Ray-tracing, the simulation of light rays and their interactions with the environment, is the holy grail of computer graphics and can achieve Hollywood-level imagery. The Amiga home computer, despite being capable of ray tracing in the 80s, was left out of the conversation due to hardware limitations. The Amiga played a significant role in visual effects and pioneered software that is still used in the TV and film industry today, but ultimately fell out of favor due to financial struggles and competition from home consoles.
Ray tracing is not a new thing. But what was done on the Amiga 30 years ago is quite different from what people talk about today. We’re talking about real time ray tracing - that is technically challenging and requires computational resource every millisecond orders above what was available in an Amiga.
As Isaac Newton (and others before him) put it - we’re standing in the shoulders of giants. In 30 years may lament that people forget what was happening in 2023 when they look at the technology of the day.
!remindme 30 years
Oh wait, this isn’t Reddit.
we remember it taking multiple hours to generate a single frame with a handful of objects. it was awesome.
I’d argue that every amiga user remembers. Also multitasking that worked. Wysiwyg for far less cost in publishing and if course genlock.
There’s a huge difference between real-time ray-tracing and playing back ray-tracing. The fact that the whole Juggler demo was created and pre-rendered fully on an Amiga was impressive for sure, but that’s not what we mean today when we talk about ray-tracing.
Was the juggler really rendered? To me it looked like all the balls where just flat brushes with a 3D ball effect that is moved around always facing towards you. Similar to the enemies in duke nukem and doom.
Yes. A nice, brief history here: https://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/anims/eric_graham/juggler.aviVE.html
Looks like i was thinking about a different animation. The balls in Juggler are not static and show a different reflection in each frame.
@Helvedeshunden @[email protected]
Commodore Amiga demo: Blitz - Real Time Raytracing (1991) https://youtu.be/piUrB0bApkw?si=8BCcBZ6Pdy6pvwo9 via @YouTube
That’s really cute. Of course, it’s also a fair bit simpler than Juggler, but real-time is neat. I’m sure there are other examples, but you never quite know when to trust descriptions in demos, because some were a bit on the braggy side ;)
What can be done in real time today took hours on the Amiga back in the day.
I always like to imagine an alternate reality where the Amiga won the personal computer wars of the early 90s and it survived to this day. Now imagine the Amiga OS with technology that is available today (super fast CPUs, tons of RAM, SSDs, etc).
Can be done, you can buy a new PPC based computer and run Amiga OS 4 on it … can’t do an awful lot with it because it doesn’t have a lot of programs, but you can buy one.
It should be noted that the Juggler animation was a pre-rendered loop, and wasn’t real-time raytracing.
I remember. It took 14 hours to make one still image at 640x400.
And I bet playing battlefield at 160x120 would actually make it fun!
