3D graphics
I was astounded when I first witness 3D rendered animations and learned about term “raytracing”, around 1989. Two years after I got my first Amiga. I made these images on my Amiga 4000 in the 90’s using a program called Real3D by Realsoft. Realsoft was a small company in Finland driven by two brothers. It was one of the most advanced 3D programs that could run on a home computer back then, the learning curve was a bit to steep though.
Real3D had ground breaking features such as cubic b-splines, simulations based on Newton’s laws of motion, morphing based animation techniques and phenomenal rendered output. Version 2 did not subdivide B-splines to polygons prior rendering but used an advanced approach where surfaces got subdivided on the fly during rendering. It also took full advantage of the multi-tasking abilities of the Amiga – allowing the user to continue editing a scene on another window while rendering. For animations, a collision detection system did not use bounding boxes but used the true shape of objects. Real3D was the first software being able to detect and solve exact collisions between all supported geometries, such as hyperboloids and cubic B-spline surfaces.
Real3D graphics from 2020
Download IFF HAM8 animation (zip)
