From 1992 to 1995, I wrote a few books about image synthesis in general, and the first versions of Autodesk 3D Studio in particular (before it became the 3DS Max nuclear power plant we all know today). The books were published in french by Dunod and International Thomson Publishing. These images and animations are from this period, so don't laugh ! It was a time when simple raytraced scenes could take hours to render... The first serie is from 1990-92. The image quality is not excellent because these are scans from the book (unfortunately I lost the original files).
The cover of the book : 40000 polygons, 1 h 47 mn in 1536 x 2048, with 3D Studio v1, on a PC 486-50 Mhz, 32 MB.
In 1994, the book on 3DS v3 was a good occasion to explore animation on PC. The following stills are from this book.
The cover of the book : 36000 polygons, 23 mn 54s render with raytrace shadows in 450 x 600, on a Pentium 66 MHz.
In 1995, the book on 3D Studio v4 was published. It was the last version of 3DS for Ms-Dos, before the first 3DS Max.
The cover of the book. Mmh... Nice globe !
Well, it was a real one, not rendered :)
Here is a medley of a few animations I did for these books. They were in FLI (Autodesk animator) VGA format, 320 x 200 with a frame rate of 15 fps. I managed to convert them to 320 x 240 x 25 fps and mix them with Magix Video Deluxe 2006 Plus.
These animations use a fixed 256-color palette (8-bit coding).
3DS Oldies.avi
(anim - PC)
25 MB XviD
I kept the best for the end :) These two images on the right were rendered in 1987 on the Amiga, with Sculpt 3D : the first humanly usable program able to do raytracing on a micro-computer.
I don't even want to remember the render time on a 68000 CPU ! These were good times...
