Some of my Early Computer Art from the 1990’s

Hi,

I’m Brett and I’ve been a commercial web developer since 1997.

Before that I was a computer hobbyist and started coding at the age of 12.

Here are a few rare remnants from stuff I made years ago. This kind of stuff is pretty rare. Digital assets are so easy to throw away. And in the old days storage space was really expensive.

I still regret losing so much stuff to faulty ZIP Drives, but here is a selection of what archeological remains still exist of my digital history.

Early Photoshopping

So these days everybody has a mobile phone that can do photoshopping at the swipe of a finger.

But in the old days it wasn’t quite so easy.

People were literally amazed when I showed them this photo of me and my friend messing about in our biochemistry lab:

Thankfully both of us got our doctorates in fruit ripening. Me for tomatoes, my friend for mangoes.

I photoshopped this photo using Photogenics for the Commodore Amiga. It was an amazing paint package and it would be many years before I found anything as good on the PC.

This is the original size of the photo. In 1996 768×512 pixels was literally enormous.

It was harder still do make a print from the .JPG. I walked into Jessops the photographic shop to enquire about making prints from computer files and they thought I was quite mad.

Another early photoshopping. Aliens attacking my university’s biochemistry building. This one’s pretty good IMHO. Again Photogenics and the Amiga were years ahead of their time. In 1995 Amigas were being used to create the special effects on Babylon 5. PC’s were running Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

Early 3D Animation

Inspired by Babylon 5, I had a go at 3D rendering and ray-tracing. I used Imagine for the Amiga but without a FPU it was agonisingly slow. However the raw power of the Pentium processor made me switch over to the PC. It still took a long time to render an image though!

Here’s a few of my early efforts.

I managed to make an entire room in Imagine, then 3D render my 2D photo into the same room. Argh the angles are all wrong, but in 1996 this was pretty cutting edge. It was certainly amazing to be able to do this on a home computer.

I made an animation of this room, and I had to leave my PC on for 3 days and nights to render it.

Another picture of the same 3D room. I wonder if I could import it into something and recreate it? It would probably render in realtime now lol.

I used to be a food scientist and made this 3D render of a tin of tomato puree. I think this still looks pretty good, and Imagine did a good job of wrapping the scanned wrapper around the virtual can.

Do you have any memories from the good old days of the Amiga and PC? Please post a comment below if you have some interesting recollections of Imagine, Photogenics or any thing else from the good old days.