| emufan |
26 February 2018 17:14 |
Traces - The beginnings of Blender
1 Attachment(s)
Traces has been rescued.
I made this request since it's not yet released and to bring it to your attention :spin
Quote:
You know that I am a fan of Blender and Amiga, what can be better than combining both passions? On October 30th, I was at the Blender Institute headquarters in Amsterdam, where the core Blender is coded and where animated films are made in the Blender Animation Studio and I had the pleasure of talking to the Blender artist Ton Roosendaal.
We talked about the old Amiga times when Ton coded Traces, or the progenitor of Blender on his Amiga 2000. A few years ago I was looking for this program and I could not find it. Now it's clear - it was soft written for the internal needs of the Dutch animation studio and was not publicly distributed, so the chances that someone from outside had it were close to zero. Only later version on Silicon Graphics was probably sold externally, but I will not give you a head. Hence, without much conviction, I mentioned to Tonomy that I would be very happy if you could find this ancient, Amiga version. What Tone reacted with enthusiasm to, that he has here his Amiga 2000 somewhere in the backroom, we will start it soon and see what is there.
Despite the search (what were there for the miracles, even some historic Silicon Graphics workstation), the Amiga was not there, probably someone borrowed it and did not give it back. I thought it was over, but Ton did not give up and found on the other computer old backups that he got from Amiga around 1997. Bingo - we found not only Traces but also its source code plus exemplary scenes and benchmarks.
After some adventures I managed to run it and it is impossible to hide that it is the progenitor of Blender. Who knows Blender will feel at home, basic shortcuts (G, R, S, rotate the view with a numeric keypad, menus under the space) are identical, there is also a 3D cursor, snapping to cursor, layers, etc. Even objects are marked with the right button the mouse! Mind-blown, for me it is just an early Blender regardless of the name. As you can see many things unique in Blender, like the right-click select mentioned above, it is derived from the Amiga. More details soon.
By the way, I used a skill that I've been refreshing for two years, that is knowledge of Sculpt 3D from 1987. Traces reads the objects from Sculpt 3D directly so I could move my scenes there that I did on Decrunch. The snake from the boing comes from my scene in Sculpt 3D (at the bottom of the page).
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