François Gastaldo, a French teacher specializing in lighting, shading and texturing, has recreated the Amiga Juggler animation using Blender and the Open Shading Language (OSL) implementation for the Cycles renderer. The Amiga Juggler is a historic ray-traced one second looping animation of a juggler made of spheres originally created by Eric Graham back in 1986 with the Commodore Amiga computer. The animation showcased the 3D computing capabilities ushered by desktop computers of the mid-1980s and became an iconic image for CG graphics at the time.
The original Amiga Juggler animation was rendered at 320×200 resolution using the computer’s HAM mode (which featured 4096 colors), each frame took approximately 1 hour to generate with a ray-tracing program developed by Eric Graham. The Blender OSL version runs in real-time.
Find out more on François Gastaldo’s website.
That made me smile 🙂
Rune, my Amiga fellow!
I’ll never forget how excited I was about that awesome raytracing. Good ol’ days!
I had the same idea an i made this on shadertoy.com
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/llXSWr
I love that piece of digital art!