Found the very first #3D Modeling program I ever used circa 1992, "3D-Edit."
It came with a bunch of shareware on a 105MB hard disk I got from my parents that year. The program itself was released in 1986.
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/3d-edit
#ClassicMac #ClassicMacintosh #RetroComputing #3dGraphics #Modeler
When I used it on my Mac SE, I created a one-sided very crude facsimile of a quarter, and then slowly rotated it while taking screenshots, and then created a #HyperCard stack to animate it. ;)
My parents were over the moon for my little hack. XD
Heh, found out the data format for the 3d files is plain text*, if anyone feels like taking a crack at it. XD
https://rldane.space/TAURI
https://rldane.space/Walker
(The files will disappear the next time I do a blog push, no sooner than ~20 hours from now, and maybe as distant as a couple days away)
*classic mac "\r" EOLs, instead of "\n", just a simple tr "\r" "\n" < file away from conversion
Getting it converted to something that I could view in something like an STL viewer, a lightweight 3d viewer, or even just Blender would be the shiz.
Way outside of my field of expertise 😆
@rl_dane @slembcke @TerryHancock
...this looks like just a set of X Y and Zed per line
super easy to parse into a set of coordinates
would probably need to know the desired scale to produce a proper STL but it should be easy enough
@rl_dane @slembcke @TerryHancock
yeah I'm fairly sure from skimming that it's just a set of coordinates, then an end-of-coordinates marker, then a set of vertices specifying which sets of coordinates connect to each other, then an end-of-vertices marker
Duuuude, that would be amazing as an STL file.
Any best stab at the scale is fine.
@rl_dane @pixx @TerryHancock Oh, that was actually pretty easy... Add "v" to the vertex lines, and replace the count in the face lines with "f" and it's a valid(ish?) obj file. Works in some random progam I found (Exhibit), but PrusaSlicer threw a vague error. http://files.slembcke.net/temp/rldane-models.tgz
(edit: Hah! The guy next to me at the meetup (who is also Scott) was curious. He spent years in the early CG days hand editing OBJ files due to lack of tooling. He knew a lot of the Wavefront folks back in the day)
Sick!!! Awesome work, thank you!!! XD
@mirabilos @TerryHancock @slembcke
hah, Usonianism. A quarter dollar coin.
It says "copyright 1986" and "public domain". Ummm.
Those are mutually-exclusive states! 😆
Well, yes. But also, how would he know? Remember, all we had to go on was a dictionary, maybe an encyclopedia at the local library, the people around us, and whatever was already in our heads. ;)
To him, "Public Domain" probably just meant "freeware."
But… like… just judging from the individual words, that doesn't make any sense. You can't hold the exclusive "right" to "copy" if it is the "domain" of the "public".
Brofam, people today don't even think about things that deeply. ;)
Accept your exceptionality. ;)
I am quite exceptional.
I guess most people haven't read the clause of the US constitution that sets forth the basis of copyright. (If they did, maybe more people would consider the current state of it unconstitutional.)
Again, where's a 1986 dude living in rural Texas going to get a copy of the U.S. Constitution?
Maybe from his High School textbooks, if he kept them (which we generally did not, as they belonged to the district), maybe from the library, but then you're talking about going somewhere, asking someone, walking through aisles, finding the right book, finding the right page... to read something dry.
It didn't happen all that much. ;)
Dunno, but I had a paper copy on my bookshelf from when the library was handing them out.
And someone who does computers in 1986 could presumably have gotten it from the budding Project Gutenberg, where the constitution was the fifth piece published, in 1975? I forget if it was accessible beyond a limited network at that point, though.
Surely it got shared around on some of the BBSes at the time.
Possibly, but disk space was quite expensive, too.
Sure, but how is a BBS Op going to get just that one file?
If PG was available at all, it would be in rather large zipped corpi, and probably not individual files.
I'd never even heard of it until I got into university.
Heh, well, it doesn't use the actual word "copyright"
Welcome!
I recall next using some random ~$200 Windows 3d modeler and renderer circa 1995, but I can't remember the name of it for the life of me.
I then remember buying [Caligari trueSpace] shortly after that.
I also recall using a standalone modeler called "GUM: the Grand Unified Modeler" alongside the open source [POV-Ray] renderer circa 1998.
Briefly tried learning #Blender a few times after that, but never particularly seriously. ;)
This is all I have been able to find about GUM. It has otherwise seemed to have disappeared from the internet:
https://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/RTNews/html/rtnv7n4.html#art14
Wait... ha!
https://archive.org/download/win-cayn/WIN_CAYN.iso/W_GRAFIK%2FGUM_0B8.ZIP
I thought I had seen it in magazine ads in the early 90s, but it's not that old, so I must be confusing it with something else.
Is it easier to learn than Blender?
Oh, a subdivision modeler. That's a lot like trueSpace.
I'll have to give that a try sometime!
R.L. Dane 
🍵 
slembcke
pixx
mirabilos
Amin, minor deity of the legume realm
Guy who's trying his best :(
thedæmon (Clay Ayers) [he / him]
Holx