Back in the days, the Juggler was an amazing feat of computer animation. Using ray-tracing, Eric Graham created it on his Amiga in Sculpt 3D. I still remember having my mind blown when I first saw this. Nowadays, you can re-create it in Blender in real-time :)
Youpi writes:
OSL is a very powerful and high level shading language. It’ near possible to do anything with it, even the most unexpected shaders!
As I was working on the FOSPHORE project, I was thinking “… spheres, spheres, spheres, just like the very first 3D on personal computers… “ and Wosh! I rushed back in time, in 1986, to Eric Graham’s Juggler.
It was a true milestone in Computer Graphic! If we are using 3D software on our PC now, it’s also because, one day, a small Juggler animation told us “it’s possible to do it without Mainframe Computer, with the computer on your desktop!”.
So, here is my OSL version of the Juggler!
I try to do it as close as possible to the 1986 rendering. So I wrote a true Minimalist Ray Tracer inside the OSL shader.
This shader is near Real-Time. And you can play with it inside Blender! (The first Juggler was more than one hour rendering time on Amiga computer in 1986, in 320x200 pixels).
2 Comments
Great, unforgettable Juggler.
I remember it on my Amiga 1000...
Great idea Francois.
Bye.
B.
excellent work! How wonderful memories, this great demo Juggler so hypnotic led me to Sculpt 3D, Imagine, Real3d,Truespace, Pov, Lightwave and now Blender :-)