Really terribly bad 90s CGI rendering?

Hideous · May 2015

So one of the "downsides" of the computer graphics industry is that it's always striving to get better - so I'm having a really hard time trying to find something that will let me render things in really terrible quality - think 80s/90s ads like this: [ame]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv59aPNU1Ng[/ame]

Any suggestions?

hyrumark · May 2015

The main thing that sticks out to me is absolutely no shadows or AO. And VERY simple models with lots of hard edges and intersections. I'd think that would get you 90% there.

Scruples · May 2015

Well this is an odd request. Not going to be able to offer any specifics until we know what you're rendering in. But whatever you're rendering in you should turn off shadows/motion blur while keeping sampling quite high, crank the environment ambient lighting up a bit and for lighting have 1-2 diffuse lights and several specular lights or optionally an envball.

It's important to note that most everything was modelled out of nurbs which because of it's limitations is often only solid colors or procedurals, notice how everything is both hard edged and incredibly smooth.

Hideous · May 2015

Scruples wrote: »

Well this is an odd request. Not going to be able to offer any specifics until we know what you're rendering in.

I've actually not picked a renderer for this yet - I usually only do realtime things, so I've not got a renderer I use normally. I was hoping I could get some tips on a renderer to use for this, with this thread.

thomasp · May 2015

well, any scanline-type of renderer should do? simple materials and no fancy lighting and those tiny chrome 8bit reflection maps.

or get yourself a period-correct sgi workstation with softimage 3d or power animator installed and it'll be all set correctly right away.

Weso · May 2015

Interesting challenge. I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to do this in a real-time package. Turn off your cast shadows, your AO, your global illumination. I'd use the simple Blinn or Phong shaders. Get all those reflective materials with a reflection map, or using a cubemap with raytracing. The eyes look like they're unshaded and simply coloured.

Maybe look into behind the scenes info for 3D 90s shows like Reboot and Beast Wars that had this kind of look. You might be able to find out what renderer they used.

skankerzero · May 2015

Remember to keep your specular highlights white and all your shadows black. That helps a lot.

A sign of the times was having 'chrome' applied to as many elements as you could too.

Also try looking up generic tiling textures.
As thomasp said, get yourself an old version of whatever software you use. Try only using the default shaders and sample textures provided with it.

oskarkeo · May 2015

don't forget to make sure any camera tracks drift a bit.

cptSwing · May 2015

https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/114/library-pixar-one-twenty-eight.html

Vailias · May 2015

You don't need an older version of the software, you just need simple rendering and materials. Literally any renderer packaged with your DCC software will produce stuff like this if you feed it basic materials and lights and leave it at its default scanline settings. If you want to do this realtime, that's also possible.

You have 4 basic material choices for that era. Blinn or Phong for shiny stuff, Lambert for basic diffuse stuff, and environment mapped for the chrome like stuff, sometimes multiplied by a surface color.

The aesthetic was largely driven by hardware capabilities of the time, so lower polycounts are a must, you can do smooth vertex normals, but forget about normal mapping.

Animating Stuff is largely segmented hierarchies of objects, because the math behind a bone deforming mesh was still too computationally intensive to bother with in production work.

Lighting should be kept to simple point/omni and spot lights plus a scene wide ambient term to fill in shadows. "Radiosity" or "global illumination" started to be available in the later 90's but you still needed renderfarms for it, so for anything less than Pixar or ILM, you weren't likely to see it.

Another key point is to recall the output resolution of the time. NTSC TV broadcast is 640x480 interlaced. So you may want to output to that resolution, or downsample your final render to that size then rescale with bilinear filtering to get the same, rather fuzzy, output.

skankerzero · May 2015

The idea of using an older version of the software was so he would not be tempted to use modern tools and features.

It would be like when modern film makers use modern equipment to try and emulate the older look. Just use the old cameras instead.

Really terribly bad 90s CGI rendering?

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