I love the aesthetic of 90's 3D animation. Something is just there, that you don't see anymore in CGI. I've been thinking about buying one of these old SGI workstations to use Quicksoft 3D or some other classic CGI software on. Is that a good idea?
>Any experience with these Computers?
>Any reccommended software to try out?
http://www.ebay.de/itm/SGI-Ingido-2-mit-Extreme-Grafikkarte-/322057419711?hash=item4afc1e3bbf:g:sCQAAOSwNyFWhGEO
This is fucking retarded dude. If you want to learn how to do shit from the 90's, study hand drawn animations, cel animation, use a VCR to run footage through. Don't waste your money on shit like this. You can create anything in new systems
>>518676
some people want a self contained retro solution that they can just plug in and go without booting up some retarded nu skool programs / os
>>518665
speaking as someone who happen to do stuff in the 1990's.
I'll explain how you model something, you either use a very expensive program that was very hard to use.
Or.
You write the model in a text editor, You write out each point for the model assuming you did everything correctly it should work.
>>518684
It's called a laptop, faggot. But yes, go ahead and put that shit on a resume and get fucking laughed at.
Learn to adapt or die trying. Stop trying to be a hipster and start learning these nu skool programs.
I can't understand why you would want to purposely use old antiquated crap
You can use any shit acer laptop with 3ds and make stuff that looks like the junk they made in the 90s
>self contained retro solution that they can just plug in and go
it's a used 20 year old computer good luck with that
lol. there are much easier ways to do retro 3dcg without wasting a shitload of money on vintage workstations. use nurbs and limit your renderer to effects available at the time and you'll pretty much be doing it like they did in the 90s, except with better interfaces/usability and render speeds they would have killed for. think of it like having access to your own state of the art 90s render farm on one box. there you go
>>518665
>>518684
That is the most retarded thing I have ever heard from a 90's retro fag (AKA current gen is to hard 4 me).
You can do any retro 3D in any incarnation of these software suits, just easier, you only have to dial in legacy settings for everything.
If you start buying old silicon graphics stations and out-dated software do recognize that it is not about the aesthetics of the produce.
Rather it is pure posturing on your part under the pretense that it something you do for the 'true 90's look'.
I have a bunch of old SGI workstations sitting around here, but I've never used any of them personally.
I think you'll run into quite a lot of issues trying to make this work. Transferring stuff onto and off of them will be a chore, it'll probably be a chore to find compatible peripherals (monitor etc.)
Also, when stuff breaks you won't have any easy way to fix it. They are also bulky as hell, somewhat loud & eat a lot of power.
You also will get very outdated tools (meaning less productivity) and have a very hard time to import anyone elses stuff into your workflow.
So as others have mentioned, it's probably better to just seek to emulate the style you want with modern tools...
its like when a musician uses a modular synth instead of a soft synth. The results can be just as good with either, its just a matter of preference. no bulli
>>518755
Audio is a whole other realm of preference. I fully understand the analog warmth vs soft synth "too clean" yadda yadda.
Instead of the synths, think about a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) such as FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc...There's a plethora of reasons why they are constantly updated to meet modern tasks, while still having the option to mix in older techniques. What OP is doing is hard limiting theirself to, for example Fruity Loops 1.0 (1998). You can still create an 8bit power ballad but with much better efficiency with Fruity Loops 12 (2016).
>>518756
Nope. Its the same shit. Listen, deadMau5 aka the most financially successful electronic musician in the world has a preferred working method of...this...and not soft synths.
>>518759
are you sure that music and art is the same thing as "the tool makes the difference"
in art you simply use a shitty shader, a shitty render, old way to filter textures and animate and there you go
>>518762
music is art mate. He could use all soft syths on a macbook which are 100x easier to set up and save patches and move around but he chooses not to and he's STILL #1
>>518759
Ok, so main point being that unless you are aiming to be the d!3R4t of CGI and blog about how you can only
make your 110 poly surface meet at a certain 90's degree angle if you use vintage semiconductors in your setup,
in order to induce massive rageboners of retro-cred envy in all of your hipster CGI friends, you're better off with using current era tech.
>>518665
i had some sun3 pizza boxes sitting in the basement, booted up one of them for giggles and all my nostalgia wafted away.
but still, i knew one guy had a vax 8800 in his small apartment and his girlfriend almost left because of it. she stayed, the machine left.
>hurr dats retardud
>ids to combligaded
>you wond be as brodugdive
>jusd use shitty sofdwar
>music is art, 3D artworg is nod
The only thing I'm missing here is "that won't get you into the 3D industry!!".
Threads in which /3/ tries to grasp the concept of creativity or getting inspired always turn into massive trainwrecks.
What OP wants to do may seem inefficient but I guess it's more about getting in the mood for the stuff he wants to do.
There are lots of artists who intentionally limit their tools to get inspired.
Having unlimited possibilities (like with modern hard and software) can actually be a bad thing for creativity and limiting yourself can boost your creativity.
Why not just download an old version of 3d studio for DOS or get an Amiga emulator running and run an old version of Lightwave?
>>518819
because its not an all in one. Its like buying a midi keyboard vs buying an all in one solution that doesnt need a computer
>>518810
It's not about creativity, it's about hipstering. Op is obv clueless about 3D and hope the older packages
will provide him with some 'X-factor' that'll enable him to make shit he can't do in contemporary software.
Doesn't work like that. Creating the very same shapes takes a fraction of the time with the refined tools of the current 3D editors compared to what was on offer in the 90's.
You also gotta realize that the reason 90's 3D looks like absolute shit today isn't because artists back then sucked.
It is because the tools where a lot cruder and a lot harder to use, ran on much slower hardware, and therefore limited what you could realistically pull off.
They're also not wonder machines that produce somekind of given in aestetic to who ever uses them, it take skills.
And Op'll develop those skills a lot slower on a silicon graphics workstation, because he'll be using a piece of shit hardware from ~20 years ago for no good reason.
While we obviously mock his stupidity you gotta realize how big a favor it is for his artistic development if we succeed in de-fucking him from venturing down this path.
>>518665
I have an Octane2. It's a nice machine and Irix is a neat OS. Although I have an old version of Houdini on the machine I have no desire to do actual 3D work on it.
If you are interested in SGIs, I'd say do it. If the IRIX box is more of a means to an end I'd say skip it and just do what folks in this thread have suggested.
>>518843
>You also gotta realize that the reason 90's 3D looks like absolute shit today isn't because artists back then sucked.
the matrix came out in 1999 and was started in 1997. the 3d still holds up. It was made on one of these
>>518891
>an army of professionals working for 2 years with a 60 million dollar budget in the late 90's were able to make something special
>lol any neckbeard with a 20 year old sgi machine can do the same!
>>518916
>2hr flick
>>518665
I hear you OP, I also love these things. They remind me of my college years in animation when it was a brave new exciting world. I have an old SGI Octane laying around, but what I think I am going to do is gut it and mod in modern parts. May use it as a render box.
>>518665
Also jesus fuck there are a lot of faggots in this thread. OP, it may have it's downfalls, but fuckin' do it if you wanna do it and ignore these pussies. I think it would be cool as fuck. Good luck.
>>519714
>jesus fuck
>faggots
>fuckin'
>pussies
>cool as fuck
you must be at least 18 to use this website
>>519739
I'm 35. I was using this shit in college.
fun little fact, leendert van doorn, someone senior at AMD last i checked, was a notorious gay cracker in the 90's who made IRIX his bitch.. the gay thing mentioned because he'd throw it in people's faces sometimes in chatrooms.
>>518665
Couldn't you just track down some downloads of the old software and run it within a virtual machine? Also, you could achieve the "90s CG aesthetic" in modern CG software by exclusively using simple shaders like Phong and not lighting realistically.
>>519711
I really dig those o2's myself, very modular probably could mod it for an itx build.
>>518665
I like old hardware, and have a decent amount of it around the place.
That said, if you want to do this, you're going to need a lot of persistence. How well do you know UNIX? Linux knowledge will help, but the first time you step out of Ubuntu and into a real old-school UNIX it's massive culture shock.
There won't be too many people who can help you if you need advice, because the only people that know anything about these machines are people like me who used to use them and held onto a few as a hobby (I'm a Sun guy though, not an SGI guy). These aren't PCs. They don't have a BIOS, they don't see the hard disks the same way as a PC, and they are designed with the idea that a trained systems admin will be around for everything more complicated that just using the software.
Whatever you do, don't let this thing get a public IP address. All of the UNIXes draw from the same codebase, and there's a lot of bugs in there that have been fixed since IRIX was last updated.
I don't want to discourage you, but bear in mind it'll be a lot of work with a steep learning curve. If you aren't really interested in retro computing and just want to use the old software, you're better off with an emulator. There's plenty of those around.
