🧵 1990s CGI Thread!

Anonymous at Wed, 12 Jan 2022 20:48:57 UTC No. 875495

ITT: 1990s CGI with optional commentary.

This image was from the computer game The 7th Guest, the sample image itself also included on World Creation Toolkit CD-ROM for Autodesk 3D Studio R3 for MS-DOS.

Look at that lens flare; the 1990s had no shortage of excessive use of lens flare in its 3D imagery (and personally, I kind of miss that -- the ubiquity of conspicuous lens flare in 3D graphics waned around the same time "Orchestra Hit" sample stopped being used in pop music). To achieve lens flare (and other advanced effects) in 3D Studio at the time, required the artist to spend over $1,000 USD (in early-199x dollars; price not adjusted for 2022 equivalent amount) to buy a separate "IPAS plugin" made by a third party (although Lens Flare, to my memory, was a Yost Group one, which would technically make it count as a first-party plugin).

As for the god-rays emanating from the stained glass? Not done by raytracing nor a shader, but it was a 3D model! It was a trick done with geometry and materials; the outline of the windows was taken and then extruded outward and downward. Then a highly-transparent material was created that used the same texture as the stained glass window itself did, and then that material was given a tiny amount of glow; the 3D mesh it was applied to then had an intentionally-imperfect texture projection applied to it to make it look like pieces of the light hitting dust in mid-air.

The fire on the torches was a simple animated video of a fire; the quads were set to always face the camera via billboarding (I don't remember 3D Studio supporting automatic billboarding, so it's likely the animators had to manually rotate the quads to always face the camera during the game's flythrough animations).