using Imagine 4.0 because it gave the best render quality in my view and had the best procedural textures. But that of course is personal preference. And by the way, I found SysInfo benchmarks of my 4000-060 with Cybervision 64. 57,83 MIPS 41,46 MFLOPS the original 4000-040 with 25 MHz had 19,14 MIPS 4,85 MFLOPS if I run WinUAE with my PC (Intel Skylake 6700K) - WinUAE uses only 1 core anyway... 515,64 MIPS 75,34 MFLOPS Well that was boring, I guess... But I was suprised, I found those old benchmarks on my A-4000 harddisk.
Thanks for the memories. I loved Imagine back in the day and had loads of CD's full of models. 3 of us put money together to buy it and then shared the manual. I always wanted Lightwave/Amiga Toaster but it was too expensive, although it did serve as the foundation for my username (which has been adapted over the years). Later on PC I managed to save up an get Inspire 3D, which was kind of a 'lite' version of Lightwave and eventually I got Lightwave itself.
Had both Imagine 3 and 4 on CU Amiga coverdisks. Sadly we could never really get into it, as it was too slow on an Amiga 1200, and we couldn't afford a processor card.
@@HoldandModify true. But when you can get Blender for free, and better support for it, it would seem a somewhat fruitless hobby. Nice to dip in to the nostalgia now and then, though. :)
Thanks for this video! I really can’t imagine using imagine.. pun intended! Way back before Babylon 5 came out I was working at IBM’s UK labs developing Virtual Reality systems and early virtual studios. I was using a dev version of Lightwave 3D on a SGI machine…I can’t remember if that was before or during the early 3DS days but I never touched anything else, LW was my thing
Man! I taught myself Imagine following tutorials from CU Amiga. Never got into Lightwave, I actually moved on to Tornado3D using a PPC+bvision, that one just loved to crash.
Action & Stage editor are iintertwined. Cycle editor is for Cycle Objects. Think of a jointed robot, or a puppet. You can make your dancing/walking/jumping puppet in the Cycle editor. Detail editor is where you build most of your stuff.
It looks primitive now, but back in the day, this was the best software available, and there were no internet tutorials, no RUclips, nothing, you had to figure stuff out on your own, and the computers had no GPU, everything was done in software on a CPU that probably had less compute than a USB cable has today
The Amiga was amazing as a graphics machine when it came out. CGI back in the day was super cool, but when they used this sort of thing in movies it always was a distraction for me. The first movie that I ever saw that had realistic enough CGI to not distract me was The Fifth Element. I watched a good 15 minutes of this movie before I realized I was watching computer graphics. It was ground breaking.
I remember Imagine, Real3D, Lightwave (the really expensive one) but i got started with Cinema4D. Very interesting video flashback. I did use C4D to build a spacestation with a rotating section, a giant wheel. Worked out the size and speed of rotation to approximate 0.9G. I also built a simplistic StarFury type model, that will remain hidden for all time. StarFury was the fighter type, Delta was the squadron designation. I recall they were refered to Delta fighters in early episodes. They made an atmospheric capable version in later series called the Thunderbolt. Did i mention i've seen Babylon 5 and i quiet liked it?
I started in 1991 on Sculpt Animate 4-D, running on the A500 (1 MB). After a while, I tried using Imagine and it became very confusing for me. The big evolution was Lightwave 3D, running by LightRAVE, on my "recently acquired" A1200 Blizzard 1230IV 32 MB in 1993, leaving days to render a 4 seconds anim-5 animation and use of ClariSSA! for smooth interlaced animation. My favorite packages are: Lightwave3D, Vertex, Scene Generator, Cinemorph, AdPRO/MorphPlus, ExpertDraw and for painting: True Brilliance and Deluxe Paint.
Great seat of tools you had! I did a video on LightRave here on the channel. I was stunned to find a copy on Ebay. Considering how niche and rare it is.
It's funny how nowadays, most 3D Software like Maya or Blender is considered easier to use, and then you have Imagine for the Amiga...I pray the souls of those that didn't know what to do when they wanted to learn 3D animation back then :(
@@HoldandModify If you were to compare that to let's say Source Filmmaker (a bit arbitrary of me to compare Valve's game engine to a ancient 3D software, but bare with me), I'd say that SFM would somewhat be of an exercise as well since you'd have to learn methods on using it. But with Imagine? Both of them are somewhat similar in terms of 3D animation software, or CGI (in some instances), but if someone were to remake an episode of X:RA (Xavier Renegade Angel) entirely on Imagine, I'd applaud to them, because it would show how much they have the BALLS to animate on something that is considered ancient technology on an already-outdated computer platform.
@NathanDarkson984 That would deserve a special Emmy at the least. When I sit down and really try to make something even in LW on Amiga, with all the ease it has, it’s still a SLOG. I have to slow way down, think smarter and more efficient, plan stuff out.
I wanted LightWave when I was a kid, but I had Lightwave at home... which was trueSpace. Then switched to 3dsmax in the aughts. You could say in this video you demonstrated how is babby formed.
@@HoldandModify Cool story, before caligari went bust I contacted them and asked them if they had any copies of the original caligari for Amiga. They did and actually sent it to me. Unfortunately. It could not run on my Amiga 500, but it's still a little cool bit of obscure computer history to have.
I was a master with Imagine 2.0, I still miss it. Also sad that Realsoft (Real 3D) has been semi-abandoned in 2020. Lightwave is back, I have the latest version 2023
the thing to remember is programs like Imagine were SLOW, because you were doing everything on the 68k. The Toaster being a Zorro device was important because it meant you were using a big box system that probably had a reasonably (or at least relatively) fast cpu. No real dedicated 3d hardware in '94
In order ti play nice with publishers, copyright holders, I don’t share files in general. A Google search does wonders though. As does the Commodore Amiga FB groups and Discord ;)
@@HoldandModify Gotcha, even under Pimiga 4, would you emulate the hardware of an Amiga 1000 in that case? Just looking to see what would be more ideal for something like Lightwave and Imagine
Oh yeah, it's "Mr Q you" . I think the international Amiga community still needs a further Kumbayah moment, which could happen if the world economies keep on deteriorating. It's not like we need too much diversity in the Amiga hardware/software space on the product side of things, possibly less with a little more consolidation or standardization, or trying not to look like too many linux distros. Maybe MorphOS or Aros will set the stage for some pan-solution.
I did fairly advanced stuff in Imagine, mostly in v4 and 5 and it was surprisingly powerful but it looked so dated compared to Lightwave, The stage editior definitely wasnt as good as doing the same thing sin Lightwave, but for a lot of the other stuff, it was more powerful than most ppl think.
Because making thumbnails manually takes a Lot of work. I used to do that. I have around 200 videos. I run out of ideas. So now I use a free online Ai generator to make them. My intro video is still made by me and I was considering making a Made On Amiga version. Have to see. My day job eats up a TON of my time.
@@HoldandModifylike, it makes no sense to me. you make a whole video about creating CGI on the Amiga and the idea never crosses your mind to just use the shot at 7:20 with some text as the thumbnail?
@Megatog615 Hey. That’s a good idea actually. You’re right! I continue to live up to my..most poorly produced, under produced … I do have prior videos where I use screen grabs from LW3D as thumbs. A video I did just a couple weeks ago.
I purchased Imagine.... what a great piece of software in that a to produce 3D VFX on a dekstop was a golden opportunity. But also... what a pile of b@lls in terms us ease of use. It was such a dog to use it made me bite the bullet and get a second hand A3K and Video Toaster with Lightwave and learn that system.
An earlier set of tools were DKBTrace/POV-Ray, Sculpt3D, and Forms in Flight. It was amazing what we could force onto an 800KB floppy.
When Amiga was released it was about 10 year ahead of Windows. Multitasking just blew my mind. Windows halted and lagged while formatting a hard drive. While on Amiga formatting a disk and processing stuff in the background while playing with deluxe paint was no problem.
I helped write the manual for when Imagine for Dos switched over to Imagine for Windows. I also owned one of their 3d digitizers that was run with a stripped down version of Imagine for Dos. Good times.
Dang dude!
ruclips.net/video/EeeSsY2oak8/видео.htmlsi=9J7AvLUVbkd3SP0h
@@HoldandModify We made this in 96 or 98, not so sure anymore. Imagine for windows, Light wave, premiere, and a personal animation controller the guys at impulse made and sold. It was in all the Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos nationwide. Good old days...lol
The dude (Jenshi) made free models and posted them in 1994. Before the Web which was invented a year later. So someone must have used Gopher or BBS to get the files. Crazy to think about how cool that was, at least to me, who remembers those early days of the Internet before the World Wide Web, which we all just call the Internet today.
dude thats awesome. thank you
for the history
The web was invented in 1991. 1994 I already was on for quite some time.
@@Oli1974 CERN released the WWW software to the public domain on April 30, 1993. But it took a couple of years for it to proliferate. For instance Netscape Navigator
which is really the first widely used browser came out In October 1994.
Also used Imagine a lot. It was part of our “poor man’s Video Toaster” setup in the computer club. A heavily upgraded A2000 for the time (030/25/68882, 6MiB, SCSI HDD 120MiB), DVE-10p Genlock, two SVHS recorders, manual AV mixer and Scala MM200, DPaint IV, AdPro and Imagine 2.0. I later was allowed to take this whole setup home when we started using DV cameras, PCs and Adobe Premiere. I edited my home videos until 2001 with this.
I played around with Real3D as well and 3DS Max on the PC but I found that Imaging was most intuitive to me. The workflow appealed to me as it was divided into the separate editors. 6 MiB of RAM weren’t much even by the standards then but it was usually enough to do intro animations and some nice effects.
Thank you SO MUCH for sharing some of your history! I love reading this stuff. (hope others do too)
The TV serie SeaQuest has really blown away my mind, when i saw the movie intro and CGI sequences - all created with Amiga!
Yeah show and intro was a big one back then. just wow!
Great Vid “Q” 👍🏻 I always liked CGI. I remember seeing the Last Starfighter back in ‘84 and what had to be done just to bring the spacecraft such as the Gunstar with the Cray II Super Computer. Fast forward a few years and the Amiga could do nearly the same with B5. 🤯 Thanks for the quick DOPUS tutorial 😉
Last Starfighter, Tron, had me JONSING for a computer that could do such a thing!
Imagine 2.0 was my first foray into 3D as well. Here I am 30 years in the industry, currently moving my workflow over to unreal engine. Like all the amiga users I knew, I spent a lot of time on Lightwave. Lightwave was awesome.
Unreal is the solid bet. i’m still in LW. i’ll be the last man standing i suspect. ;)
I got Imagine 2.0 on a coverdisk as a kid. I was completely obsessed. I made cars, animals, fruit, planets and a rather detailed starship Enterprise. I even paid to upgrade to Imagine 3.0 so I could use the inverse kinematics. I never really figured out how to use it though.
Me too! I also bought Imagine 3D 3 also
I think we all made an attempt at making a Star Trek ship. I know I did.
👍 good old times!
The good old Amiga Format days 😊
@@jimbotron70 cu amiga later gave away the version 4 of imagine 3d
Started off with Sculpt 3d on the Amiga myself, then later the 4D, then Imagine.
Was mind blowing at the time the results you could get from effectively a home computer.
We all had no idea how things would change did we 🙂
Young - uns, this current era of AI generated stuff is only the beginning, it's going to be a wild ride from here. I hope I'm around to see some of it.
The evolution of all things 3D related BLOWS MY MIND yearly. Heh
There were typically two versions of Imagine with each release. One was optimized for FPU and one was not.
Yeah I see an Integer version too.
It is really cool these 3D programs existed back then. We are soo spoiled these days with instantaneous rendering on GPU's with gigabytes of VRAM, and CPU's which mostly sit idle 99.9% of their life.
i challenge myself now and then making stuff on my Amigas. I’ve made some videos on this channel about it it can be…..enjoyably frustrating.
Made my first 3D render with sculpt 3D, on my 1 mb amiga A500. It was a very slow process 😊
Felt good though, right? Doing what you could.
@@HoldandModify it felt amazing, getting access to such advanced software on a home computer was totally insane back then.
8hrs for a 128pix Rez frame… been there, done that, got the t-shirt…
I had no idea until I saw the Imagine title screen... It was made in MN! (I grew up in MN.) I had a friend that recently retired from NASA that used Turbo Silver and later Imagine.
you sound alot like Jeff Bridges
that and the fact you are doing an Amiga video really really fits :)
haha. I’ve heard this from others. That’s funny. I’m not trying to!
I remember my first 3d animations I created back in 1994 was on an Amiga 4000 Video Toaster with Lightwave as part of a video production class in High School.
I wish I went to your High School! hah!
Imagine was my fav gfx program for many years, had a blast animating and rendering, it became my main tool on PC after they ported it. Did some amazing billboard early photo real advertisements with it.
That’s cool. You don’t often see stuff from Imagine. Amiga or PC. The program was a challenge for sure.
My path started on my Atari 1040ST with Cad 3D and the entire Cyber suite. I then went to the Amiga and started with Sculpt 4D, then, Imagine 2.0, Cinema 4D, Aladin 4D, Real 3D, and finally Lightwave. After discovering Lightwave I never looked back. Then jumped to the PC and continued using Lightwave and still do today.
That’s a great path you carved out! Tried them all!
@@HoldandModify The PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) and the AD516 SunRize 16 soundcard other than Lightwave were my most important purchases.
I used to use Turbosilver and Imagine, and I loved them! Great video! 🙂
haha same here! still have the book :D
my first foray into 3d came with Data Becker Reflections 1.6 and the accompanying animator. It took ages to raytrace an object, but had features that were rarely seen later in much more expensive products (like the "crumple" function to generate a crushed look on surfaces).
Later I used Caligari (not Truespace, the original Caligari) and with the Supra Turbo my old Amiga 500 could almost animate stuff inside the program in realtime. It was insane, and my mind was completely blown to make concept art in 3d with this tool, and fast!
Sadly, I never got into Lightwave, because soon I moved over to PCs and 3DS (version4) and Bryce2 became my passions for a long time.
Caligari3D was the last Amiga app I tried before finally getting Lightwave3D on Amiga. It was decent. LW though, wow. Just awesome! Thank you for sharing your history. I love it when folks share. The stories are great!
Yeah, I remember Imagine, videoscape 3D, Real 3D, Sculpt 4D and of course I settled on Lightwave. But I wish I'd kept hold of the floppy discs Tobias Richter sent me containing his 3D models of trek ships for videoscape...... Lost in the past somewhere. But that got me into 3D and Lightwave and I still use it now. Everything is better than Povray!
I should ask him if he still has them. I remember watching his stuff from back then too.
@@HoldandModify When I think back, it was pre-internet. pre-BBS at least for me. We were still swapping discs at meets and school. I posted a letter to Germany as a kid! Praising him for his excellent animations and said I'd wanted to try the same but didn't have any models.... I got a reply thanking me for my kind words and included some floppies containing many of those classic looking TOS era ships.... Tobias really did make a big deal out of his love of CGI!!
Respect dude! To be honest, I don't know if I ever would have pursued 3D, if I did not start in Strata 3D on a Mac.
Ohhh Strata! Man. Forgot about that!
I did so much work in Imagine... Crazy how I barely remember it now.
I think I demonstrated that as well...clearly. hahah,
I think the muscle memory would kick in, if you started using it again.
Lord knows I'm saying that for a ton of things nowadays 😂
Imagine is great. I still stuff i made back in mid 90's :)
I'm just glad that i made full backup of my A4k system before i sold it 1998. Somehow it has survived in my hard disks since then. I started to tinker with actual Amiga hardware again in 2016 so it was nice to have my old Amiga backups in working order :)
smart!
Back in the 90s, I cut my 3D teeth on Imagine and used it for at least 8 years (along with LightWave).
After watching this video, I don't know how (or why) the heck I used it for as long as I did. 🤯
LOL. Yes!
I remember TS/Imagine. Using it was a hard lesson in waiting and disappointment. Before Imagine2 if you didn't add a light to your scene, it would happily render along in pitch black. Thank god Lightwave came around.
Oh my! Now I'm glad I never used Imagine 1.0.
My A2000 with the 68040 Card still stands a few meters away from me, packed in a box. I also started with Turbo Silver and made all updates up to Imagine 3.0. Everything should still be installed on the system... I also used a DCTV video enhancer, unfortunatly I never got the chance to use it for profit.
There’s still time. Get it all back up and running. Conquer the world!
I found out from some used diskettes for Amiga, a copy of Finnish modeling software, Real3d. I made some animations, and yes of course version of Star Trek's Enterprise. I do say rendering even small animation with Amiga 500 took a LOT of time...
We all rendered Star Trek hahaah. thank you for sharing!
Now I feel old. I started with DBW-Render in 1987... Then Turbo Silver, Imagine, Lightwave and others. I kept using Imagine 4.0 because it gave the best render quality in my view and had the best procedural textures. But that of course is personal preference. And by the way, I found SysInfo benchmarks of my 4000-060 with Cybervision 64.
57,83 MIPS
41,46 MFLOPS
the original 4000-040 with 25 MHz had
19,14 MIPS
4,85 MFLOPS
if I run WinUAE with my PC (Intel Skylake 6700K) - WinUAE uses only 1 core anyway...
515,64 MIPS
75,34 MFLOPS
Well that was boring, I guess... But I was suprised, I found those old benchmarks on my A-4000 harddisk.
Imagine was gorgeous in the render dept. Some of my earliest "successful" 3D stills are imagine.
Thanks for the memories. I loved Imagine back in the day and had loads of CD's full of models. 3 of us put money together to buy it and then shared the manual. I always wanted Lightwave/Amiga Toaster but it was too expensive, although it did serve as the foundation for my username (which has been adapted over the years). Later on PC I managed to save up an get Inspire 3D, which was kind of a 'lite' version of Lightwave and eventually I got Lightwave itself.
Oh wow I had forgotten about Inspire3D! Glad you enjoyed. It’s neat going back through these old apps.
@@HoldandModify Most people I've found have never heard of it, so it's great to find someone that does.
Had both Imagine 3 and 4 on CU Amiga coverdisks. Sadly we could never really get into it, as it was too slow on an Amiga 1200, and we couldn't afford a processor card.
I hear ya man. Today we have the emulators at least
@@HoldandModify true. But when you can get Blender for free, and better support for it, it would seem a somewhat fruitless hobby. Nice to dip in to the nostalgia now and then, though. :)
oh of course. this is just fun making retro 3d art. working with and around the limitations
Thanks for this video! I really can’t imagine using imagine.. pun intended! Way back before Babylon 5 came out I was working at IBM’s UK labs developing Virtual Reality systems and early virtual studios. I was using a dev version of Lightwave 3D on a SGI machine…I can’t remember if that was before or during the early 3DS days but I never touched anything else, LW was my thing
hey that’s cool! love hearing these old stories! i have a lot of Amiga LW vids here as well.
I think NTSC/PAL might be a setting in the config file.
Man! I taught myself Imagine following tutorials from CU Amiga. Never got into Lightwave, I actually moved on to Tornado3D using a PPC+bvision, that one just loved to crash.
You BRAVE soul!
"What's this pic file here?" - Riskiest click of the day for you :D
lol! TRUTH
Action & Stage editor are iintertwined. Cycle editor is for Cycle Objects. Think of a jointed robot, or a puppet. You can make your dancing/walking/jumping puppet in the Cycle editor. Detail editor is where you build most of your stuff.
Ah haa! It's slowly coming back to me. Thank you.
It looks primitive now, but back in the day, this was the best software available, and there were no internet tutorials, no RUclips, nothing, you had to figure stuff out on your own, and the computers had no GPU, everything was done in software on a CPU that probably had less compute than a USB cable has today
Yep Imagine was my first 3D program on an Amiga 2000.
I was shocked how hard it was. i make Amiga Lightwave vids and thought i could handle Imagine again….nope. heheh
:)@@HoldandModify
The Amiga was amazing as a graphics machine when it came out. CGI back in the day was super cool, but when they used this sort of thing in movies it always was a distraction for me. The first movie that I ever saw that had realistic enough CGI to not distract me was The Fifth Element. I watched a good 15 minutes of this movie before I realized I was watching computer graphics. It was ground breaking.
Yeah true. Although there was some CG in earlier movies that looked quite good. Used sparingly of course. Flight of the Intruder had some good stuff.
I remember Imagine, Real3D, Lightwave (the really expensive one) but i got started with Cinema4D. Very interesting video flashback.
I did use C4D to build a spacestation with a rotating section, a giant wheel. Worked out the size and speed of rotation to approximate 0.9G. I also built a simplistic StarFury type model, that will remain hidden for all time. StarFury was the fighter type, Delta was the squadron designation. I recall they were refered to Delta fighters in early episodes. They made an atmospheric capable version in later series called the Thunderbolt. Did i mention i've seen Babylon 5 and i quiet liked it?
B5 IS LEGENDARY!
Thank you!
You're welcome!
I miss my 500 actually dropped quite a bit of memory in the bottom if I remember properly
they’re on Ebay and if you’re patient, you can find a deal. Or of course, emulation.
I started in 1991 on Sculpt Animate 4-D, running on the A500 (1 MB). After a while, I tried using Imagine and it became very confusing for me. The big evolution was Lightwave 3D, running by LightRAVE, on my "recently acquired" A1200 Blizzard 1230IV 32 MB in 1993, leaving days to render a 4 seconds anim-5 animation and use of ClariSSA! for smooth interlaced animation. My favorite packages are: Lightwave3D, Vertex, Scene Generator, Cinemorph, AdPRO/MorphPlus, ExpertDraw and for painting: True Brilliance and Deluxe Paint.
Great seat of tools you had! I did a video on LightRave here on the channel. I was stunned to find a copy on Ebay. Considering how niche and rare it is.
@15:41, I have learned 3D on Maya but currently use Blender and Preferences made my brain turn in-side-out.
yes, I was agree
Thanks for representing WOMEN in the thumbnail! Women are just fine, and deserve representation. They are part of our community.
Glad to be of service!
Aww I'd Love more B5. Anyway, interesting video. Thank you.
I have many videos showing off B5 in Lightwave at least. :)
It's funny how nowadays, most 3D Software like Maya or Blender is considered easier to use, and then you have Imagine for the Amiga...I pray the souls of those that didn't know what to do when they wanted to learn 3D animation back then :(
It's an exercise in......a lot.
@@HoldandModify If you were to compare that to let's say Source Filmmaker (a bit arbitrary of me to compare Valve's game engine to a ancient 3D software, but bare with me), I'd say that SFM would somewhat be of an exercise as well since you'd have to learn methods on using it. But with Imagine? Both of them are somewhat similar in terms of 3D animation software, or CGI (in some instances), but if someone were to remake an episode of X:RA (Xavier Renegade Angel) entirely on Imagine, I'd applaud to them, because it would show how much they have the BALLS to animate on something that is considered ancient technology on an already-outdated computer platform.
@NathanDarkson984 That would deserve a special Emmy at the least. When I sit down and really
try to make something even in LW on Amiga, with all the ease it has, it’s still a SLOG. I have to slow way down, think smarter and more efficient, plan stuff out.
this hardware was so ahead of its time.
absolutely!
I wanted LightWave when I was a kid, but I had Lightwave at home... which was trueSpace. Then switched to 3dsmax in the aughts.
You could say in this video you demonstrated how is babby formed.
I looked at Caligari. But LightRave came out and I finally had Lightwave for cheap. (yes I have a video on my channel about it too ;) )
@@HoldandModify Cool story, before caligari went bust I contacted them and asked them if they had any copies of the original caligari for Amiga. They did and actually sent it to me. Unfortunately. It could not run on my Amiga 500, but it's still a little cool bit of obscure computer history to have.
DA0: makes sense.
DF0: Disk (Floppy) 0
DA0: Disk (ADF) 0
ohhhhh, alright
I was a master with Imagine 2.0, I still miss it. Also sad that Realsoft (Real 3D) has been semi-abandoned in 2020. Lightwave is back, I have the latest version 2023
Yup Lightwave3D lives on!
the thing to remember is programs like Imagine were SLOW, because you were doing everything on the 68k. The Toaster being a Zorro device was important because it meant you were using a big box system that probably had a reasonably (or at least relatively) fast cpu.
No real dedicated 3d hardware in '94
Ive used a Toaster on a system with no CPU card upgrade. it was PAINFUL.
@@HoldandModify my first experience was Imagine on a stock a600. It wasn't really usable except in a kind of "whet your appetite" kind of way.
Always fun watching your videos Q
Thanks man! Get ya some Q time! heh.
I brought sculpt animate 4D. Was expensive
yeah but that back cover on the box showed amazing 3D renders.
Would you be able to share your FS-UAE emulator config and emulated hard drive file?
In order ti play nice with publishers, copyright holders, I don’t share files in general. A Google search does wonders though. As does the Commodore Amiga FB groups and Discord ;)
What would be a feasible experience on Linux? Would you just use FS UAE and WinUAE (via WINE) with an emulator Amiga 1000?
I would not know about that. Never did Linux. Although PiMiga is 100% Linux. Just grab that and you’ll have a super Amiga at your fingertips!
@@HoldandModify Gotcha, even under Pimiga 4, would you emulate the hardware of an Amiga 1000 in that case? Just looking to see what would be more ideal for something like Lightwave and Imagine
Amigas were amazing. So much better than Macs and PCs of the time.
Oh yeah, it's "Mr Q you" .
I think the international Amiga community still needs a further Kumbayah moment, which could happen if the world economies keep on deteriorating. It's not like we need too much diversity in the Amiga hardware/software space on the product side of things, possibly less with a little more consolidation or standardization, or trying not to look like too many linux distros. Maybe MorphOS or Aros will set the stage for some pan-solution.
Heck I say Hyperion keeps pushing with dev on original. It's getting more and more modern feeling while retaining its Amiga-ness!
@@HoldandModify ✅
how is babby formed?
LOL
iirc, imagine 3 was able to use RTG. that was before i figured out how to retarget LW 4...
Yes and Lightwave3D Modeler was able to use RTG after version 4.0 I believe. Maybe 5. Heck you'd think I'd know. My brain is mostly oatmeal.
I did fairly advanced stuff in Imagine, mostly in v4 and 5 and it was surprisingly powerful but it looked so dated compared to Lightwave, The stage editior definitely wasnt as good as doing the same thing sin Lightwave, but for a lot of the other stuff, it was more powerful than most ppl think.
imagine had many powers…impressive powers…only a few knew them all.
Video toaster addons made those serious things cgi machines 😊
absolutely !
why didnt you use the amiga to make your video thumbnail?
Because making thumbnails manually takes a Lot of work. I used to do that. I have around 200 videos. I run out of ideas. So now I use a free online Ai generator to make them. My intro video is still made by me and I was considering making a Made On Amiga version. Have to see. My day job eats up a TON of my time.
@@HoldandModify then pay an artist
@@HoldandModifylike, it makes no sense to me. you make a whole video about creating CGI on the Amiga and the idea never crosses your mind to just use the shot at 7:20 with some text as the thumbnail?
@Megatog615 Hey. That’s a good idea actually. You’re right! I continue to live up to my..most poorly produced, under produced … I do have prior videos where I use screen grabs from LW3D as thumbs. A video I did just a couple weeks ago.
@@Megatog615 If they'll take the $28 a month I make on YT to make me thumbnails, then sure!
hey
howdy
I purchased Imagine.... what a great piece of software in that a to produce 3D VFX on a dekstop was a golden opportunity. But also... what a pile of b@lls in terms us ease of use. It was such a dog to use it made me bite the bullet and get a second hand A3K and Video Toaster with Lightwave and learn that system.
Yes. It was a great “first start” type of 3D app but boy did we hope for better.
Videoscape 1.0 ftw.
was thinking about showing that next. I have no idea how to use it either.
This video didn't blow my mind.
You are STOIC.
Genlock is not CGI
I didn’t show any check lock. but Genlocks can display graphics
7:25 once you see Donald Trump's face you cant unsee it!
Staypuff? haha
@@HoldandModify i.imgur.com/USXZ3F2.jpg
oof ai art, yikes!
Look. I do 3D animation for a living. Even I embrace Ai art. It’s an evolution. Adapt, go with the flow, eching and stuff. ;)
AMIGA F O R E V E R 💾❤️
SUBBED..
GREETZ FROM BAVARIA 🥨🍻
Thank you! Please check out my channel. I have around 200 videos of Amiga stuff! :)