History
This page contains some historical images created with Real3D and Realsoft 3D software.
Real3D is the brainchild of us - two Finnish brothers, Juha and Vesa Meskanen.
First experimental computer generated graphics images were created in 1982, on IBM PC and Commodore 64
computers. Some of these two dimensional experiments used trigonometric
functions and appeared almost as true 3D objects.
This lead to an idea of trying to render true 3D shapes in a computer.
Without knowledge of any existing technology, everything was invented and implemented from scratch.
This is the second 3D experiment established on Commodore 64. The
first one was a spinning cube, of course.
The object had some tens of vertices and 6510 CPU was able to render it with astonishing
10 seconds per frame speed. In order get this phenomenal speed
the line rendering routines had to be implemented in assemby language.
The object was supposed to represent a BMW, which is a German car, not a boat!
The development of Real3D got boosted in 1985, as Commodore released its Amiga 1000 computer
equipped with advanced Motorola 68000 CPU.
Juha had started his studies at the Techical Institute in Lahti and wrote a 3D CAD program with which
he designed a chair. The program had a demanding modeler and in addition to wire frame
renderer it was also capable of rendering shaded images. The renderer
was based on Vesa's genious idea of shooting light rays through monitor pixels
and then letting them to bounce in the scene to capture the information needed
to construct an image, like the one on the left.
Basic shapes like planes, spheres, cylinders, cones
and point light sources was supported. Juha also implemented hyperboloid
as a result of a bug in ray-cone intersection equation (bugs are not always bad).
This image was created in 1986 to promote the software to
Serlachius Oy - a Finnish company manufacturing kitchen
cabinets and furniture. Images rendered at the time had jagged edges and dithered
appearance due to limited color space.
Jagged edges wasn't the only obstacle on the road. The number of light rays one had to
trace increased exponentially with the number of objects and any practical size scene took forewer
to render. These performance problems nearly killed the whole project until at one coffee saturated
night Juha got his biggest idea ever, or at least his biggest idea so far. The revolutional idea was to
project 3D objects to six two dimensional surfaces. Each pixel in these surfaces represented certain
direction in 3d space. If a pixel was not set then there was nothing to trace in the direction in question.
Correspondingly, all cpu intensive ray-surface intersection calculations could be skipped for that light ray.
First ray-tracing optimization method was born. What was remarkable was that Amiga's Blitter graphics
processor was particulary suitable for creating these two dimensional optimization masks and the
next step was to make this optimizaton system hierarchical. Rendering
got speeded up by orders of magnitude.
This was one of the very first images created with the first commercial Real3D version. All objects in the scene were constructed from quadric surfaces, such as ellipsoids, cylinders and cones. It became soon obvious that shooting only one ray per pixel wasn't enough. One had to shoot several rays through each pixel to get better idea about the light passing through the pixel. This anti-aliasing, as it is called, had a significant impact to rendering quality.
Young student Vesa, studying mathematics at the University of Helsinki.
Vesa played an essential role in the development of the rendering engine. It was Vesas's
idea to implement recursive rendering process to simulate glass and reflective surfaces.
Also the name - Real3D - was Vesa's exellent idea and the first commercial
Real3D version was released in 1989 on Amiga. Vesa dropped his university career and started the
company realsoft. At the time of writing Vesa no
longer have pimples on his face.
Basic shapes like cubes, spheres and cylinders didn't provide enough control over modeling. For example, representing a circular hole in a cube wasn't possible even thought the program was able to represent the both geometric shapes as separate entities.
The problem was rather embrassing, but the solution to it was not, as the brothers discovered
that a drilled cube could be represented as boolean operation, namely cube AND NOT cylinder.
Vesa put forward even more bold idea of making this boolean operation system
hierarchical. In other words, a cylinder could be used for drilling
a hole to a cube and this drilled cube could then be used
in boolean operations to get even more complex shapes modeled. Easier said than
done, of course, but a few months later true solid modeler was born. Objects were
no longer just set of surfaces but true volumetric solids. For example, sphere
was not defined by a two dimensional surface but a set of points whose distance
from the center of the sphere was within the radius of the sphere. In additon of "inserting" new
geometric objects into the scene to be simulated, the user could now also use
geometric objects to "remove" matter from the virtual universe.
The program was finally capable to model complex shapes like this quitar on the left. This hierarchical
constructive solid geometry approach, as it is called, is still an essential part of the software.
The body of the guitar consists of a cube, ellipsoids and hyperboloids,
boolean operated with each other.
The first Real3D version shipped also with a few basic animation tools and
this is the very first Real 3D animation ever, shown at Technical Institute of Lahti,
Finland in 1989, as Juha demonstrated his final examination.
The animation used so called 'Delta' video format, which had to be developed in order
to show the rendered animations in real time. The Delta format was bi-directional supporting both
loop and ping-pong effects. Realsoft's Delta format worked very well with palette oriented
images where the color space was quite limited. Later formats working better for true
color images were developed (mpeg, etc.).
Real3D version 1.2, released 1990, was already distributed in several European countries.
This is an image created for the Cebit Exhibition we attended 1990 in Germany. The image
demonstrated new volumetric rendering and bump mapping features.
Rendering done in Amiga 1000 with 320x250 resolution and
HAM (Hold And Modify) screen mode, which offered revolutionary 4096 colors.
The candle stick and the body of the teapot was created with 'Lathe' tool. The lathe tool created smoothly connected objects
from quadric surfaces (two dimensional surfaces, such as spheres, ellipsoids,
hyperboloids, cylinders and cones).
Real3D version 2 was released two years later, 1993.
It was a redesigned software with a new source code basis and a new
animation system based on the idea that a moving car consists of
two sub objects: a car shape and a motion. It also introduced several other
ground breaking features such as cubic b-splines, simulations based on Newtons laws of motion,
morphing based animation techniques and blew most of the
competition out of the water with its phenomenal rendered output.
Version 2 did not subdivide B-splines to polygons prior rendering but
used an advanced approach where surfaces got subdivided on the fly during rendering.
It also took full advantage of the multi
tasking abilities of the Amiga - allowing the user to continue editing a scene on another
window while it rendered!
This is a sample scene included with the first version 2 package - an image which
was shown as a cover image in quite a many 3D magazines.
Real3D V2 was regarded with the best software of the year rewards by several magazines and
reviews.
Version 2 introduced also so called Motion Blur feature. This is a frame from
a collision detection simulation included with the first Version 2. The image was also used
as a cover image for the manual and the box. The collision detection system did not
use bounding boxes but used the true shape of objects. Real3D was the first software
being able to detect and solve
exact collisions between all supported geometries, such as hyperboloids and B-spline surfaces.
This is the award winning candy bear animation called E104. It was
created by a young German student Maria Boeckenhoff, with some help from
our long time beta testers Axel Mertes and Frank Vogt. The name of the animation (E104)
refers to a food colorant.
First dark clouds above Commodore were in sight 1993 and porting of Real3D to Microsoft's
Windows was started. Compared to Amigas true pre-emptive multi threading operating system, with
Motorola's linear memory space, it was actually quite a shock to discover what a piece of crap the
first Windows operating system was. It was really good only for two things: text editing and
text editing. Luckily Microsoft's new operating system Windows NT
and Digital's new CPU model gave us some hope, and the port was finally finished 1994.
This image was created by the beta tester Grant Neisner, Reflect IO and was
used as a box cover image.
Version 3 release 1995 continued the v2 based development line. The feature set kept growing
and it introduced quite a many new excotic features,
such as the animation drag method and animateable shrink wrapping, just to name
a few. This is the V3 box cover image created by Grant Neisner.
Version 3.5, released 1996, was the last version based on v2 architecture.
Realsoft had started a new development project around 1994.
It was a major rewrite, based on a new
platform independent programming interface and including
features like Rational Subdivision Surfaces, NURBS
(Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) surfaces and Visual Shading Language.
Realsoft continued in its unique path to invent and implement everything by itself,
rather than copying ideas from other companies (let alone
using the code other companies had implemented).
The user base had to wait quite a while until the result of the ambitious project finally
matured enough for a new product release. Version 4 was released in 2000.
The subdivision surface modeler in Realsoft was generally reviewed
one of the bests, if not the best on the market. Also the Visual Shading Language
was regarded as the most powerful shading system out there. Most reviewers rewarded
the software with 'best value for the money' award.
Version 5 was released in October 2004. This is one of the images in the abstract serie of Tim Borgman created in Realsoft 3D V5. The images were chosen into the respected Expose 2 book and received the Abstract and Design 3D Master Award.
The latest version 6 was released at the end of 2007. V6 introduced powerful parametric tools for plant
modeling and building construction. It also improved rendering speed. The software documentation toolset was
redesigned for version 6. The new docbook based system allows automatic production of native platform
specific manuals in html, Windows help and pdf formats. V6 is available for more platforms than ever;
there is now a version for Mac OS X, there are native versions for 64 bit operating systems,
tailored packages for various Linux flavors etc.