Imagine | Code Like It's 198x

Not to be confused with Imagine Software, the Liverpool publisher that collapsed on camera in 1984. Same word, unrelated: this is the Amiga 3D package.

Imagine was Impulse’s second attempt at an Amiga ray tracer, and the company threw the first one away to make it. Turbo Silver had sold well, but its animation system and manual drove even its fans to distraction, so Impulse started again from scratch. What arrived at the turn of 1991 could make shiny ray-traced stills and walk a jointed figure across the screen, and in 1993 Amiga Format gave the whole program away on its cover. It was powerful and notoriously hard to learn, and one of the Babylon 5 animators counted it as one of only two serious choices for Amiga 3D.

Fast facts

Publisher: Impulse, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota, run by Mike Halvorson.
Released: version 1.0 at the turn of 1991, after a missed launch date.
Price: $350 in the United States in 1991.
Predecessors: Silver (shown in 1987) and Turbo Silver.
Later platforms: MS-DOS (Imagine 2.0, 1993), then Windows.
Machines: any Amiga with enough memory, with a separate build for 68020/68030 processors and a 68881/68882 maths chip.

From Silver to Imagine

Impulse showed Silver, its ray tracer, at the first AmiEXPO in New York in October 1987. Turbo Silver followed, and by 1989 Amazing Computing counted it and Byte by Byte’s Sculpt-Animate 4D as the “two major ray-tracing programs for the Amiga”. Turbo Silver cost $200 against Sculpt’s $500.

The critics liked its pictures and not much else. Amazing Computing’s R. Shamms Mortier called his attachment to it “obsessive but sometimes frustrating”, blaming “the way that it handles animation” and “its convoluted manual”. AmigaWorld’s reviewer Kelly Day, a cartoon animator, found it “a ‘by-the-numbers’ kind of program” that demanded exact degrees of rotation and lengths of extrusion typed at the keyboard instead of shapes made with the mouse. According to Mortier, Impulse had decided more than a year before his review that reworking Silver again would cost more than starting afresh.

Five editors

Imagine 1.0 split the work across five screens:

Project, where a job was started, render settings chosen and finished pictures and animations saved.
Detail, for building objects from points, edges and faces, with lathe and extrude tools, a magnet tool for smooth curves and rolling terrain, and commands to bend an object round a cylinder or sphere.
Forms, for pushing and pulling a sphere of points into organic shapes.
Cycle, for character animation. A user built a jointed figure, such as a walk cycle, and could then hang any body parts on it. The parts were linked in a hierarchy, so lifting a hand moved the forearm and shoulder too.
Stage, for arranging objects, lights and camera over time.

Mortier thought nothing in Silver or anywhere else matched the Forms editor, and that only Hash Enterprises’ Animation: Apprentice attempted what the Cycle editor did. Up to four IFF pictures could be wrapped onto one object, and output went to HAM screens or 24-bit files. The manual, by Rick Rodriguez, ran to about seventy pages. Frank McMahon, writing alongside the review, called Imagine “a natural extension of the Turbo Silver family that is not an excellent program struggling to get out of an interface—it’s just an excellent program”.

On the coverdisk and in the studio

Imagine 2.0 followed in 1992, and in December 1993 Amiga Format put the complete program on its coverdisks with six pages of tutorials, calling it “the best Coverdisk package ever to be seen on the front of any Amiga magazine”. Readers were offered an upgrade to the new Imagine 3.0 for £75. Dealers were already bundling Imagine 2 free with memory and accelerator boards.

Its reputation for difficulty stuck. Mojo Seffa of Foundation Imaging, the Babylon 5 effects house, wrote in Amiga Shopper in January 1995 that Imagine had brought Amiga 3D “to the Next Level” and was “one of really only two serious choices for the 3D enthusiast”. He added that it was “a very difficult piece of software to get the hang of”, with a manual that was “mediocre at best”. His own tutorials used LightWave 3D.

Professionals did use it. AmigaWorld reported in November 1993 that the Disney animator Kelly Day had used Imagine, Sculpt and Pro Draw to make graphics for the animated series Goof Troop.

Later history

Impulse released an MS-DOS version of Imagine 2.0 in 1993, and by the end of 1996 it was putting most of its effort into Imagine for Windows. Halvorson told Amiga Computing that the Amiga version’s future depended on a survey of its users. The Amiga version carried on anyway: CU Amiga gave away Imagine 4.0 on its cover in January 1997, and in June 1997 Amiga Format reported that Impulse was working on Imagine 6 for the Amiga. Public sources record Amiga releases up to version 5.19 in 2006 and Windows releases up to 2.1.9 in 2004.

Sources

AmigaWorld: January 1988, p. 10, “AmiEXPO Takes New York” (Impulse shows Silver, 10–12 October 1987); June 1991, pp. 14–16, Kelly Day, review of Imagine ($350; Turbo Silver “by-the-numbers”); June 1993, letters (the MS-DOS version of Imagine 2.0); November 1993, p. 44, “Amigas in Hollywood” sidebar (Kelly Day and Goof Troop).
Amazing Computing: vol. 4 no. 9, September 1989, pp. 17–18, David Duberman, “Secrets of Visual Synthesis” (Turbo Silver 3.0 and Sculpt-Animate 4D, prices); vol. 6 no. 1, January 1991 (Imagine about to be released); vol. 6 no. 3, March 1991, pp. 21–24, R. Shamms Mortier, “An Impulse To Imagine”, with Frank McMahon’s sidebar “Amiga 3-D: On the Comeback”.
Amiga Format issue 40, November 1992 (Imagine 2.0 advertised at £189.95); issue 53, December 1993: Imagine 2 on the coverdisks, tutorials and the Imagine 3.0 upgrade offer; issue 98, June 1997: Imagine 6 in development.
Amiga Computing issue 63, August 1993 (Imagine 2 bundled with an accelerator), issue 107, Christmas 1996 (Impulse’s Windows work and Amiga survey).
Amiga Shopper issue 45, January 1995, pp. 28–29: Mojo Seffa, “The Three Ds of 3D”.
CU Amiga, January 1997: Imagine 4.0 cover disks.
Wikipedia, “Imagine (3D modeling software)” (web, secondary): last Amiga and Windows versions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_(3D_modeling_software)