4 ms·

Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on the way in, but regardless these SGI boxe

by npunt 5y ago

Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on the way in, but regardless these SGI boxes were just so lustworthy - the style, the performance, the otherness and clear superiority in all dimensions to my lowly hacked together PC. I was just a teen getting into 3D animation & game design in 1998, and since I couldn't ask my parents to mortgage the house to buy one, I wound up picking up a workstation card instead - a footlong Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 with 32mb ram and four 3dlabs chips - for a much more reasonable $750 used. I think about a year and a half before these went for $4k new, that was the pace of 3d innovation at the time. It suited me really well to learn Softimage 3D on until I got a job at Pandemic Studios as an artist/designer. Even this beast of a workstation card couldn't run Quake without errors though, there was still a separation of functionality between consumer 3D accelerators like 3dfx and the $1k+ workstation ones.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
How did you find out about 3D animation and the hardware used for it way back when? Were there any particular forums you visited or magazines you subscribed to?
- npunt 5y ago
  I was part of the Total Annihilation community and a local LAN party scene with the Gamespy folks in 97-99, so got to meet some industry folks that way and learn what was going on. The big in that I got was going to a local 3d animation meetup in 98 where I met two artists that would become the art leads at Pandemic Studios when it were founded a few months later. I don't remember the exact sources, I just hustled a lot during those times because I wanted to get in the industry and was bored of high school, and I was lucky to be near the action in LA. I eventually took a Softimage 3D animation course in summer 98 and I needed a computer that could handle it! I was only 16-17 at the time and looking back I think I had a pretty wild experience as a teenage game designer during a really cool time in the industry. Might write about it one day.

by npunt 5y ago

Dracophoenix 5y ago

How did you find out about 3D animation and the hardware used for it way back when? Were there any particular forums you visited or magazines you subscribed to?

npunt 5y ago
I was part of the Total Annihilation community and a local LAN party scene with the Gamespy folks in 97-99, so got to meet some industry folks that way and learn what was going on. The big in that I got was going to a local 3d animation meetup in 98 where I met two artists that would become the art leads at Pandemic Studios when it were founded a few months later. I don't remember the exact sources, I just hustled a lot during those times because I wanted to get in the industry and was bored of high school, and I was lucky to be near the action in LA. I eventually took a Softimage 3D animation course in summer 98 and I needed a computer that could handle it! I was only 16-17 at the time and looking back I think I had a pretty wild experience as a teenage game designer during a really cool time in the industry. Might write about it one day.