🧵 Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Aug 2023 03:18:36 UTC No. 954435
What types of programs were used to create abstract geography landscape images like in the picture during the 2000's? I'm also thinking of the types of vast mountainous 3D-generated terrain that used to be used in the skyboxes of all types of games, but mostly source engine ones.
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Aug 2023 05:15:55 UTC No. 954443
Bryce
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Aug 2023 15:12:14 UTC No. 954475
>>954435
Bryce 3D, but someone already said that. To be more specific, Bryce used a raytracing renderer called POV-Ray that's been around since 1991. That renderer is what gives the renders that slightly uncanny yet appealing look, and it's possible to use it with other, more modern programs.
Picrel is something I made on a virtual machine with Bryce 3D 3.0.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 12:38:19 UTC No. 954577
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 16:06:12 UTC No. 954585
>>954577
How's it forced? Do I need to burn Bryce to a CD-ROM and use it on a physical vintage PC?
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 16:46:02 UTC No. 954586
>>954585
It's too clean, textures are HD and water/sky is clear. It's forced into something we hate.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 17:07:18 UTC No. 954591
>>954586
Bro I literally used the assets that came with the program. Computers were capable of making stuff like this back in 1997.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 17:13:22 UTC No. 954592
>>954586
>What is raytracing :s ?
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 17:30:00 UTC No. 954594
>>954475
>Bryce used a raytracing renderer called POV-Ray
Bryce used its own rendering engine. POV-Ray was entirely different.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 18:36:41 UTC No. 954598
>>954586
Now that I think of it, the setup I used would have been possible back in the day, but would have also been uncommon. Windows NT 4.0 with extra RAM which makes higher-quality renders more convenient to make, and True Color enabled which enables the render to achieve a higher level of visual clarity. Most of the old renders likely would have been made by hobbyists who wouldn’t have had access to technology this advanced, and a lot of the genuine renders are, of course, old, and have likely been compressed and passed around a few times, resulting in quality loss.
>>954594
I was incorrect about that. I heard a few people say that Bryce used that renderer a few times and assumed it was true without doing any research since it seemed plausible. Both of their renderers have that typical retro raytracing look, so I can see where that misconception comes from. A few modern programs do have POV-Ray addons which can be used to get similar-looking results while minimizing the need to use the renderer’s actual scene description language.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Aug 2023 19:09:37 UTC No. 954602
>>954585
its always forced when it is a recreation of an era past.
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:06:38 UTC No. 954628
>>954619
I was looking around and wondering why you mess up. Then reading here on: https://archive.org/details/eu_Macw
your VM made it HD, it did not follow rendering like normal. That's why my is normal and yours is not.
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 01:04:48 UTC No. 954640
>>954628
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but essentially what you're saying is that because I used Bryce 3D 3 instead of Bryce 2, the render I made doesn't look old enough due to the enhanced capabilities of the newer version. I suppose I could try out Bryce 2 on a Mac.
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 01:52:44 UTC No. 954643
>>954640
No your VM because it doesn't offer older rendering stuff like graphics card. The machine just took your current powerful one to mimic the colors that should become. Not really an expert on this rendering math stuff but we can all agree that it's clearly the VM fault.
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 15:53:42 UTC No. 954698
>>954643
I think the version explanation makes more sense. The article you included in your previous post stated that Bryce 3d 3 came with some extra enhancements that improved the quality of the output. A lot of the more well-known 90s renders were made before the release of Bryce 3d 3, and may not have even used Bryce, which I think explains the difference. I'm no graphics card expert either, but I do know the only thing a graphics card really does is receive instructions, calculate mathematical equations, and provide output. The quality of a program’s rendering is dependent on the program itself, the graphics card is just the muscle that gets the work done, and that’s why newer programs need better cards. If you send a graphics card two-decade-old instructions, it will give two-decade-old output. A graphics card can’t upscale textures or upgrade an old program to have better noise functions or cast more rays. I think I'll just try giving this a shot with an older version of Bryce.
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 16:12:19 UTC No. 954699
>>954437
3kliksphillip just did a video related to this - the software for the 1.6 skyboxes is Terragen and in the video he uses version 0.9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhI
Anonymous at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 19:47:37 UTC No. 954716
no reason not to use blender for doing this.
>>954577
>>954586
>>954643
nonsense
Anonymous at Fri, 11 Aug 2023 02:00:15 UTC No. 954750
Make the scene in blender and then import the file into byrce 3d
Anonymous at Fri, 11 Aug 2023 14:04:15 UTC No. 954793
>>954791
That's just JPEG artifacting. You still need a reduced palette.
Anonymous at Fri, 11 Aug 2023 14:46:17 UTC No. 954798
>>954577
>forced soul
just shut the fuck up if you don't know anything
Anonymous at Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:49:47 UTC No. 954818
>>954791
>the old redner they had is gone forever
??????
https://download.blender.org/releas
Anonymous at Fri, 11 Aug 2023 23:18:11 UTC No. 954842
>>954818
Can't run older blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/
First real open source was 2003 which defeats the 90s style and changes that aren't in Blender to this day. The very early Blender has problems which i am assuming you know very well from a youtube video from a guy trying to get it running. Lastly, if you even try to get older 2.0 versions, you'll 99% chance don't understand OpenGL and why you can't run Blender 2.0 versions.
Also no, i am not talking about the updated fix version someone made, for 2.0 blender, it doesn't match current version to be consider 2.0.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:54:15 UTC No. 954848
>>954791
>lender will never render the old fashion way,
maybe learn how to execute a creative task instead of just rendering primitive objects in different programs?
Authenticity doesn't matter when you're specifically trying to make something retro. The people back then were trying to make modern state of the art renders. You can get the same result with whatever modern program you use, if you know how to
a: use the program
b: break down the retro renders and understand what you actually find appealing about them.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 03:12:24 UTC No. 954855
>>954842
any version of windows can run opengl 1.1
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 13:15:31 UTC No. 954888
>>954848
This is why people are mocking you, you aren't making retro, you are making fake retro. There are 100s of free programs in Wayback Machine, all waiting to be downloaded and you just come in here and claim "MoRdEn ReNdER". No, rendering is different, each version is different. Stop with your nonsense, it's like saying Windows XP is windows 11, they aren't the same, it's just the same brand.
>>954855
Fail, OpenGL rendering not web version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0t
>>954877
Clearly said 2.0 and clearly stated not the fix version.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 13:29:59 UTC No. 954894
>>954888
Blender 2.79 doesn't require any fixes. You just have to set the selection mode to Occlusion Queries in the preferences otherwise selection will be slow and that's it. The Internal render hasn't changed much since the first release.
For 2.37, yes I had to put in a couple of fixes and recompile it but you don't have to use it because 2.79 includes everything that's in there except Radiosity.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 13:47:19 UTC No. 954896
Also, anything prior to 2.37 the mesh modeling tools were somewhat incomplete because Blender wasn't supposed to be a mesh modeling tool, which is why there's a video editor, a game engine and whatnot. So, there is not much point in salvaging any earlier version.
The quick rundown is as follows:
2.37 because usable
2.76 last version with support for OpenGL 1
2.79 last version with internal render
The internal render, if it's there, is essentially the same except for added features such as Subsurface Scattering and Approximate Gather, which are all disabled by default.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 15:24:51 UTC No. 954899
>>954698
>>954640
3D software of that era didn't even use GPU rendering. >>954475 is authentic, and >>954586 is probably one of those retards who blurs their emulators to shit with "CRT shaders" and thinks the real thing looked that bad.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 17:52:44 UTC No. 954908
>>954894
>Not adding Radiosity
That is where you fucked up, as you can see in the picture. And Your picture, you can never recreate the soft edges that was part of retro. I am right, you are wrong about how retro works. I told you, you have zero understanding in OpenGL, you abanded something because you do not know how it works.
>>954899
yes GPU wasn't part of the 90s yet you used GPU, you can't call that picture real retro because you can't recreate it in your young noobish mind. You don't know what retro rendering is, you only assumed retro looks like something.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:06:20 UTC No. 954910
>>954908
>soft edges that was part of retro
You don't know what you're talking about. Radiosity was incredibly expensive in CPU time back then and rarely used. Even anti-aliasing was often skipped as too expensive. Check out the old IRTC pics from the 90s:
https://web.archive.org/web/2001060
However, one technique that's no longer used is screen-space noise. Maybe that's what you remember as "softness". You see it in some of the pics here.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:08:00 UTC No. 954911
>>954908
Radiosity is what Global Illumination used to be called in the 90s.
If you need references, take a look at:
http://megapov.inetart.net/samples.
There you can see some Povray renderings with and without Radiosity.
Notice that Povray implemented a special type of Radiosity, which recently they're trying to reproduce on GPU and it's an advanced type of Screen Space Global Illumination.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:11:19 UTC No. 954912
>>954910
>screen-space noise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:16:26 UTC No. 954913
>>954912
Not what I'm talking about. E.g. look at the 1996 winner "iaclock.jpg" by Ian Armstrong. That grain in some (but not all) of the textures is very likely screen-space noise (noise added per pixel). It's obviously not dithering because some textures are perfectly clean. Screen-space noise is physically inaccurate and incompatible with animation, but people often used it back then because it was a computationally cheap way of suggesting detail that would otherwise be too expensive to model.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:18:48 UTC No. 954914
Notice the blotches on flat surfaces. Those are a feature, not a bug.
Povray automatically sets light probes based on what the camera is seeing, then interpolates in screen space.
That was revolutionary because it made Radiosity renderings possible on home computers for the first time basically.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:21:24 UTC No. 954915
>>954914
And notice how it's basically a fancy Cornell box, like all radiosity demos back then. People didn't routinely use it because even this optimized version was too slow on 90s hardware.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:23:51 UTC No. 954916
>>954913
That looks like a Povray with Radiosity rendering. If you really want that effect, Blender still has a Povray export plugin. It need work though.
I'll post my Povray renderings one day. I have a lot but I don't have them at hand.
>screen-space noise
Yes. Now that I remember it's called "crand" in Povray. It was intentional, to give a grainy effect.and it was really just rand() from libc.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:31:50 UTC No. 954917
2.5.3.2.3 Crand Graininess
https://www.povray.org/documentatio
And I remember that there was some drama at some point because crand was not temporally stable and people were bugging the Povray people telling them that their animations didn't look right.
I don't think I've ever used it but I guess at the time the desire to break the perfectly flat shading was so intense and also to help with 256 color quantization.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:35:55 UTC No. 954918
>>954913
>>954916
>>954917
Looking at the source file, only the bricks use crand here.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:38:06 UTC No. 954919
And the reason "crand" existed was that if you rendered without anti-aliasing and you were applying noise in texture space, it would result in Moire effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%
So, the Povray devs solution was to just apply some rand() in screen space. And people loved it.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:40:03 UTC No. 954920
>>954888
1. no one has been mocking me ITT
2. there's no such thing as real retro, there's a real thing from the past, and a thing from today that is emulating the thing from the past, which is called retro. It is intrinsically fake as the intentionality behind the design is different to the intentionality behind the original thing.
3. I don't claim that modern rendering isn't different, I claim that you should have control over your render and make something that looks the way you want it to. I think you should understand what particular features the old render has to make it look that way, rather than using an old program and not understanding what's different except for "it looks retro".
Not doing that is why you get issues like this
>>954475
instead of
>>954761
and why you think
>>954791
looks right when it doesn't.
Just using an old program to render primitive shapes for le y2k vaporwave look is pointless arts and craft shit, like being a zoomer who records songs off the radio onto cassette tapes for a tiktok video about the old days.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Aug 2023 20:05:04 UTC No. 954922
To be honest, the really retro Amiga-tier renderings, I've never really liked them. I was around but I thought of them more of as a curiosity than anything else.
I have no nostalgia for anything that pre-dates Ambient Occlusion.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:25:46 UTC No. 954932
>>954910
>>954911
Just because you are wrong doesn't mean you can write an entire book about it here. Let's go through all your awful examples.
1) Global Illumination is a math answer to 3D light, it is not a program, it is not a thing.
Just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_
Rendering was custom made, there was never a 100% thing like you claim. People made their own Global Illumination.
2) CPU was not expensive and had the power to render almost in any software.
One example of people brought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Pa
3) soft edges were part of 3D rendering, tv and computer display were not HD. What you claim is BS crazy facts. There was never a reason to go Full HD in the 90s.
Including TV shows like ReBoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk4
You see soft edges.
4) It's not called Space Noise, rendering machines and software including current day use this to fill in without complex math. This is what everyone calls noise, there has never been a person that has call it "Space noise". You see it in the 90s because of the poor PC, not because of your lame excuses. You don't see ReBoot with noise now do you, and it has many episodes.
5) POVRay was a library, as state in Wikipedia and their own website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POV-R
>some specialized for POV-Ray, others supporting import and export of its data structures, including the free and open-source 3D creation suite Blender
What you said does not work with facts, you just made it up BS stuff again.
6) Again trying to BS your way out of your BS you made. Retro is Retro, yes you are lying, yes you made it fake. Once again you fail to understand rendering and once again you fail to understand why things worked in certain ways.
Rendering today is not like Rendering in the 90s. The math is not the same and yet you claim it is, stop it. It will never be the same, no modern rendering software can recreate it. You have no proof of it.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:30:56 UTC No. 954933
>>954920
>>954922
>>954926
Retro 3d artist had zero understanding of how 3D spaced has worked. Your dumb statement of
>pointless arts and craft shit
Is an excuse of not understanding 3D arts.
Also, that's not an Amiga render, nothing close to youtube videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWn
Still failing at making a simple render into my or do you fail to use Photoshop correctly. Just Stop.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 01:00:42 UTC No. 954935
Man, all this silly fighting over a simple render. I made that render because I like dicking around with old software. I’ve got old VMs with a bunch of old programs and games on them because I think it’s interesting. I stopped arguing like 2 days ago and people are still going at it and making edits to my render. What’s funny is that it seems like there’s at least 3 of you arguing amongst each other with each person thinking the other two are the same guy. Just a typical day on /3/ I suppose. Is my render really that special to you guys?
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 02:15:17 UTC No. 954940
>>954932
>>954933
No.
>>954935
You did what?
You don't understand. You touched Retro. Retro is important.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 02:31:08 UTC No. 954941
>>954933
>Retro 3d artist had zero understanding of how 3D spaced has worked
and how the fuck do you know that, child?
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 06:16:23 UTC No. 954951
>>954932
>There was never a reason to go Full HD in the 90s
I had a 1600x1200 monitor in the 90s. Printed images were even higher resolution.
>not called Space Noise
You're the first one ITT to call it that.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:54:06 UTC No. 954994
>>954951
No you didn't you fag, your monitor was 640x480
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 09:30:53 UTC No. 954995
>>954994
Actually it seems I bought the 1600x1200 monitor in late 2000 or early 2001. Probably had 1280x960 before that. But rich people had 1600x1200 in the 90s.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 13:16:01 UTC No. 955011
>>954941
The same logic can be apply to gen z moving to another platform besides twitter, they do not understand the concept of social media.
When 3D was starting, it was very simple art, everything was simple.
This how games looked like in 3D way back in 1980.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGf
You can not blame them for suddenly realizing they can do more than just make art and make player do simple actions.
>>954951
No one had 1600x1200 monitor, actually let me see the biggest monitor invented in the 90s in Wikipedia:
>1988 35'' misubishi tv was the biggest at the time.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/198
This is the closes i can find on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkW
SO there was never such thing as "1600x1200 monitor" in the 90s or as TV screens. You are lying.
This is why i knew you made up such BS claims, you never even try to look at Wikipedia to confirm facts. Everything you said does not match retro and we now know you are lying.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 14:19:50 UTC No. 955016
>>955011
>No one had 1600x1200 monitor
Here's the previous model (only 85Hz at full resolution, not 100Hz like mine was) to the one I had:
1999 release, 1600x1200 (true non-interlaced)
https://www.anandtech.com/show/407
And if you were rich enough to afford a NeXT workstation (like many people making the 3D renderings discussed in this thread), you could get full HD 1920x1080 (also non-interlaced) back in 1995 (as famously used by John Carmack to program Quake):
https://web.archive.org/web/2013060
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 16:41:56 UTC No. 955026
>>955016
The tv was released in November of 1999, you can’t call it a 90s TV when it’s too close to the new millennium.
You still have not proven anything, common people won’t buy these products. The tech exists but were never often used.
Stop with your ignorance and excuses. You are wrong about everything in retro. You don’t know how lucky we are to make any 3D art. You just have nothing to show for /3/ your words from the other post shows it.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 17:13:09 UTC No. 955028
>>955026
>common people won’t buy these products
Common people weren't making 3D renderings. 1995 was not "close to the new millennium". High resolution was available to those who could afford it.
1600x1024 LCD from 1998:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 17:29:38 UTC No. 955029
>>955026
The fact that you put random youtube links in your posts doesn't help your argument.
However, Retro is all about passion and you have a lot of passion, so even though you're no making any sense to me, you must be right.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 20:02:44 UTC No. 955037
>>955028
>52k units sold
Still does not proved your point. The Steam Deck sold more than that, other vaperware junk sold more. Once again you are trying to get your falsehoods to become reality.
The YouTube videos are examples of early retro, that’s it. You are by far the worst person in /3/, how dare you just come here, makeup shit. Not once did you care about 3D, not even looking at the cool retro videos. Just get out, you’re no longer welcome here.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 21:28:57 UTC No. 955040
>>955037
Total sales are irrelevant. 3D artists were not mainstream. The undeniable fact is that HD displays existed in the 90s. It's also undeniable fact that people rendered high resolution 3D CG for printed works (magazines, posters, etc.).
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Aug 2023 22:26:45 UTC No. 955041
I wonder how movies like this were made back in 1995 with 600x480 monitors. It must have been those magic graphics cards upscaling the resolution as technology improved. It's a real shame we don't have that technology anymore, now we have to use AI for stuff like that and sometimes the results look weird.
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:10:44 UTC No. 955043
>>955040
>>955041
It's called a Film Projector, only a child like you does not know things like this it seems.
https://youtu.be/59ac4B7_3Xg?t=9
This is how Large printable media is made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRN
The Toy Story
>(The original Toy Story's resolution was rendered at 1536 x 922, using a "render farm" of 117 Sun Microsystems. RES is the abbreviation of resolution.)
https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Pizza
So, yes using a farming render can do such thing, there was no such thing as "graphics cards". This was Pixar, a small company at the time, not Disney Pixar.
>It was known as the Graphics Group before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986
THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING.
I WANT YOU OUT OF /3/ NOW.
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:21:27 UTC No. 955073
>>955043
>there was no such thing as "graphics cards"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:22:16 UTC No. 955080
>>955043
Let me guess. You come from Reddit.
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Aug 2023 18:44:35 UTC No. 955351
>>955073
it's actually shaped like a card
and you can interchange them like a deck
you've never used a computer.