Real 3D - Amiga raytracing

[Amiten]

I make a little animation of 2 planets rotating with texture back in the times with Real 3D 1.X in my Amiga 600 HD with 2MB ram and 68000 I cant remember How long Takes to do the render but some days I think

And I know this animation are somewhere in some HD.

Regards

[klx300r]

great stuff on Real3D Back int he day I only messed around with Lightwave on my miggy and thought that Real3D couldn't produce images like these back then

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

I always thought of Real 3D as being technically superior to everything else available, but with a very steep learning curve, making it a tool for experts only.

Yep, from memory I remember it being touted as the only 3D package that used actual mathematical curves, rather than breaking it up into many polygons as all other packages did (and as many still do). This gave it the ability to render 100% perfect glass lenses, but you really paid for that in terms of render time.

I remember using Real3D (1.4 I think? Can't remember what version now, but it was on a magazine cover disk at one stage) to do renders of my engineering project in school. When printed on a laser printer it looked like a poor-quality photo rather than a render. It took some convincing to get the teacher to believe me :-)

That version anyway had both FPU and non-FPU versions. I ran it reasonably well on a stock A1200 with just a hard drive.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Flash951

I also think that Lightwave used a processor on the Video Toaster in addition when rendering...
..
.

is this true? can someone confirm this? I took my toaster out of my A4000 due to heat issues since the bloody video slot on the daughterboard was literally right on top of the MB...anyhow my understanding back then was the Toaster was merely a very expensive dongle for Lightwave and nothing more.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by klx300r

is this true? can someone confirm this? I took my toaster out of my A4000 due to heat issues since the bloody video slot on the daughterboard was literally right on top of the MB...anyhow my understanding back then was the Toaster was merely a very expensive dongle for Lightwave and nothing more.

Sounds unlikely to me.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Flash951

I also think that Lightwave used a processor on the Video Toaster in addition when rendering...

Originally Posted by klx300r

is this true? can someone confirm this? I took my toaster out of my A4000 due to heat issues since the bloody video slot on the daughterboard was literally right on top of the MB...anyhow my understanding back then was the Toaster was merely a very expensive dongle for Lightwave and nothing more.

Sorry for drifting OT but, just for the record.. regarding the Toaster...

There were several versions of the Toaster.. The Original for the A2000, then the Toaster 4000 then, Toaster "Flyer" and finally (for the Amiga) the Toaster "Screamer" add-on. (Not a card but basically a parallel system)
Before the Screamer, all rendering was done on Amiga CPUs. The Screamer used a pile of MIPS R4400 CPUs for rendering though.. Not sure how common that thing was though..

And the whole Toaster "thing" was not that big in PAL territory.. It played well with NTSC, but PAL... not so much.. (It needed a "hack" to work at all.. (Passport 4000 from Prime Image)) So that probably limited its reach a bit too..

[Pyromania]

Lightwave 3D was later sold stand alone for Amiga, no Toaster required. I think it was around 1994.

[Pyromania]

What's the status of Real 3D for any platform today?

[wawa]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Lightwave 3D was later sold stand alone for Amiga, no Toaster required. I think it was around 1994.

i dont think there might be anything toaster specific in lightwave other than support for calculating some ntsc wipes. far too complicated to replace otherwise.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

What's the status of Real 3D for any platform today?

last ive heard of them, they have delivered some follow being called realsoft. and then just lately they considered to make it available for aros.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by Flash951

I also think that Lightwave used a processor on the Video Toaster in addition when rendering. It was possible to render in network, using many Amiga's.

I looked this up, apparently not quite right. The Flyer had encoding hardware to rapidly compress 24 bit images onto a hard drive array complete with compressed 16 bit audio. (VTASC proprietary Newtek format).

Lightwave did indeed have a farm capability for multiple machines generating images simultaneously for the same scene.

But I haven't found any evidence that Lightwave gained any benefit from hardware on the Toaster as such for rendering.

I'll keep looking though.

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Sorry for drifting OT but, just for the record.. regarding the Toaster...

There were several versions of the Toaster.. The Original for the A2000, then the Toaster 4000 then, Toaster "Flyer" and finally (for the Amiga) the Toaster "Screamer" add-on. (Not a card but basically a parallel system)
Before the Screamer, all rendering was done on Amiga CPUs. The Screamer used a pile of MIPS R4400 CPUs for rendering though.. Not sure how common that thing was though..

And the whole Toaster "thing" was not that big in PAL territory.. It played well with NTSC, but PAL... not so much.. (It needed a "hack" to work at all.. (Passport 4000 from Prime Image)) So that probably limited its reach a bit too..

Well, that didn't take long to find. Screamer was the Toaster with the render boost. Thanks.

[Pyromania]

@Pat the Cat

You are right. Lightwave 3D Amiga version did not use the Video Toaster hardware for rendering. Early versions of LW3D required the Toaster as a form of copy protection that Lightwave looked for and would not run without. LW3D did support rendering directly to the Video Toasters Framebuffers at 24bit, 16.8 million colors. But that was only for display, rendering was not faster. Also, on the Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster 4000 a few seconds of LW3D animation could be played back in realtime from RAM. Once it had already been rendered. This worked even without a Flyer card.

[jkdsteve]

I ran 1.4? in my 500 with 4MB RAM expansion back in the day, got used to 2-3 hour render times. I thought it had the best refraction / reflection modeling of the software back in the day and the boolean modeling was great