3DPC

3DPC - The First Movement, "No Holds Barred".

While shopping at CompUSA in 1994, I noticed some shiny, ray-traced, 3D-animated bouncing balls displayed on the CRT monitors for sale. It was from a screen saver called 3DPC, developed by a little-known Carlsbad, CA-based software company named Forté. I was hooked and bought the first series, of which the company would later produce three, for $19.99.

I dutifully registered my purchase with a postcard enclosed in the box and later received a brochure detailing how they produced the series- 3D Studio for modeling and POV-Ray for rendering, as well as an announcement of their second series. I immediately ordered it and upon shipment, noticed on the packing slip an entry for a previously unannounced series named 3DPC - The Premiere Bootleg Edition. For some reason, I decided to wait, but when I later tried to buy the Bootleg edition, the company had already discontinued all of its products.

Five years ago, the original developer generously posted the entire series online for free, including the Bootleg edition, for Windows users. I quickly downloaded and installed the series using Boot Camp to see if I could extract the individual files to play on my iMac. Sure enough, the animations were listed as a series of files but with a curious .3D extension. It took minimal work to figure out that they were simply renamed Autodesk FLI animation files. This made sense because, despite its 256 color and 320x200 resolution limit, FLI could play back 3D-generated animations without any special hardware.

So in order to display the files on modern computer systems and web browsers, (QuickTime 7 was the last player to support FLI natively) I decided to convert them to animated GIFs. I know, hello 1987! But it's really the best file format to preserve the image quality with absolutely no loss of information and file sizes are still in the kilobytes. Plus the animations can be looped forever as initially intended.

Here's a gallery of all three of the 3DPC series, courtesy of Forté, for your enjoyment.

http://s1168.photobucket.com/user/studiopixs/library/3DPC