Re:Ask HN: What software was used to make 90s cutscenes?
by antihero on Monday January 09, 2023 @07:08AM
(#34309429)
What about Lightwave? Wasn’t Babylon 5 done with that?
Re:Ask HN: What software was used to make 90s cutscenes?
by flohofwoe on Monday January 09, 2023 @07:12AM
(#34309459)
Yeah, as far as I know the Amiga was popular for US TV productions, probably because of the Video Toaster heritage, and the low resolution of TV allowed to render out lower resolution video which didn't require powerful SGI render farms. I don't think Lightwave was ever popular in the PC game development scene (I remember one small Berlin game studio though which sticked with Lightwave for a fairly long time because they had built a pretty extensive workflow around it).
Re:Ask HN: What software was used to make 90s cutscenes?
by mixtur2021 on Monday January 09, 2023 @10:24AM
(#34311307)
My understanding is that Maya wasn't a total rewrite, it bolted together parts of Power Animator and Wavefront together with a new architecture.
Re:Ask HN: What software was used to make 90s cutscenes?
by djmips on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @01:11AM
(#34321137)
Wavefront's big product AFAIK was called Kinemation. I used it circa 1994 to pre-render sprites using motion captured animations that were captured at a very early studio called BioVision. The game was for the Mega Drive / Genesis. We may have been the first game to do motion capture in this manner (not rotoscoped). IDK?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinemation
BVH format is still floating around. The Biovision motion capture format. I am quite surprised!
As far as I remember, 3DSMax was still an outlier throughout the 90's, but it quickly gained popularity in the PC game development scene because it also ran on PC and didn't require a separate investment in SGI workstations or beefed up Amigas (and I guess the rampant software pirating on PC in the 90's also played a role to make 3DSMax popular).