In late 1986 a short animation of a ray-traced robot juggling three mirrored balls on a checkerboard began circulating among Amiga owners. AmigaWorld wrote that it “quickly became a symbol of the Amiga’s graphics capabilities”. Its author, Eric Graham, told AmigaWorld that the Amiga had finally let him write the 3D graphics program “he had been wanting to write for 20 years”. In the summer of 1987 that program went on sale as Sculpt 3D, from Byte by Byte of Austin, Texas, for $99.95. It could ray-trace glass and chrome on a home computer. A complex scene could also take two days to draw.
Fast facts
- Author: Eric Graham, creator of The Juggler.
- Publisher: Byte by Byte Corporation, Austin, Texas, whose president was Scott Peterson.
- Released: summer 1987, at $99.95.
- Machine: any Amiga with 512K, though AmigaWorld advised at least a megabyte for complex objects.
- Successors: Animate 3D (on sale by 1988), Sculpt-Animate 4D (late 1988, $499.95) and Sculpt-Animate 4D Junior (1989).
How it worked
AmigaWorld’s Sheldon Leemon described the setting in January 1988: “Only a year ago, the possibility of creating three-dimensional graphics and animation with commercial software packages on small, inexpensive microcomputers would have seemed remote at the very least.” Sculpt 3D and Allen Hastings’s Videoscape 3D, which grew into LightWave 3D, were the two programs that changed that.
Everything in Sculpt was made of triangles, because three points always lie in one plane. The main screen showed three wireframe windows, the “tri-view”, looking at the scene from the side, the top and the front. Users placed points with the mouse, joined them into faces, started from ready-made spheres, cones and prisms, or pulled a group of points about with a “magnet” tool. Each triangle could have its own colour and a surface such as dull, shiny, mirror or glass. Amazing Computing noted that Graham was a photographer, and the program worked like a camera: users chose where the observer stood, where the camera pointed, what lens it had and where the lamps went.
Sculpt could draw a scene four ways. Wireframe and “painting” modes were quick previews. “Snapshot” mode was ray-traced but ignored shadows; “photo” mode traced the shadows too. Ray tracing follows lines of sight back from the viewer into the scene, bouncing them off mirrors and through glass, which is how Sculpt got its reflections. It was also why it was slow. Images could be rendered in the Amiga’s HAM mode, with 4,096 colours on screen, at five sizes from “Tiny” to “Jumbo” so that users could test a scene small before committing to a full-screen picture.
What it was like to use
The reviewers loved the pictures and warned about the waiting. Steve Pietrowicz of Amazing Computing wrote that one scene of a glass dome on a glass cylinder with three floating cubes “took two days to render”, and that glass images could take “several days”. He still called it “one of the best programs I have seen for the Amiga”. The program multitasked and was not copy-protected, so the Amiga stayed usable while it worked. Version 1.1, free to registered owners, cut ray-tracing times by up to 65 per cent.
Sculpt 3D could not animate on its own. Byte by Byte put a set of playback programs into the public domain so that users could string single frames together, and promised a proper animation program.
Animate 3D and Sculpt-Animate 4D
Animate 3D was advertised from the autumn of 1987 and was in mail-order price lists by mid-1988. It used Sculpt 3D’s objects and let users choreograph objects, lights and camera through time, with the mouse or a script language.
The two programs were then merged. Byte by Byte showed a pre-release of Sculpt-Animate 4D at SIGGRAPH in 1988, and by the end of the year it was shipping at $499.95, with upgrades for existing owners at $195. It added an interactive object editor, keyboard macros, faster ray tracing, better anti-aliasing, an animation script language and versions for 68020 processors and 68881 maths chips. In 1989 Amazing Computing counted it and Impulse’s Turbo Silver as the two major Amiga ray tracers. Sculpt was the dearer ($500 against $200) and the more interactive, since objects could be rotated with the mouse, but it had no Undo command. A cheaper Sculpt-Animate 4D Junior, around $150 and without ray tracing, was announced in 1989 for Amiga 500 owners.
After the Amiga
Byte by Byte took Sculpt to the Apple Macintosh. By March 1991 Amazing Computing was reporting that Amiga users were “cursing the company for shifting gears to enter the Mac world”, and hoping the Mac version would be ported back. Meanwhile newer packages had overtaken it on the Amiga, Imagine and LightWave among them. Amiga Format’s 1994 buyer’s guide called Sculpt-Animate 4D “once the darling of the graphics experts”. It was still in use in 1993, when AmigaWorld reported that the Disney animator Kelly Day had used Sculpt and Imagine to make graphics for the cartoon series Goof Troop.
Sources
- Amazing Computing: vol. 2 no. 7, July 1987, John Foust, “The New Breed of Amiga Video Products” (Sculpt 3D’s arrival, triangles, magnet tool, camera interface, Graham a photographer); vol. 2 no. 10, October 1987 (Byte by Byte advertisement for Animate 3D); vol. 2 no. 11, November 1987, pp. 14–18, Stephen R. Pietrowicz, “Sculpt 3D” (review: imaging modes, image sizes, two-day renders, multitasking, $99.95, Byte by Byte’s address); vol. 3 no. 2, February 1988 (Scott Peterson, president of Byte by Byte); vol. 4 no. 1, January 1989 (Sculpt-Animate 4D features, $499.95, $195 upgrade, shipping); vol. 4 no. 4, April 1989, p. 47 (Sculpt/Animate Jr. announced, about $150); vol. 4 no. 9, September 1989, pp. 17–18, David Duberman, “Secrets of Visual Synthesis” (Sculpt-Animate 4D against Turbo Silver 3.0); vol. 6 no. 3, March 1991, p. 23, Frank McMahon, “Amiga 3-D: On the Comeback” (the Mac version).
- AmigaWorld: September 1987 (mail-order advertisement, “New! Sculpt 3-D”); January 1988, pp. 33–42, Sheldon Leemon, “Depth-Defying 3-D Programs for the Amiga” (the Juggler, Graham’s twenty years, tri-view, drawing modes, release 1.1, memory, $99.95); June 1988 (Animate 3D in a mail-order price list); November 1988 (SIGGRAPH: “a prerelease of Sculpt-Animate 4-D”); November 1993, p. 44, “Amigas in Hollywood” sidebar (Kelly Day and Goof Troop).
- Amiga Format 1994 Buyer’s Guide (supplement to issue 54): Sculpt-Animate 4D entry.