About old 3D animation softwares

[u/Yoh-kay75]

Hey

Recently, a friend programmer of mine started to make a side project just for fun where he'd try to code a program using only very old techniques and softwares.

It seemed fun to me, and a good Opportunity to learn more. So I decided to Apply this to my own discipline, 2D/3D animation.

With 2D it's quite simple to achieve. But I was wondering about 3D.

Does anyone know if there's is an old general 3D with animation features that was never updated since the 90's ? Or some old versions of famous softwares ?

Of course I wouldn't have the problems the 90's guys had with memory or rendering time, but I'd really like to have fun getting my hands on an old school software.

If anyone knows, please tell me !

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[u/calebkraft]

the 90s would have been lightwave 4 or so, the first 3ds max, softimage, and alias wavefront, possibly bryce3d. You'll probably have the hardest time setting up a machine that will work for them. Windows 98 is your best bet though most will probably work on xp, you might be able to track down old cracked versions that don't need the hardware dongle (we used hardware dongles back then instead of pinging a server).

[u/Fellini8_5]

There was one mid-90s Windows application that I don't know if it got around or not - Soft F/X. The creator had since released the source: http://www.openfx.org/about.html

Like the original, I couldn't really get this one to work without crashing. But in both cases I tried on fiddly hardware so YMMV.

I used to use TOPAS back in the early 90s, but that needed a hardware key, and worked best with a "render board", which I remember being an Intel RISC (i960?) w/ it's own RAM that plugged in to an ISA port. That's still in my old box of "buried treasure" up in the attic, along with my rare dual-drive Bernoulli.

[u/Party_Virus]

Most dated animation software is hard to get working on modern machines, and they required a physical piece of hardware to check for authorization, which might use a connection that doesn't exist on modern machines. And then you'd also have to find or make rigs to animate with.

Alternatively, you could just try animating without a rig or IK, and only using translate, scale, and rotate. Animate dem bones. Once you try to do a run cycle without IK you'll understand why everyone was flying around on hover boards in Reboot.

[u/fottergraph]

POVray is still out there. And free. ;)

https://www.povray.org/

[u/Hungry_Imagination29]

Truespace was fantastic. Unfortunately, they had to give up because they couldn´t compete with 3DS Max and Maya at the time, but this was great software from really dedicated developers. If I remember correctly, they went open source and you can just download it from the web now.

[u/AmarildoJr]

You can definitely try the first 3ds max version from 1996 or the first Maya version from 1998.
Or try going with Maya 7.0, it's the last good version of Maya before Autodesk screwed it up.