Making my 1970's-style renderer multi-threaded
3 comments
·November 23, 2025PeterHolzwarth
70s? Are the 70s and 80s far enough in the rear-view mirror that they have blended into one? (Well, at least up to 83-84).
Or, am I forgetting some 70's pop images/film animation that used this style? I'm thinking of the matte transparent quads look of the mech, etc.
retrac
No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film.
The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until about '81 - '82. Textured rendering was driven by rapid performance gains with parallel and vector processors. I can't think of any use of textured surfaces until the early 1980s, outside of some experimental things like "A Computer Animated Hand" (1972).
The Genesis effect in Star Trek II (1982) was considered mind-blowing at the time. Most people in the audience would have never seen anything like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer. A very expensive one minute of film.
What we would recognize as the early 3D graphics scifi style emerges in the early-mid 80s. For example, The Last Starfighter (1984): https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32
Why exactly would a hardware 3D renderer be unable to create the desired aesthetic? I don't see anything in the screenshots that couldn't be done using the features of Direct3D 9.