
Blender’s Prehistory – Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991) - erickhill
http://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/
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electricslpnsld
> Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small,
> three decades ago.

Which of the major shops are using Blender?

Edit: This question isn't a dig against Blender, y'all, I'm genuinely
interested in where Blender is seeing industrial use, as the article doesn't
touch on this!

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mathnode
Before they went bust, some folks at Rhythm 'N Hues publicly talked about
using it. It has pockets of usage at ILM, there are lots of software pockets
though in these big design firms. Not all bitmap and vector tools are Adobe.

Unreal Engine has been pushing Blender a lot too, and attracted hires from
ILM, they mentioned this a lot in their video podcast.

A lot of the time you only know a company is using something like Houdini
because they pay for the promotion or give the customer a big license
discount.

"Here at X we used Y for Z."

~~~
electricslpnsld
> It has pockets of usage at ILM

Very cool! Do you know if they are using Blender for modeling, or otherwise? I
hear ILM is mostly prman on the rendering side, these days.

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Arelius
The primary modellers at ILM are Zeno, their internal tool, then Maya and then
Modo, but especially in some departments, it's a whatever gets the job done
mentality. I do not however know what usage Blender gets internally at ILM

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dustinmoorenet
The history of Bender was pretty well explained in a long interview with Ton
Roosendaal by Andrew Price of Blender Guru.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg)

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abdias
Good times! I never came across Tracer or Sculpt 3D, but I did start out with
Real 3D [1] which actually was created in 1983 for the CBM64 and later came to
the Amiga in 1990.

About the same time Lightwave 3D [2] came out which first was bound to
Newtek's famous VideoToaster but of course someone found a way to emulate the
hardware so "everybody" could use it :) even for us who needed PAL (disk
swapping was a thing back in those days).

I recon that Blender is a very capable 3D software as well (and as a NLE video
editor (!)). I never got around to properly use as I was a customer with
Newtek but I kind of giving up on Newtek so I might dig into the massive
information and tutorials out there for Blender.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realsoft_3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realsoft_3D)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D)

~~~
mbrookes
LightWave 3D, Cinema 4D, Realsoft 3D, Aladdin4d, Amiga Reflections, Sculpt 3D,
Dkbtrace, Imagine, Turbosilver, Real3D.

On a home computer. In the 80's to early 90's. The future is where you have
been.

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agumonkey
while we're going back, youtube has some video of 3D Studio DOS from 88
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6BIIL1CY9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6BIIL1CY9g)

~~~
mbrookes
Let's go back a bit further - MIT Lincoln Labs, 1963:
[https://youtu.be/t3ZsiBMnGSg?t=190](https://youtu.be/t3ZsiBMnGSg?t=190)

~~~
agumonkey
Lot more people have seen Sutherland than this little 3D Studio demo though :)

Still worth seeing

