Behold the Juggler

From november 1986, the famous "Juggler" demo that started it all. The very first 3D character animation done on a personal computer, by Eric Graham.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• AMIGA
• juggler

[Zarchimedes]

Some of you guys seem to know Eric Graham in person, or are in contact with him. Do you think you could ask him to release the model data, so we could re-render this milestone of computer graphics history in today's (and tomorrow's) screen resolutions? I think the model should scale very well, and although we could of course try to guess the model proportions, it would be a neat thing to really render it with the exact original proportions, colors, light source position/angle/intensity etc. etc.

[robcat2075]

I'm sure he has an email somewhere but I wonder what the data woudl be like? This was done in a renderer that could only display spheres, no polygons, so I imagine the data would just be a bunch of XYZ centerpoints and a radius for each one.

[Zarchimedes]

XYZ center points and radii would be just fine as model data. The hard part will be to get the colors, lighting and shading right. If Mr. Graham still has the Sculpt 3D model of the Juggler, one might even consider trying to hack the Sculpt 3D Amiga code to make it render in true color and higher resolutions. (Or, if that should prove too hard to do: tile, zoom, render and collate.)

[robcat2075]

Sculpt3D had a "RAW" mode that rendered 24-bit color so no need to hack that.

But "The Juggler" wasn't in Sculpt3D. Like I said, it was a one-off thing that predated Sculpt3D. Aside from both doing ray-tracing, they were rather different approaches to rendering and describing geometry.

[robcat2075]

Also, I recall he put the essential ray tracing code in an AMIGAWORLD article at the time so if you just dug that up it would be fairly clear how he was handling color and light.

[Capeau]

@robcat2075

thats more then enough to recreate it manually if need be, its not like its 1000s of spheres :D

It like to recreate the scene in 3ds max and render it with some global illumination, caustics and dispersion on the glass material etc, just for fun.

So if you could obtain the needed info on how to recreate the scene, it would be greatly appreciated.

[robcat2075]

@Capeau

Oh, I have no idea how to acquire the original modeling data. Perhaps you could seek out Eric Graham, but I imagine this is ancient history for him and not worth the bother that would be.

My suggestion would be to eyeball it.

[crd86]

You know, this is quite a big achievement for 1986. This seems like the early development of professional animation we have today.

[RaggedTiger70]

This also appears in Tom Petty's "Jammin' Me" music video

[ChristianMiersch]

@Zarchimedes If the scenefile still exists, you could extract ALL data (Lightpositions, Direction, Colors, Cameraposition, etc. etc. But to be honest you could also recreate it just from this animation. Put the animation as an imageplane into any 3d Program and and match it, not terribly hard.

[archon808]

I still have the issue of Amiga World that had this juggler on the cover

[Sanosuke004]

You should see the "Monarch" demo that was also done by xanth in the 80s.

[vapourmile]

@Capeau There is an email address for Eric Graham at his new company, Google for Direct Algorithms and look at the contact info for that company.

[ciolamorta]

This is epic. But, i always thought, since a kid, "THIS IS SCARY!"

[Orlor]

@RaggedTiger70 As does the Amiga computer and the "Marble Madness" game.

[kenneld]

by god i haven't seen this for 20 years! blew my mind back in the day and actually it still looks pretty cool.

[Sanosuke004]

Xanth made this demo way back in the 80s.. I even have their not well known shiny balls demo and the fuji boink demo as well.