I can’t imagine them having a huge selection.
Thats a good question, Lightwave was bundled with the Net Yaroze Playstation, but it lacked a lot of functionality. I suspect Lightwave was used on PC’s and then transfered onto the development machines, the bigger versions of the Net Yaroze (the Playstation Development Kits) given to software developers. Good question though, I’m interested myself now.
Softimage, Wavefront, Lightwave, 3D Studio and others in the early days of the Playstation. Max from 1996 when the N64 arrived then Maya not long before the PS2 arrived.
As an ex N64 developer
Multigen, Ningen, Power Animator, Wavefront?, Softimage, 3D Studio
Maybe a bit of 3DS Max and Maya towards the end
no lightwave in our studio (wasn’t very big in UK game dev)
Dpaint, Photoshop
3d studio on dos, psygnosis used to offer softimage or alias as a choice when you joined. Lightwave was indeed little known in the UK, but a personal favourite! It had only just made the transition to pc from Amiga around 95.
Dpaint was popular for making textures, along with PaintShopPro and PhotoShop.
Later I remember people starting to use nendo/mirai, but that was exotic!
Max came out toward the end of that generation and was either loved or hated like Marmite!
It had the right pricepoint though so quickly became established as the games tool.
God Dpaint…that takes me back! Rocking Imagine 3D & Dpaint on an A1200 with an 030 33mhz in it, hardcore stuff.
If I remember right the first Zelda on N64 used softimage.
At that time iirc softimage was 20 000 pounds sterling, Alias wavefront was 60 000 and 3ds was 3000. And Lightwave was 1200…
There was an article in edge magazine before the number of issues was even in double figures on the making of wipeout… all the tracks were made from nurbs patches on alias machines… it made me laugh because the final worlds were around 3000 polys in total… total overkill! The vehicle budgets inmost games were around 200 polys…
60 grand of inappropriate software for that!
Even pc games at the time would only stretch to 6000
The next gen dreamcast was a luxury . I remember it feeling like Christmas to do a racetrack with 15000 polys and a draw distance of 1800 meters rather than everything popping in at 200! And texture sizes in hires @ 256 with the tarmac at a giddy 512.
By 2nd generation ps2 games streaming was standard and worlds became millions of polys… though texture sizes went down sadly!
It makes me laugh seeing low poly artwork in the finished projects section like a treasure chest with thousands of polys…
I remember when Metal Gear Solid came out on the PS, there was a huge feature on it because it was one of the few games at the time to use solid mesh deformation in the characters, cutting edge stuff then! Still an awesome looking game even today I think, shows what can be done with a limited pallet.