Pixar had released it's first film in 1985 called "Red's Dream". This was the type of 3D modeling and animating that I wanted to do. I was hopeful when a number of 3D software programs began appearing in late 1986 and 1987, however, only one supported color rendering at the time. Dimensions was just a rendering engine and had no modeling capability. You drew 2D polygons and then put text near them to tell each object how to model and apply a texture to the object. A 2d circle could become a sphere and you could extrude 2d shapes.
Pro3D was a grayscale solid modeler, it supported extrusions, lathe tool, and a few other tools for moving, rotating and resizing, in addition to the boolean tools for subtraction, cutting and merging. Mac3D was another program similar to Pro3D but a surface modeler. It featured a remarkable number of primities and tools but also never made the transition to color. Nothing offering animation capabilities at this point, except the 2D Videoworks by Macromind. If I could merge all the capabilities of all the 3D apps plus the animation features of Videoworks, then we'd be talking about a useful program. |
