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

#ReadTheAltText

#ClassicMac #ClassicMacintosh #RetroComputing #3dGraphics #Modeler

cc: @TerryHancock @slembcke

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

@TerryHancock @slembcke

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

@rl_dane @TerryHancock Huh, kinda reminds me of the .obj format.

@slembcke @TerryHancock

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

@pixx @slembcke @TerryHancock

Duuuude, that would be amazing as an STL file.

Any best stab at the scale is fine.

@rl_dane @pixx @TerryHancock I have a gamedev meetup tonight and traditionally I poke around at random graphics stuff. I'll give it a go converting it to an obj. If it's a closed model that should be exportable to an STL. It looks like it's a non-triangle polygon soup format, so it might require a bunch of cleanup to be printable though.

@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)