Once Windows 95 came along we started to see some really amazing design and animation packages. I remember buying Hash’s Animation Master, a 3D program that used spline patches, not polygons. It was a very different way of working, but taught me so much about character animation.

Fascinating to learn about all these apps!

I remember Corel Draw being on school computers, and often getting old versions free on magazine cover discs, but never really being able to get my head around the node drawing tools at the time! But somehow that rainbow hot air balloon always appealed to me nonetheless...

I think I found the program I was thinking of though - PaintSpa Pro and PaintSpa for Windows! It looks like it was a particular tie in with RM computers, so probably in the majority of UK schools, but not popular anywhere else? https://www.thenimbus.co.uk/nimbus-software-titles/paintspa

It certainly has the texture pallettes, and it makes sense if there was a version on RM Nimbus 186 PCs as well as a Windows version on the Win3.1 RM 386 PCs!

Zup wrote on 2024-02-24, 08:45:

honorable mentions to Kai's tools

Oh fsck yeah, Power Goo! Utterly useless from a productivity stand point, but awesome as a kid's toy.

justin1985 wrote on 2024-02-27, 09:57:

I remember Corel Draw being on school computers, and often getting old versions free on magazine cover discs, but never really being able to get my head around the node drawing tools at the time! But somehow that rainbow hot air balloon always appealed to me nonetheless...

Yeah, I had a few versions of Corel Draw, I always meant to get into it "properly" as halfway house to learning CAD, but I think what I usually used it for, was loading up vector clipart, (svg?) tweaking it, then saving it out at high res rendered to a format I could cut and paste it into paint or a WP document with.

Pixar Typestry and I still use Microsoft Image Composer 1.5 on occasion (included as a separate install on the FrontPage 98 CD).