By affordable, I mean an app. with a pricetag that would still be well under 1000 dollars even with inflation, enough to be in reach for families who wanted to give their children an advanced creative toy for Christmas.
LGR also goes into just how important this app. was in selling the idea of CGI as a creative medium, with sci-fi imagery created with it finding its way into a lot of products including school supplies. This was back during a time when the best you could expect from FOSS was a text editor with no viewport or UI (ie. the domain of computer nerds). There is also the interesting bit of it having a rendered view mode for its viewport more than a decade before Octane and Cycles.
Anyway, a good insight on just how magical the medium of CG appeared back then; the possibilities seemed endless at the time in spite of how primitive it was compared to today.
Hello,
Given the fact that this a high value video (in archeological terms), i can’t see the point of $200 being family friendly-affordable at the time.
In 1988 Turbo Silver was listed at around $100 and it was a pain in your budget.
By the time Bryce 2 was released for Windows, you had Imagine 3 (far beyond Bryce in my opinion) for free in a magazine cover disk (Amiga version so sorry Windows users).
In the late 90s the German software label Topware released a software bundle under their “Gold” line for a meager $25, which included 3D Studio R4 (for DOS), which was a huge deal, and I was lucky enough to get it. Turned out that the deal with Autodesk wasn’t finalized at the time of producing the discs, so a second run of the collection had to be produced without 3DS on it, while Autodesk sued Topware over it.
Still, it was one of my earliest steps into 3D graphics, which turned into a career.
