CGI. Now with liminal spaces.
Unknown creations beyond human comprehension
Also sometimes lamps
Often a teapot
Soundcloud: / user-503704039
Patreon: / theknowledgehub
Be sure to check out my other channel ; / whimsu
Video Credits. Lots of good CGI stuff out there and I couldn't cover it all;
Ultimate History of CGI
Gabriel Mendes
Retro Space HD
Muzzy mawr
thelateraleye16
VintageCG
Rich S
Arbor Video
Sean Cunningham
saburwulf
Digital Guru
David Hoffman
crystalsculpture2
smeedysyd
Big 13
Imagine being the guy who invented cgi only to moments later have countless bowling ally owner’s knocking down your door demanding a piece of this new technology
Yes, bowling alley
this aged wonderfully
Don’t remind me of the certain video
@@JM99-Official huh
@@minecraftfnafsbrp5194 A video parodying bowling alley animations but made it so that it was a... NSFW gif has been making the rounds online recently.
It’s easier for me to appreciate Veggie Tales now since you realize that in the beginning it was just four college dropouts working on one computer. Even if it looks crappy now, it looks incredible for 90s standards
The smartest thing about it wad that they chose veggies because they were simple shapes. Bob and Larry were just a circle and oval, and they just bounced and stretched to walk and move
Yep, credit where credit's due: the crew behind Veggietales were pioneers in commercial CGI
I’m gonna say it, in my opinion the older veggietales still holds up and it’s super charming especially in the “oh no what’re we gonna do song”, I love the pillars and checkered floors
It's crappy in a very charming way that makes the characters still clearly look like they are supposed to. It didn't try to force past its limitations and end up with some uncanny, ugly end product. They kept it simple and as a result, created recognizable, memorable characters
Ok
*5 years from now* “Early AI was horrifying”
I noticed some parallels as well.
tbt Google Deep Dream back in 2018(?) where it made eyes and dog faces melt with everything. What a delightful nightmare
Remember back when we thought the first dall-e was “highly detailed” ah memories
here after sora was announced
10 months*
As someone who lived through this time as a child I can say that even though the graphics were crude they looked incredible and inspiring. I knew by the time I was an adult that they would improve immensely. I remember going to an early imax theater in a museum and watching a 20-30 minute movie all done with grids and triangles and feeling like I was witnessing something incredible
YEP MATEY AND THE BEST THING IS SOME OF THESE WERE MADE BY TODD HOWARD
@@NigerianCrusader dude turn your capslock off, have seen multiple comments from you in all caps lol
As a child, watching this stuff (and things like Reboot) felt like peering into a different world or another dimension that worked on fundamentally different rules from reality. As cool as actually-realistic CGI is, I feel like something was lost. The deliberate artificiality of early CGI was fascinating to my developing brain.
maybe the more realistic the animation becomes, the less people think about it as a computer created image and just look at it as an image and take it for granted. With the early cgi it makes people think about how it must have worked and was constructed.
@@katzunjammer Yeah, that's a lot of it. You couldn't look at early 80s/90s CGI and not immediately see something artificial, so they tended to lean into that for a deliberately surreal and otherworldly aesthetic. Now that CGI animations can fit in more or less seamlessly alongside real people that's pretty much completely gone. The technical limitations led to some really interesting artistic choices and a very distinct aesthetic that doesn't get used anymore (even despite the fact that we supposedly just went through our 1980s/1990s Nostalgia Era as a culture).
Imagine if there was a horror movie that would end up taking advantage of this type of CGI, it would be very interesting honestly
I was wondering that too. Polly Gone completely freaked me out there. Those eyes are were a jump scare and a half!
Its a bit unintentional, but the cgi in Lawnmower Man is uncanny in all the right ways
I’m sure there is at least one courage the cowardly dog episode that does
@@Seansadventure I know exactly which one you're thinking and it's hella creepy kzhead.info/sun/erqEcZGkZ4JpZ68/bejne.html You're not perfect
Like the characters are in the real world but the bad guy is made of shitty cgi and the characters acknowledge that the bad guy looks like it’s made of bad cgi
what's wild to me is that the early animations from the 70s predate digital storage of the actual animations, it's all stored on film, you can see the artifacting. It's wild that they were able to produce the images digitally, but had no easy way to reproduce those images at the time besides film (or maybe videotape, still analog though)
Wow, that part never occurred to me, but that is super cool to think about
pretty sure video tape, is just film inside a plastic container. but fair point. Edit - i said, im pretty sure, but i stand corrected. thank you youtube comments, you have taught me something that should have been obvious - film may look like tape, and serve a similar purpose, but they are not the same.
well, what I'm about to list may still not be digital storage, it depends on your definition of it, but in the 70s there already were laserdiscs and very very early stage hard drives (very expensive and the size of a fridge for 5mb)
@@DisentDesign I might be wrong but I think videotape is like vhs or beta it’s stored magnetically.
@@basik6825 that is true I had forgotten about laserdisc. As far as the drives, I’m pretty sure there were no any video compression algorithms or file types at that point. Although they must have had something by the late 80s since there’s much higher res masters compared to anything before.
I love how for toy story, the animations of the toys were a bit staccato due to technical limitations, but in the later movies they kept it as a stylistic choice.
What does that mean?
@@TurtleMan2023fr
music terminology?
As a pianist, I feel like by “staccato” animation, they mean “scattered” or with a “stop-motion” effect. If we go by the Italian word, it means “detached”. 📖
Early CGI really went hard on the "haunted circus" aesthetic.
Makes me realize "The amazing digital circus" isn't exaggerated at all.
It's so interesting that "Dinosaur Stuff" is now basically the kind of thing someone would make after just a couple weeks messing with Blender.
does this mean I could learn to make videogames in a year? if not, I’ll check again in a decade. I really want to make games but don’t want to devote years of school to it
@@willfrancescofini yeah, you could easily learn to get by in blender and unity + learn basic-intermediate c#, assuming you devoted 10 hours or so a week to it.
@@pimposki6232 hey, this is inspiring news! thanks for your level-headed words
they walked so that we could run
@@willfrancescofini depends what you want to make and what you know already. You can hop onto game maker, use the drag and drop interface and have a space invaders style game down in a couple weeks even starting with almost no knowledge. Similar with rpg maker. But if you really want to make something more in depth, then yes the time scale and effort investments go up quickly. But I've gone too long without doing it, so I don't care if it takes years
For anyone wondering why early CGI is so abstract, its to show off that you could do literally anything with CGI, an example of what i mean is when Tin Toy was first shown one guy from a studio asked "how did you program fear into that toy?", people genuinely had no idea how it worked or it's capabilities if they had no prior knowledge.
thats actually very interesting!
It’s just another tool for creators. It’s all still done by hand (except for some procedural tasks).
that makes sense actually. The synthavision demo is a good example because I saw the entire thing and it basically is a showcase of what you can do with it. They made simulated ads for lifesavers and brillo pad and also made like news reel screensaver type things. So when they showed it to people who had no idea what CGI was they could be like "Oh I get what we can use this for."
"How did you program fear into that toy" is such a cocaine-ass question. Very on-brand for the 80's.
@@agluebottle I miss the 80s 😔
I think the main issue with a lot of these early CGI attempts is that real artists weren't involved a lot of the time, and computer engineers came up with the video ideas and did all of the artistry. You can tell which CGI animations had traditional artists involved.
yep
This is largely due to early cgi having to be generated by deducing math calculations, like plotting a graph on a calculator, not by moving or warping an entire object's position with key frames as we do today. When the only way to create cgi scenes is by calculating multiple vertices' positions with advanced algebra by hand, your average artist couldn't be involved. It wasn't until around the late 80's/early 90's where cgi software had progressed enough to be user friendly for non-programmers. Pixar was such a standout before that time because of that. They were a leading developer of cgi animation, and also had a keen eye for storytelling. For what they lacked in visual artistry, they stood above the rest in technical advancement and narrative.
What could artists bring to this so early in its development? Problems, wasting time, nothing of value. Unless one of them was also a software engineer, but participation in development of early CGI had zero room for "actual artists"
@@Gamez4eveRwhat a fascinatingly interesting comment
@@Gamez4eveR This is not a reason to have a subwoofer, i'm sorry to say.
That demo from the 70s with the purple guy with the uncle Sam hat is amazing! I would have NEVER guessed that was made in the 70s. That's truly amazing.
Crazy to see the devolution since faking the moon landing only years before ;)
looks better than that roblox crap my kid plays nowadays
Looks like Pac-Man voiced by Jiminy Cricket
@anth636 If Pac-Man was sired by Thanos
@@IvoPetkovskiI love Roblox but god the official accounts not very good at making things
A lot of the best CGI animations took their technical limitations and ran with them. Surfaces look like plastic? Make your movie about plastic toys. Animations are robotic and clunky? Make your characters robots or AI. The world seems artificial and computer-generated? Set your whole story in a virtual world inside a computer.
underrated comment.
your world looked dreamlike? now it's all about a dream
World looked brown and crumply? Make your movie about being trapped in a bucket of poo 💩
I identify the first and third ones as Toy Story and Reboot, but i have no idea about the robot one
@@mateuszszulecki5206 maybe Wall E
I love old CGI. It was so weird and surreal and dreamlike but now it just replicates reality
@nemo pouncey No, what is it?
@@phoenixgaming-plakadrakes6235 a compilation of old CGI.
@@tsm688 that's pretty cool
@@TheOtherClips thanks!
@@phoenixgaming-plakadrakes6235 not all 2010s to present CGI looks realistic. Last I checked Pixar and Ilumination are still cartoony looking
Growing up with early cgi is what got me into psychedelics.
you’re so cool for that
@@grrlandi7180but not as cool as _you~_
same
We got to move these color tvs
@@S_WxIxLxLxIxAxMxS you are the coolest
To be honest, "Andrè and Wally B" from 1986 looks really beautiful to me. Simple, dreamy, smooth, something I would like to expect from a TV show for little kids.
ikr? It's the first time I've even ever heard of it and it's delightful! I thought his assessment was a bit harsh.
Shitty CGI has a charm to me, especially the early 2000s CGI. Nostalgia pumped into my veins via IV.
What is your Lieblingsfach?
But by the early 2000 CGI looked really good, just look at cutscenes in Final Fantasy 10 as example ( or other Squaresoft CGI animations from this time )
I like the CGI from Babylon 5. Especially season 1. That's some charming shitty CGI:)
Reboot has it best.
Ditto, as a child of the 90s, CGI and 3D animation always seemed like such a special, big deal, even if it hasn't necessarily aged well.
You know, the fact people thought that the moon landings were CGIs when the CGIs looked like THIS even after 1970s is kind of funny. Edit: The main arguement is that it staged sorta like a live action movie set, but some people actually believe it was CGI.
I don't think people really think it was cgi, probably practical effects in a real studio, look how realistic some horror movies with practical effects still look today
@@mattbabb921 The funny thing is that there was no way of faking the moon landings with practical effects either. Here's a fantastic explanation of why it was impossible: kzhead.info/sun/ktCohaiLa5Vpdqs/bejne.html (Excuse the charmingly odd style of this video, I personally like it a lot).
@@mattbabb921 The ending of Alternative 3 was frighteningly good miniature work for a joke documentary, which was made (AFAIK) by a documentary crew, not a sci-fi film one.
@@mattbabb921 Depends on who you encounter. There are many groups who believe in slightly different things on the internet, and there's definitely people who think it was CGI, as opposed to practical effects. That's the thing with wild conspiracies, even if you make some mistake in describing one you're still probably correct cause the believers are many fractured groups trying to support something from many different angles they think sound ok enough. Flat Earth probably has the greatest split between people who think space is an ocean and the glass dome keeps it from entering Earth and those who think it's regular space with possibly other flat objects / projections and all.
Staged*
It's interesting the things you think are a con - the dark, empty backgrounds, the odd feeling of the imprecise animation, the uneasiness caused by inconsistent lighting, the bizarre faces - because those are my favorite parts of these shorts
thought the same lol
Yeah. Just thought for a while what you said, and decided to open my Nintendo 64 after a long time for, not only revisiting the most nostalgic years of my life, but also to check out on this extremely uncanny feeling that these early CGI/3D Graphics emit
"The waves move in a very mathematical fashion" is now one of my favourite quotes.
It's funny how I can see the vaporware aesthetic was so influenced by 80s animation and its limitations.
Outrun, Retrofuture, Bauhaus, Synthwave, Memphis Milano, etc.
it’s carbon copy
Yea no shit that’s like the whole point of vapor wave?
That IS vaporwave....
Why is this video so condescending?
if you were around when it was emerging you'd know it was the most fantastic thing any of us had ever seen. there was no concept yet of "good" or "bad" CG. it was just magic
Facts that Mario 64 was so 🔥 like mind blowing
100%
I agree, that’s why to me the old N64/PS1 games I love still have that charm to them that games these days don’t have. Yeah technically it may be better looking, but a lot people want games to look more and more realistic it loses that fantasy appeal.
You didn't have to be there to appreciate it. Nothing has to be from your time, to grow up with it. I grew up with DOOM 1993, yet I was born 10 years later. I still love it, not only for its contributions to video games, but its pixelated faux-3D charm, even if it terrified me at times. Revenants, mancubi, dark areas, tight corners, accidental jumpscares, gore, mobs, traps, the icon of sin, and the map 30 music made me hesitant to play. But I played anyway, of course.
And it all happened within a person's generation. That's how fast it all was.
Personally, I find Early Computer Animations as a pinnacle at its time. I mostly call it "Abstract CGI" b/c of the unusual polygons, appearances, etc.
27:08 the sound disappears for a bit.
IKR?!? I wish there was some way to convey this to the content creator and maybe get a reupload
This needs to be pinned or noticed assp ;0; i felt like i was going crazy
@@geekdivaherself if he did that the youtube algorithm would murder him
@@JohnJCB that's why I said maybe. Some content creators think that a clean copy is more important for an individual video here and there than the algorithm. Some don't.
Probably muted it because it had copyrighted music
The strongest CGI fan vs the weakest Claymation enjoyer
I'll say this, even the weakest claymator knows how to use them hands
*Aardman:* Am I a joke to you?
Claymation looks amazing when well made
oh are you KIDDING ME??? HOW ARE YOU EVERYWHERE MAN @@poweroffriendship2.0
Is there any video on the Internet where claymation and CGI are combined? Maybe, an experimental short where a CGI character examines a claymation character, staring at him in the "what the fuck are you even?"-kind of disbelief and/or vice versa. There probably was something like that in the recent CDRR movie, but I don't remember if there were interactions between the two styles
The amazing part about this is how Blender is capable of doing all this tenfold, and is completely free
Every one of these animations, especially the animators behind them, are what made that possible today 👏👏
Why aren’t there more success stories like Blender? I know there’s free photoshop knockoffs but what about something as good as After Effects but open source? What about a robust open source replacement for Solid Works or CAD, which is something super close to Blender but is parametric modeling rather than direct modeling. Maybe Blender could branch off and work on that. It would bring manufacturing to the masses the way Blender has brought 3D modeling/animation to the world.
@@davidswanson5669 the problem is that a lot of the high end effects from photoshop have a patent and as such only adobe can use them, that is the reason why even other pay products cant really compete with photoshop but aside from that blender had the right mentality which allowed it to grow, before 2.8 blender had its own way of doing things more centered around shortcuts with many tools only being accesible through them which from profesionals more adapted to other tools like MAYA, 3D max or lightwave which are more centered on mouse keys it proved extremly dificult, 2.8 completly revamped the entire interface because the guys at blender realized that if they wanted to be competitive with the big boys they needed to play by the rules, which they did this is not something that a lot of other free alternatives use, one of the biggest weakneses from GIMP for example is that compared to other tools like photoshop is extremly diferent which makes it confusing, just changing from the GIMP libraries to .PNG is a fucking show, and unfortunately GIMP is the closest open source competitor to photoshop other programs like solid works or autocad personaly i dont know
not only is capable of doing all this things, i could do one of this animations in an afternoon and have it render in like 5 minutes
@QUAD849 the software is still pretty important, you could have a modern computer run blender 1.0 and apart from rendering incredibly fast the renders would be shit because that version of blender lacks all of the fancy tools that modern blender has, like hell blender didnt had N-gons until like 1.6
Early CGI has a bit of a charm, nowadays, i look at CGI and i am like "BORIIINGGGGG" but i look at old CGI and i am just fascinated by the things it was able to do back then and the plasticky style of shading AHHHH MAN i love it
**Modern day CGI is capable of creating near realistic designs of worlds and alien races, with True Realism in video games is only a decade or so away from being a part of reality.** Facko: “This shit is boring.” **1970s LSD induced fever dreams with worse graphics than Gameboy games.** Facko: “NoW tHaTs ReAl CgI!”
@@johnnyrocket1685 Modern CGI is boring and always will be. You can have your 3D animation be realistic as possible or have a game with the most Realistic graphics ever, but if it's not interesting to look than what's the point. That's why i like Early CGI. (And if people like Modern CGI that's perfectly fine, this is simply my opinion, nothing more, Shame on you for mocking my preferences XD)
@@Fatih_M177 Honestly I agree to a certain extent. I like realistic graphics and beautiful lighting, but it needs some type of style to it. Like a color overlay, or a certain palette, a filter etc. Just having realistic graphics only goes so far - you're taking up all my computer's resources, so it better be worth it! It's why I still play early 2010's roblox games, for instance, with all the harsh angles and flat lighting and crunchy sounds. I don't know why roblox ever decided to go more realistic with their player models (outside of the obvious: to sell models). Also why games like spore, everquest, doom etc. still get players - they have a stylistic charm despite their limitations.
none of these animations creep me out, strangely enough, they make me giggle. i love them
A note about the humans in _Toy Story:_ The limitations of 90s CGI is the reason why PIXAR waited until _The Incredibles_ in 2004 before making a film focused on human characters. They knew it would be off-putting, so they instead made their first five films about toys, insects, toys again, monsters, and fish, before feeling confident enough to make a story focused on humans. And they came a long way in the twenty years since their first film: The shots of the newborn Riley Andersen at the start of Pete Docter’s _Inside Out_ (2015) are praised for how good CGI had gotten by the mid-2010s, often being compared to the _Tin Toy_ baby for these reasons. In fact, I’d imagine that some people found this uncanny, not because it’s not quite cartoony, but not quite human, but probably because it’s almost _too_ realistic, which would be repeated a year later with the CGI faces of Grand Mifflin Tarkin and Princess Leia in _Rogue One: A Star Wars Story._ (2016) In addition, another great achievement in animation in _Inside Out_ would be the particle effect on the emotions. Originally, this was only meant to be applied to Joy, (Though whether this meant all Joys or just Riley’s Joy is unclear) before being scrapped for being deemed too expensive and time-consuming. After the animation team got over the shock of an impressed John Lasseter having the effect applied to all the emotions, they actually pulled it off, and it really helps emphasize how different the humans are from the emotions that inhabit these extradimensional planes of the mind by having the latter have this grainy, almost fuzzy texture to them. You could almost say that they’re felt.
pixar's story of decision making is a masterclass for basically any type of management imaginable how they knew before hand their limitations, and used that knowledge to guide the type of production they'd invest money and time, while pushing over their limits, to further bridge the gap between technical limitation and artistic vision, WHILIST managing to make big bucks, putting out picture length films that would competed directly with summer blockbusters religiously every 3 years of so is stuff pulled out straight from management heaven
"Too realistic" is not how I'd describe those weird people.
"You could almost say that they’re felt." holy shit
@@Stettafire I wasn’t referring to the emotions; I was referring to its human characters, and I guess I worded it in a vague way.
@@Daniel_Huffman Pretty sure he was referring to the humans as well; I'm of the same mind.
I had literally no idea that there was CGI animation that good in the 70s, it just blows my mind
I remember seeing this stuff for the first time in the early 80s. It didn't seem like a big deal because they were generating most of it on super computers of the era. Here's another tech tidbit that'll blow your mind. Electric cars have been around since 1832 and outnumbered combustion vehicles for much of the 19th century. Most people aren't aware of that.
meanwhile, in 2021, i only understand how to make a box
Flight of the Navigator was an amazing movie with early cgi.
@@mezzovii Delete cube.
@@chytstorm dang that’s cool
I recognized a lot of these, because I grew up watching the "Mind's Eye" tapes in the 90s. They were collections of these early CG demo reels set to soundtracks by people like Jan Hammer and Thomas Dolby. Beyond the Mind's Eye specifically was always my favorite. Also, Reboot is one of my favorite shows of all time. Partially because of the CG that was mind blowing for the time. But also because it is just plain a good story. Growing up with things like that, and early 3D video games, and seeing where the technology is now, is incredible. Its amazing how much the technology has changed in only a few decades. Though, I do miss the pure, surreal, and dreamlike essence of these early CG animations. By comparison, most modern CG just feels boring. The only thing these days that comes close to capturing a similar feeling is AI generated animation.
Yes!! I was scrolling through to see if anyone else mentioned The Mind's Eye! Was definitely disappointed he didn't mention it even though his video has clips from it. I had no idea it was a collection of a bunch of things put together.
Gate to the Mind’s Eye was my favorite. 🤗 Dolby’s music contributed so much to it too.
_Mind's Eye~✨_
Yes! My dad gifted this to me. I don't remember where he got it, only that it was free. I watched Reboot, too... Alphanumeric!
Hell yeah! I'm in Canada and grew up with YTV in the 90's, they would take clips from those Mind's Eye films as "Short Circuitz" between shows. I loved them.
Thank you for putting this together - it showed a lot of the shorts shown on the BBC's Micro Live (and possibly a few other programmes) - that I hadn't seen for decades - that inspired me to pursue a career in CGI/editing/motion graphics!
For finding early CGI terrifying, you do have a lot of favorites.
well, people can enjoy things while also recognizing they’re objectively scary or creepy.
My favorite relatively early full-production CGI film is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Lots of people complain about how it falls heavily into the uncanny valley, but I think it still holds up remarkably well given that it was being produced back in 1998-2000. For a 22 year old film entirely made with CGI, I honestly think it still looks quite good. Unfortunately, the theme and style of the film, much like several other animated films of the time, failed to reach the target audience, and thus it flopped spectacularly and caused the studio to shutter.
wow ok jeff pop off
@@mndlessdrwer Aw that’s a shame, idk how many FF films there are, but I swear they never do that great and its always a bit sad to see :( but then again I genuinely have no idea if that’s right or not lol
I'm blown by how complex 70's animation was. And the teapot hits as a cute nostalgia perk.
I know, the computers they used were practically an abacus duct taped to a calculator.
It quite honestly idek why but it boosts-up that visionary easy-going, & relaxin' nostalgia as a kid :D
Apparently the Genesis Planet sequence in Star Trek had a render time of hours PER FRAME! It took weeks to make. Which makes you wonder why they didn't use traditional animation, at the time it would probably have been faster and cheaper.
I legitimately didn’t know these even existed. I had no idea this was even being messed with as early as it was. This is absolutely fascinating.
black sky boxes and the limited atmosphere is what really draws me towards the uncanny look of old 3d animation
Back in 1990, I worked with 2 animators who produced CGI using an Amiga computer outfitted with a Newtek Video Toaster. Each frame had to be rendered and layed down to tape on a JVC MII machine. A short clip would take all night to render. My job was to edit all this animation together. Heady Times. 👍
Laid* down. *runs*
I think your lying, there’s only 7 biLLION PEOPLE IN THE WORLD AND NOT MANU PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT CGI UNTIL TOY STORY RELEASED SO U ARE LYING SORRY FRIEND BUT THE CHANCES ARE TOO LOW WE WILL NEVER BELIEVE YOU
@@gtc239oh no the grammer police
@@gtc239Were all glad for you're corrections
Its a good thing rigged animation was created
It’s honestly crazy how CGI has gotten exponentially better over a pretty short period of time
It's still shit, though.
@@douglasfreeman3229 As compared to what? This comment makes little to no sense lol
@@douglasfreeman3229 sometimes, yes. not all the time though but i can still see where you are coming from
And then Hollywood just got lazy with it and we got shit like Marvel Studios movies.
@@douglasfreeman3229 it's only shit when you notice that it's shit. It's so good often, that you don't even realize it's cgi.
I know this is meant as a jab toward the old and uncanny early demos, and even though I am someone growing up in this new technological Era, I can't help but still be struck by this. Fascinated like a child by this display of old groundbreaking technology. It's still so cool how this can be created by the resources collected from the earth, minerals and such, put together as this box which generates images; in a crude sense. It's just fascinating.
Thank you for this video, I've probably watched it at least 30 times. It's great background noise and I've gotten to the point where I have unintentionally memorized parts of it.
the devs who created cgi are legit supergeniuses. it's really really really hard to make simple figures from early versions of code.
It took a hell of a long time.
Back in the late '90s I was doing a computer course and we learned to do (old, even then) Pascal programming for DOS that lead to Visual Basic code for windows. Had to learn a lot about MS DOS 6.22 as well like creating .bat and .sys files. Got to learn to craw before walking. Anyway, we had a Pascal program that did basic shapes that danced about. Shapes like a triangle, rectangle, circle and square. Simple stuff one would think. Then I looked at the code behind it and I was blown away just to draw a square, let alone make it move and make it grow bigger and smaller. Many many lines of code.
Todd howaRD PROVED U WRONG
@@infinitesimotelNO IT DIDNT IT TOOK ONLY 5 MINUTES TO RENDER
@@robynstephens166THATS NOT TRUE MATEY YOU NEED TO PLAU MORROWIND DO KNOW ABOUT THAT WHICH U CLEARLY HAVENT MATEY
I am a 3D artist and I think I should unite with a group of other artists and recreate this dark vibe with lowpoly cgi
🙌
i want to learn this style, is there a youtube video or something that can help me learn this?
Agreed.
@@GoldenmikeRD the style? Just use the worst renderer you can find, that’s how you learn it lol.
90's revival.
I love this video so much. Thank you for making it. I keep coming back to watch it
The fact that this groundbreaking technology has come so far that it can nowadays be used by the common man like you and I to animate Patrick Star dancing to "Como te voy a olvidar?" has got to be one of the greatest testaments to human ingenuity.
Honestly I wish that early 90s cgi horror takes off just like analog horror it feels and almost looks purposefully made to be scary with the uncanny characters, dead background, weird action and plot along with the static noise I’m surprised that no one used it to its full advantage yet
I would love to see that, this is just my assumption but I think it would be hard to pull off successfully? Like how do you pull off the horrific feel but still make it look good enough for today's audience? Very interesting
The youtube channel "surreal entertainment" comes to mind
Honestly? Early CGI abominations that clip through walls and whose faces morph horrifically like on those '500% facial animation' mod videos would make for interesting horror monsters, especially if contrasted with live action people Or well rendered, Disney-looking animated people
I thought Five Nights at Freddy's VR horror game used this aesthetic a little bit.
@@Hel1mutt i Dont think so i mean just look at the fnaf vhs tape genre they use 3d characters and environments which a 90s cgi style horror video could use for inspiration. if not then maybe the quality of the video decreases over time to the 90s style cgi starting off similar to how toy story looks only to become more and more broken
As a kid i always LOVED seeing these Computer graphic animations because of the synthetic look and vibe and the awesome atmosphere they had. I never saw them creepy but the uncanny feeling was part of the fascination. Photorealism can be impressive too but personally i always preferred computer graphic animations to embrace their synthetic digital nature and really love the smooth flat shaded looks with very simple visual shading. It is a visual style i just really really love. Especially when such CGI sequences are coming from a film source and having this film-layer added to it with the smoother edges and soft glows.
couldn’t have said it better
Exactly this. The surreality, the dreaminess, were much of the appeal.
I agree with you, the quality is only as good as the effort to make the "actor" in CGI come to life. Only when Pixar started making bugs that could actually pluck at your heart-strings did people start trying to compete by making the actors in the animated world much more believable.
people don't talk enough about the Sonic Adventure intro cutscene. It looks phenomenal for 1998, like on par with Pixar
My clearest memories of early CGI were the "Genesis Project" in Star Trek and the "Money for Nothing" music video. They were so impressive at the time. The Dire Straits video looks ridiculously primitive now.
I love how 80’s CGI is simple but underneath, there is a lot of complex computing power for its time. Nowadays, making a sphere, a cylinder and a cube are close to nothing.
I would have loved to watch “Tin Toy” as a Pixar short before seeing their feature film. That baby looked horrifyingly hilarious.
@@halftwins It was more funny than scary. Crude CGI is hilarious to me.
it also had real baby noises if you haven't watched it yet, as a kid in the early 2010s these types of thing taught me all about morale and how people ( or things ) feel without speaking. it gave me a feeling of wonder, watching a collection of old pixar things on a single dvd over and over. following up with cars, mater shorts (look it up) and the incredibles, just kicked off the first ten years of my life to be creative. if you look at my video's, all i have to say is that flipaclip stinky and i'm better at pencil to paper artsy things, and no i don't ask you to trust me. good day :)
a Wii game????
i thought there were only games just for the the xbox 360 or something
you have given m e fear and exitment yet again for the Wii thank you
I've re watched this about 30 times. Never gets old. It's a comfort video for me...
Rewatched it like 10 times since...
As a kid, we had a couple VHS that were just dozens and dozens of early CGI shorts and I watched them so often they are basically baked into who I am today. I need to find them and digitise them, because I have yet to find full rips of them. They were called 'Imagina [insert year here]'. Seeing a handful of these shorts again was such a serotonin boost!
The part that CGI was missing until the mid-2000s was "Subsurface scattering" of light. Most objects that look bad in most CGI are partially translucent (esp. humans)
That's a great point 👍
True but the shading was very limited too. No PBR.
sub-surface scattering is also why most animatronics are incredibly creepy as well. Same with wax replicas. There's just not a great way with current production methods to get the right sense of depth to the skin, and any methods that might allow for this are really an absolute pain in the ass to produce. You could totally make a multi-layer silicone skin for an animatronic, burying the red muscle and vein layer beneath a semi-translucent layer of flesh-toned silicone, then painting on the pigment to add detail to the skin before adding an extremely thin layer of slightly more translucent silicone and adding surface details to that, but it's still just a pain. That's three molding processes at least and working with layers of silicone with that tight of tolerances is a nightmarish proposition. Now imagine needing to bury those kinds of details into a 3D model and simulating it on a computer with light ray tracing and you begin to see why nVidia producing CUDA accelerated sub-surface scattering plugins and renderers is such a big deal back in the late-2000's.
@@mndlessdrwer I'm positive that wax is translucent.
@@tsm688 it is, but they typically need to apply so much paint to the surface of the wax that this effect is lost.
I am shocked how good the CGI was in the seventies! I thought it was a nineties invention.
"I thought it was a 90s creation" that is so cute...
me 2
I mean, it's just that what you needed a million-dollar machine to do in the 70's could be done with a thousand-dollar machine in the 90's. But better hardware will not magic you into being an artist, as this video shows.
Me too. I knew it was around in the 80s (glad the Money For Nothing video got a mention lol), but was surprised to see it from the 70s.
Oh, you sweet summer child...🤣
The Amazing Digital Circus nails that feel, but updated
I remember a lot of these tech demos between cartoons growing up. It's amazing how far we've come.
Is it just me or does mid-80's CGI feel like your watching a dream lmao.
Ong it does
Get high as hell then watch it
@@justbainz7 what happens after you give up god?
@@Slipknlov I got no clue my boy
@@justbainz7 lol i was faded and i was gonna rant about how "ong" is technically a wager of god, and i was curious what would happen if the bet was lost LOL cheers
It’s insane how far CGI has come, some scenes in love, death, and robots you can barely tell it’s CGI
Tbfh!!!! Sometimes they look real af! Also when is the new season coming 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
A lot of movies are like that nowadays and I’m impressed
That's great and all, but I don't watch that show to see exactly one style of animation every time. Season 2 was supremely disappointing in that respect.
I also think we used to be stunned about the technological representation of these amazing artworks rather than their perfect aesthetics but now we are able to admire them as they deserve.
did the sound get muted towards the end?
Got into CGI in 1989. Got instantly hooked on making graphics. 30+ years later I'm working in the industry. All because of these simple demos, that at the time were awe-inspiring.
Interesting... did you start out with cyberstudio/cybersculpt on the atari ST? I think that predated most of the Amiga 3D packages.
@@Viczarratt I started on 3D Studio 3.0, I think and there was another software. Alias Animator or something like that. I don't remember. I was running on a 16MHz IBM 286. I still have that 3D Studio on floppies somewhere. It fits on 4 diskettes. A freaking 3D package on 4 floppies! How amazing is that! Amiga's I only read about. Never actually seen one live in all the years.
@@enilenisThank you for haring your memories ) I know which one you mean! Autodesk animator, because 3Dstudio was also an autodesk product! if i remember right, one needed the 287 coprocessor installed to run 3Dstudio... and 4 floppies! i think Raydream designer for windows3.x also came on 3 or 4 floppies
Bet it had to take some time to process before releasing your first project.
@@Anime2012Mii I made a 3 minute clip at 320x200. It took about a month to render. Back in those days, waiting times were no joke, but it was still amazing and totally worth it. It was still "magic".
Something about bad CGI feels very nostalgic
its old
video games
Not bad, it’s just old.
You want bad, try the crude hand-drawn animation on "The Bullwinkle Show." But they made up for it with the best writing on TV.
@@BigGoji99 it's bad dude
Nah, early CGI is underappreciated art. Truly wonderful art that doesn't deserve to be coupled with meme buzzwords like "liminal", etc.
Liminal means "in the process of breaching a threshold". These demos are literally liminal.
People who disregard things as buzzwords are squares
@@TheMMAKasual It became a buzzword the moment people abused the term, deal with it.
@@MemoxWasHere extremely subjective based on your irrelevant opinion. The term buzzword is overused in itself hypocrite.
@@TheMMAKasual It's not subjective if it happens objectively all over the internet, maybe do some research. For every person that uses the term correctly there are dozens that use it erroneously or worse, as clickbait titles; if you deny that, you're delusional. Also, labeling people by the words they use is an irrelevant opinion, as well as an hypocritical ad hominem, don't you think? Especially in this case, since "buzzword" doesn't have that many synonyms; it's a stupid word, but sometimes you need such things to represent stupid trends.
I loved ReBoot. I did notice that the animation/characters/shading/etc. improved for the better towards the end of the series. What a difference
The moment when that weird _"bowling alley screen animation"_ every time you get a strike becomes an opus magnum on its own rights. The early CGI is what happened if you look at the mind of Salvador Dali when he sleeps.
I appreciated those animations. Then those _two_ animations on Twitter ruined it for me.
@@glacierwolf2155 DONT
@@glacierwolf2155 omfg I remember 💀💀💀
I actually like creepy early CGI aesthetically, and I think in the right media it really works. Like in the case of a game like Persona 1, the surreal and unsettling CGI adds to the overall dream-like feeling of the entire game.
One of, if not my first experience with CGI came from a VHS called "Elroy's Toy", which is compilation of scenes, two of which "High Fidelity" and "Breaking the Ice" were mentioned in this video. It remains as one of my oldest memories.
The Minds Eye animation shorts were amazing to watch back in the early 90s. Even revisiting them decades later they still have a novelty coolness to them that's worthwhile.
I feel like I should be creeped out... yet I find these animations more mesmerising and oddly calming than anything else.
It’s less to process, but more to observe and appreciate
It’s a clickbait title. Nothing creepy or horrifying. Just cool
EXCEPT FOR MORROWIND CGI
@@jackdylansoundINDEED
@@trashyraccoon2615but Morrowind is also clickbait unfortunately
Fun fact: The movie Casper (1995) was the first movie to have a CGI character as the main lead and was the first movie to capture a CG character with realistic human emotions and expressions using motion capture on a animator's face to capture the ghosts' facial movements convincingly. And redesigning Casper's wider eyes from the cartoon to more rounder "sympathetic eyes" like E.T. which was also suggested by Steven Spielberg along with taking elements of the voice actor's dental or eyes when creating them. And... I'm gonna have a hot take but I think the animation on Casper aged better than Toy Story. It's more smoother, more expressive, not plastic looking, it's fluid and not stiff movements and the character expressions hold up well today, like they blink at the same time unlike Toy Story where they blink slightly before with each eye. And that movie also came out months before Toy Story as well. So we can really thank Casper and his uncles for making CG protagonists and more convincing emotions like today's Disney movies and live action remakes.
I had no idea that was CGI. I thought it must be some other sort of animation. And I had no idea it was that old either
For every compliment for these monumental accomplishments there are 3 complaints from this guy…
I find it really amazing for its time, there was a 1972 cartoon with some pink ball character from Synthavision. Then there was the 1984 Andre and Wally B, all were really good for its time. I wouldn’t say it’s horrifying, but rather hilarious and goofy.
as a 90s kid, honstly early CGI scared me and often I would have abstract, limited light source, low poly nightmares 🙈 liminal space nightmares, imagination lands you couldnt leave unless you woke up or learned to be aware The opening for the Eye Whitness kids educational tapes creeped me out too x'D
Damn that’s awful it felt like you were in silent hill 1, lol, though i know i used to be scared of something being on screen, and nothing but a black void being behind it probably why i had a fear of the darkness for awhile.
Yep, the kind of CGI that, for example, has the digital face of Caine, the main villain of Robocop 2, is nightmare fuel and I never understand why exactly.
yes! me too!! I read a very interesting paper on how the human population’s dreaming actually changed on a massive scale with the advent of film
@nemo pouncey Neo NEO N E O NEO NEAR EARTH OBJECT
one of the first nightmares i remember having was being stuck in a super pixelated simulation lol i just played PS 1 at the time hahah, not even cgi related but its funny you mention nightmares it reminded me
As a kid I had this VHS tape "Beyond the Mind's Eye" which was essentially just a collection of a bunch of CG shorts (including some of the ones you show here) but all edited together under this astounding Jan Hammer musical score. It completely recontextualized what were originally unrelated commercial pieces, tech demos, etc. If you're not familiar with it I definitely recommend the "Mind's Eye" series but particularly "Beyond the Mind's Eye". That "little Death" sequence, with the dog and the pyramid etc., is truly haunting with the new music over it
Ha! Nice to see someone else remembers "Beyond the Mind's Eye". I had that VHS tape. For its time, it was pretty mind-blowing.
I think I came across a DVD for it at a vendor mall once. Truly one of those titles that you first see and think “the fuck is this???”
I had those and was fascinated as a child
Thank you for this comment, I just discovered something amazing!
@@JonahIronstone If you're interested, there are actually four films in that series (you can find the names on Wikipedia when you search Beyond the Mind's Eye). I think the films are on KZhead but I just got mine from the Internet Archive website for a higher quality rip. I've got them on VHS somewhere, but I doubt they work since they've been in a hot attic or a damp basement for 20-something years.
when I seen many of these animations as a kid in the 80's. I was so blown away, I just wanted to learn how it was done.
I don't know why, but my dad had a lot of these shorts on various VHS tapes when I was growing up as a kid and I would watch them SO much! I recognize almost all them from 84' onward which is weird because I didn't even exist for over half a decade later. High Fidelity is one of my earliest memories even! So glad he showed this all to me. RIP dad, thank you for all the core CGI memories!
I am obsessed with the sort of absurdist horror that seems so common in a lot of these. Some of it seems pretty intentional, but even the ones that aren't still have a lot of artistic merit I think. The abstraction that was necessary due to technical limitations just makes it feel so alien and interesting.
14:35 Kinda surprised you don't like how Andre and Wally B looks. I've been deep in the 3D animation field since I was a kid, but besides that bias I have an immediate affection for the lighting of the forests and such.
I loved that clip as a kid :(
All it needs is self shadowing & HDR & its photo realistic. Its uncanny a little bit due to the programmed animations i think... nowadays we use motion capture which our brains recognize as real movement.
@@1NOTEGBEATZ I generally hate motion capture, because it _never_ fits the character they did it for.
@@DannyDevitoOffical-TrustMeBro I had that Pixar animation collection and my favourites were the chess game one and Red’s dream
I grew up across the 80s so I got to watch most of this unfold in real time but I'm impressed with some of the stuff from the 70s that predates TRON. Looks better than I would have guessed.
what i'm curious about is the jump in technology between toy story and shrek. they're really not all that far apart time wise, but shrek is one of the earliest examples of a full length CGI film that i feel still truly stands up to today. toy story is still great (says the person who was absolutely obsessed with everything buzz lightyear for a solid chunk of my childhood lol) but like you said there are definitely things that don't quite look right. sid's dog is probably one of the creepier things. but shrek somehow seemed to like. finally for the first time really nail ALL the elements it needed to, and it seems like very little of it jumps out as obviously old CGI. they even figured out semi-realistic people without getting all uncanny. they may have overestimated how big the moon should be in that one scene, but like, it still looks good even if the size makes no sense. granted it has been a little bit since i watched it, but not so long that i feel like it's impacted my thoughts of it compared to other stuff.
I love how a number of early CGI demos look exactly like a youtube creepy pasta
totally
NO THEY DONT MATEY
@@aptdccviiGUESS WHAT HATER THEY DONT
@@NigerianCrusader dear god what's wrong with you
NOTHING SWRONG WITH ME@@randomcookie2706
9:28, "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" by John Walter Bratton, 1907. Lyrics were later written by Jimmy Kennedy in 1932. The most well-known version is probably the one recorded by Henry Hall & His Orchestra in 1932. This song was the inspiration for the "Gruntilda's Lair" theme in the 1998 video game Banjo-Kazooie on the Nintendo 64.
I was just about to comment about the similarities - interesting!
I legit thought it was bajo kazooie. Thanks!
I knew it sounded familiar and i hated how familiar it shounded, yet I couldn't think of a name or find any trace of it EDIT: It's still not what I remembered it being. I remembered it sounding almost exactly like this but somewhere else, and it's bugging me so much that I can't remember EDIT: It's similar to part of the doctor who theme from the original series. Particularly from the 5th to the 7th doctor
I thought I was crazy because I thought it sounded so much like Banjo Kazooie!
Does anyone know what the name of the animation is?
11:48 went from happy hat man to Sweet Tooth's cousin from Twisted metal
This was a great thing to stumble across and watch and it was put together really well. Thanks for this.
Holy crap, I have a Laser Disc with almost all of the 80's examples on it, It is called Art of Computer Animation. We used it to demonstrate primitive NTSC video projectors. Chromosaurus blew people away. It's hard to express how futuristic and engrossing this stuff was back then, especially to computer nerds. We boggled over the horsepower required to render each frame--which took days.
I got into Laserdisc _because_ of all the vintage CGI you can find on it.
I remember watching entire demo reels at Best Buy and Circuit City as a kid. There were a lot with music and weird instruments. I was sure he was going to include them.
Great memories for me
@@Takeshi357 any on DVD or blu ray now?
@@martianleader1 There's probably quite a few, but I expect a lot of it to be more in the line of what Pixar did instead of the weird and unusual demo reel stuff.
Fun fact: All of those little toys under the sofa in Tin Toy at 25:13 have their own names that are listed in the short's end credits. Each one was also created and modeled by each team member in the short's production. Here are the toy's names: Toypot (the yellow tea pot) Ace (the pilot in the airplane) Helicopter Sheep (the sheep with the propeller on its back, my 2nd favorite of the toys) Rallye Guy (The man in the little red car) Flip-n Beth (The green caterpillar) Clocky (The red clock) Zoo Train (The train behind Clocky with all of the cage cars) Renderman (The superhero wearing blue and red, named after Pixar's developing software) Spot (The orange horse/dog looking creature) Les and Frodo (The two little toy people with knobby hands) Chrome Dome (The blue and silver robot) ??? (A decapitated head who doesn't have a name) Bouncy (The basketball with eyes) Gumbo (The stupid-looking elephant whose name is a parody of Disney's Dumbo. He is my favorite of all of the toys, and my favorite Pixar character) Eben's Car (Based on Pixar director Eben Ostby's own blue car, or maybe his dream car) Fire Hydrant (You probably know what those look like) Tin Toy has always been one of my favorite Pixar short films, even before I was at the age to notice the quality in old CGI animation. The cursed traits and weak CGI are what give it charm and nostalgic qualities. I will always put this cartoony style of 3D animation over the hyper-realistic stuff Disney has been leaning towards these days.
I know there names also
Some of them make an appearance in toy story 3 too lol
Nice
There is also baldi the traumatic eye style
@@jamescleaner6194BUT DO U KNOW TODD HOWARD NAME
It's unfortunate such a key part of the video got its audio muted. :(
Absolutely!
I remember renting a VHS that had a bunch of these on it. I remembered thinking I was glad it was only $.50 but it was kinda cool to see all the early cgi stuff.
You can tell how many edgelords of that time that dwelled into programming was working on those demos as directors. Especially in that "dinosaur meets dragon" demo.
I guess nerds haven't changed much.
the prevalence of "sexy robot with big boobs" type imagery too.
That dinosaur was a spoof of something I forget. It was the 80's equivalent of Barney. Parents were quite sick of it.
To this day, early CGI is one of my favorite aesthetics, it's so surreal and dreamlike. It's also super nostalgic to me as someone who grew up with N64-Gamecube era games that had so much promotional art making use of the medium
GOD DAMN IT
Sameee
Yep
Vaporwave, is still more nostalgic, since it can give you strong nostalgia without getting why.
I remember when GTA 4 was about to come out, and i kept hearing "photo-realistic" everywhere. They still say that for new games now, but until i can look at something, and i can *not* tell the difference, it's really not photo-realistic. It's just an exaggeration. Hype. I think besides the computer technology and software, monitors need to advance in certain ways to work along with it. "3D" was just stupid, especially with the glasses. But the layered screens and what they're doing now as an example. I think this is the path we need to be on if we're ever going to achieve true photo realism.
I really love this video I keep coming back to re-watch it very often just because of how much I like it and just because it's a great video
Same
Awesome deep dive. Reminded me of 'Outside In', that short about how to turn a sphere inside out. It's cheesy, but I watch it every time it comes up in my recommended. Ever seen Hypernauts? It was a '90s kids show by the Babylon 5 people (same universe I think?), and even though some of the CGI looks pretty '90s-tastic, a lot of it holds up.
I would have loved to have heard your thoughts on "The Works".
Hi skul
Hi skul
Hi skul
Hi skul
Heeeeey! Skul.
As a kid, my dad had a set of 3 VHS's with compilations of a bunch of mid 80's to early 90's CGI tech demos. The chrome dinosaurs, mega cycles and the two fish lovers clip, were all on those VHS tapes. I remember watching them, and enjoying them so much. Though some of them were kind of creepy for a young child. Haha. Thank you, this brought me back. So yeah, the VHS tapes were "The Minds eye." They were so cool.
kzhead.info/sun/a82kaLuqr6ywZok/bejne.html
I remember watching that too when I was kid.
Yep, I too frequently watched The Mind's Eye" as a kid. Always liked the accompanying soundtracks by James Reynolds and Jan Hammer. However this is the first time I've seen these animations with the original audio, so that's pretty cool.
@@cs188 interesting to see you here
I do computer aided design and computerized drafting and I gotta say, this stuff is so interesting after understanding how take 2D drawings I create and extrude them into 3D model items in computer programs is so cool
The Hawaiian Punch ad won a bunch of awards not just for the CG but for the music. The soundtrack for it was by Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO fame, who formed Mutato Muzika, a production music company where Mark & his collaborators have produced soundtracks for numerous TV ads, TV Show, and films over the years.
Trent Reznor was highly influenced by Mark Mothersbaugh; the audacity of calling it a "Trent Rezonr knock-off" lol smh
Devo
NIN wasn't even out yet until a year or two after that ad was made.
@@SpectacleDifficulty Trent Reznor would probably lose his mind with happiness if he heard that
The progress is insane.
4:59 Ummm, guys, is this the Freddy Fazbear and Bonnie The Bunny? Ur ur ur ur ur.
Reds dream is one of my favorites, I just loved it as a kid. Love all these animations, they just have something too them that is great!
When Money for Nothing came out it was mind-blowing, and holds up largely due to the fact that it never aspired to realistic representations of the people characters. It owned it's CGI-ness. Pretty amazing considering that almost nothing designed for standard-resolution TV looks decent on a modern high-def or 4k video platform.
Yeah, I loved that video when I was a kid. I don't think it's accurate to say that they didn't aspire for realism, though. That was as close as they could get! It wasn't SD TV that was the problem, nor was SD TV the highest resolution they had. The workstations that they used to produce those animations had high-resolution displays (well, way higher than broadcast TV, anyway). Moreover, would you say that video from a camcorder looks "unrealistic"? The issue always has been (and still is) the amount of processing power and storage you need to render an image in a given period of time. What's missing is realistic lighting, textures, etc. The limitation was ultimately time and money/resources (processing power). The workstations capable of rendering those images back then cost like 40,000+.
@@bsadewitz They weren't going for realism. The same team made another version of the Money for Nothing video, for the Beverly Hillbillies themed Weird Al parody. And it contains CGI versions of characters from that sitcom. With the characters from a live action sitcom to compare against, we can say they weren't going for realism. If they were aiming for realism, things would look very different. The Weird Al version honestly is also a great video, in a "holy sheet two cakes" way. Like, theres Two Of Them. Wow. It is honestly just the same thing as Money For Nothing, and its not one of Weird Als best parodies either. Would pick the original as the better one. But again, we live in a world were there's Two Of Them and I like that.
It's also funny when the characters from it cameo in Reboot and get made fun of in the show for their looks. Considering that they arguably hold up a lot better stylistically than any character from Reboot does.