The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned the first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. It’s possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.
Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, three decades ago. If you ever wondered when and where some of the most iconic Blender conventions like “right-click select” or 3D cursor originated, it’s then, in the Amiga era, even before Blender was born.
They weren’t OSS in the beginning but had a strong leader (Ton) and great vision.
Preferred Moonlight3D over them, too bad they did not have strong leadership and commitment.
Remember Lightwave on Amiga…
The money I contributed towards Ton Roosendaal’s “Free Blender” campaign counts as my wisest ever software “purchase”
Caligari trueSpace began it’s life on Amiga. Sad that Microsoft ended up buying it out and axing it during the GFC.
Reflections, Aladdin4D, Cinema, Lightwave, Imagine, Caligari, POV-Ray, Sculpt3D, Real3D – they all startet on Amiga!
What is a damn shame? That these companies didn’t step up and collectively buy Amiga and keep producing / improving the hardware.
Instead we got Escom (PC maker), Gateway (PC Maker) and Amiga Inc… maker of nothing but hoarder of copyright / IP.
Sadly the post mortem life of Atari ain’t any brighter :/ JTS (hard disk manufacturer), Hasbro (game maker), Infogrames (game maker), Atari Inc (IP exploitation), Atari Casino (seriously?)
They probably preferred to simply use already existing, blossoming and much bigger ecosystem of improved hardware, PCs… Not to mention that probably they didn’t really have the capital needed; the Amiga under them would likely stagnate largely like it did.
Why do I remember POV-Ray and Sculpt3D being DOS programs? Were they ported to the PC afterwards?
Yes, a lot of the 3D programs on Amiga were ported to DOS/Windows chasing the home user/mass market.
I never knew those programs on the Amiga (I had and still have the A500, A600, A1200), just on DOS. Thanks for the pointer! On the other hand, MOD creation and player software was quite familiar to me on the Amiga, and later on the PC (ModTracker, FastTracker II, ScreamTracker, CubicPlayer wuth its “Wurfel mode” etc.). 🙂
POV-Ray started as DKBTrace on Amiga. It was OSS from the beginning so ports to all platforms appeared quickly.
Sculpt3d is iconic for the „Juggler”, that scene made it to many frontpages back in the day. It was later ported to Mac. Don’t know about PC.
Started as DKBtrace, became POVray when ported to the PC.
When those programs came out for the Amiga the companies knew the video hardware that was in *ALL* Amiga computers.
On the other hand many of the IBM/IBM compatibles still had EGA and CGA cards in them. However once VGA and Super-VGA became the norm for the machines when you bought them the sales of those programs quickly followed.
Edited 2018-03-30 04:31 UTC