Famous Amiga uses

[cecilia]

Tomas wrote:

IIRC Amigas with Lightwave were only used for the pilot episode of B5.

Afaik it was also partially used during rest of season 1 as well, while i think the pilot was pretty much entirelly rendered on amigas.

not only was an Amiga farm used for rendering in the first season, the effects won an Emmy!

[cecilia]

guru-666 wrote:
well lot's of PC where used also,  All I know is a VFX sup I worked for had (has) a toaster card on his desk that he pulled from amblins farm, man those toasters there big lightwave dongles.  According to him the PC was a god send as the amigas where hard to manage, esp the farms.  The amiga where replaced ASAP.

of course. A similar situation happened in the effects house I worked at also.

the point is that the techniques were developed using Amigas First. People got their start - the businesses got their start using Amigas. And, generally, the main reason Amiga computers had to be replaced was because the company (commodore) wasn't their to support new HW, etc.

and in effects, the speed of rendering is a matter of competition. you lose money if you take too long to render your footage.

I still recall when Digital Domain was making tests for Titanic and it took an hour to render ONE frame. (and that wasn't on amigas).

However, the beginings were based on Amiga. the learning, the training, the foundation (no pun intended) of the work. Amiga is more than just HW. It's how you think about solving a problem. I owe a great deal to my Amiga roots.

[cecilia]

Interview with Ron Thornton

talking about Babylon 5 and mentioning using Amigas.

[cecilia]

guru-666 wrote:
@cecilia

I totaly agree, I know I got my start on the amiga.  BTW it would apper that an hour per frame is actualy quite fast.  On Monster House it took us 1 day per frame until we got things tuned, and then still to raytrace at the stuff took hours per frame.  Amiga was huge but SGI also had some very interesting stuff going on.  BTW where are you now?

the Digital Domain guy talking about this (at a Lightwave meeting) was "pleased" although he realized that it may have been fast for the time, it was still too slow.

I am in NY at the moment.



here's something I forgot: my friend Tim Wilson is the creator of "Humanoid", the first really useful and most natural looking model of the human body. Some years ago a person working on the (Jay Leno) Tonight Show using a Toaster made a graphic with the Humanoid model and it was broadcast on that show.

[cecilia]

jkirk wrote:
can't find anything to back this up but i think this  movie used amigas in production as well.

i'm not getting this page - what is the name of the film so I can do a search

[cecilia]

jkirk wrote:
Dragonworld 1994

it was a looow budget movie with decent special effects. very campy but i liked it.

just checked the crew list and found the name of my friend and colleague Michael F. Hoover.

He obviously was doing this before we did "From the Earth to the Moon", but more importantly before we did "Hologram Man".

"Hologram Man" was done entirely on Amigas. AT AI Effects it was three Amigas, A 2000, a 3000, and a 4000.
I'm not sure what Mike was using - he always does his work in his studio at his home. He certainly started out using Amigas with Lightwave. By the time we did "From the Earth to the Moon" we rendered using PC's but we used the one Amiga left in the studio (the 4000) to put together LW frames (that were rendered on the PC's) into DCTV anims. And those were saved on VHS tape. These are known as "Animatics". (Animated storyboards) And they helped the director/editor/and others figure out the best moves for the capsule.

I can certainly ask Mike what he did for Dragonworld 1994.

No exageration here: I have always found Mike to be one of THE most talented people I ever worked with. Not to mention a snappy dresser and a gentleman.