I take it you're looking for enthusiasts of shiny realtime toruses and raytraced spheres on checkerboards?

leileilol wrote:

I take it you're looking for enthusiasts of shiny realtime toruses and raytraced spheres on checkerboards?

🤣. Kinda sorta but I'm open to expanding that to include 3D game dev stuff. I have zero experience with that but it never hurts to learn something new. I'm not sure if I should include 2D stuff as well because then we've got all the early 2D animation stuff that was done with Deluxe Paint and the like. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I love Deluxe Paint but it is not what immediately leaps to mind when I think of CG, although technically it qualifies. I don't want to get too far off scope though, so mainly 3D related stuff but possibly image processing in general as well. Like, I'm mainly interested in 3D but I'd love to learn more about the other stuff too, or see what other people are doing hobby-wise.

As you say I don't see the vogons userbase being an optimal platform for this, it's generally about building pcs and gaming with emulators. But you might set up a flypaper outlet for people to contribute and discuss their new retro 3d renderings made with old software or methods and have a community around that.

I don't know about that. Old PCs still have a use for game asset profiling and reality checking.

Well maybe this was a bad idea but if anyone is interested or thinks my idea has merit feel free to PM me.

I'm interested in this! I'm not particularly good at it, but I've messed around with DOS 3D Studio, Blender, POV-Ray, and a few others. Never got very far with any of them but it's something I've been wanting to pick back up for ages. Please do post here. 😀

Also "retro 3d": can stretch a wide variety of styles....
last time I was researching 3d techniques was trying to imitate the model topology (or more lack of) in Dead or Alive 2. So much cylinder and uv sphering and subtle highlighting with a pass of vertex specular...

I like this Idea, but at the same time I'm not too sure there is enough of an audience on Vogons (maybe not so many users of old CGI). Maybe more VCF?

Nekochan has a popular (ish) section about old renderers and computer graphics. Only for SGI/Irix though (so rather expensive high end suites Prisms, Houdini, 3Dgig, Renderman etc... not so much POVray or Truespace etc 😢).

Are you talking about tools used to model 3d content for games or old computer animations and such?
Or about how such tools were developed?
I don't know too much about the former, since I've always been a graphics developer, not an artist. But I know a few things about the latter, since I've been involved in graphics programming since the late 90s, so I know my share of software rendering, raytracing, exporting geometry from 3dsmax, and importing it into your own custom engines and such.

If you ask me, those were the days... the 80s and 90s, when there was little or no hardware support, and you had to be very clever to get smooth, interactive 3d on the computer screen of your average PC or game console.
Lots of clever tricks and cheats involved. These days a lot of stuff can just be coded physically correct with full-blown floating-point processing and elaborate lighting equations and whatnot, and the sheer horsepower of the GPU will make it run in realtime anyway.
To me that is not that interesting, since most of the 'correct' physics and equations had already been developed in the 70s and 80s. They had already been implemented in offline-renderers, and papers had been published, books had been written on the topic etc. We just couldn't remotely run that stuff in realtime, so we had to cheat a lot.
A lot of modern graphics processing is just running those 70s and 80s algorithms in realtime. You no longer have to be clever for a lot of stuff, you just do it by-the-book, with brute force.

There's some possibly appropriate subforums at Beyond3D.com, and an oldskool userbase...

Scali wrote:

Are you talking about tools used to model 3d content for games or old computer animations and such? Or about how such tools were […]
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Are you talking about tools used to model 3d content for games or old computer animations and such?
Or about how such tools were developed?
I don't know too much about the former, since I've always been a graphics developer, not an artist. But I know a few things about the latter, since I've been involved in graphics programming since the late 90s, so I know my share of software rendering, raytracing, exporting geometry from 3dsmax, and importing it into your own custom engines and such.

If you ask me, those were the days... the 80s and 90s, when there was little or no hardware support, and you had to be very clever to get smooth, interactive 3d on the computer screen of your average PC or game console.
Lots of clever tricks and cheats involved. These days a lot of stuff can just be coded physically correct with full-blown floating-point processing and elaborate lighting equations and whatnot, and the sheer horsepower of the GPU will make it run in realtime anyway.
To me that is not that interesting, since most of the 'correct' physics and equations had already been developed in the 70s and 80s. They had already been implemented in offline-renderers, and papers had been published, books had been written on the topic etc. We just couldn't remotely run that stuff in realtime, so we had to cheat a lot.
A lot of modern graphics processing is just running those 70s and 80s algorithms in realtime. You no longer have to be clever for a lot of stuff, you just do it by-the-book, with brute force.

I had been thinking mainly about using old tools on old systems, like 3DS on 386/486 systems or Povray/Polyray. I'm more an artist myself. However, I'm also interested in the programming side and would love to learn enough to be able to write my own raytracer, but that may be a bit much to take on at this point. I was thinking of keeping it PC only as SGI systems are harder to come by, and the software licensing issues for them are problematic as well. Maybe check over at VCfed and see if there is a better spot for it there.

snorg wrote:

I'm also interested in the programming side and would love to learn enough to be able to write my own raytracer, but that may be a bit much to take on at this point.

To oldskool raytrace, if you know C... get "Adventures in Raytracing/Alfonso Hermida" and "Photorealism and raytracing in C/Chris Watkins" for some 'old' ways 😀

Try path tracing instead, it's the same thing but better. I wrote one for the game boy advance and ported it to dos, nothing to it. Very slow though.

vvbee wrote:

Try path tracing instead, it's the same thing but better. I wrote one for the game boy advance and ported it to dos, nothing to it. Very slow though.

Path tracing is new though, not retro. Majority of path tracers all look the same. Retro imo means no path tracing, no monte carlo... forward tracing only 🤣

But if you want to do path tracing the definitive reference is "Physically based rendering: from theory to implementation/Matt Pharr".

spiroyster wrote:

"Photorealism and raytracing in C/Chris Watkins" for some 'old' ways 😀

Holy crap, I have that book & completely forgot about it. I should dig it out.

spiroyster wrote:

Path tracing is new though, not retro. Majority of path tracers all look the same. Retro imo means no path tracing, no monte carlo... forward tracing only 🤣

It's from the 80s though, and you can even look through old papers for a fix of retro path tracing.

This counts, right?

leileilol wrote:

This counts, right?

Yes, I'd say that qualifies.

vvbee wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

Path tracing is new though, not retro. Majority of path tracers all look the same. Retro imo means no path tracing, no monte carlo... forward tracing only 🤣

It's from the 80s though, and you can even look through old papers for a fix of retro path tracing.

The technique is old (as I said, pretty much everything was invented in the 70s and 80s), but it was not applied as a rendering technique on PCs and home computers in the 80s/90s.