Sculpt 4D

Sculpt 4D is a three-dimensional modeling, texture mapping, raytrace rendering and animation application released by Byte by Byte Corporation for Apple's Macintosh computers. It was a complete rewrite based on the Sculpt family of software developed for Commodore's Amiga computers. The new code developed for Macintosh version of Sculpt 4D was never ported back to the Amiga platform due to the decline of Commodore and uncertain future of the Amiga.

In late 1986, Eric Graham wrote the SSG raytracing program for the Amiga 1000 as a bit of diversion and to prove ray-tracing was possible on a microcomputer. (He used this to create the Juggler animation which was included in Tom Petty & the Heartbreaker's "Jammin' Me" video often shown on MTV in 1987.) Because of the overwhelming response to the Juggler, he approached Amiga hardware developers to support him in making these programs into a more powerful, friendly and inexpensive commercial application. Byte by Byte Corporation was one of the few early makers of hardware expansion devices for the Amiga 1000 microcomputer. Their PAL Sr. expansion box, with a C2-ML (an ST506/MFM hard drive controller), GargantuRAM 2MB RAM expansion card and hard drive, turned programmer Eric Graham's basic Amiga 1000 into a comparatively powerful development system platform for the mid-1980s. Sculpt 3D was released in the fall of 1987 under the Byte by Byte Corporation brand.

This program was one of the first which used the so-called TriView (three-view) editor. The objects had to be modeled by defining a set of triangular faces composed of 3 vertices connected by 3 edges. The editor also assigned color, smoothing and surface type (such as metallic, shiny, dull) to each face. Following the definition of a ground, sky, lights & a camera; Sculpt 3D would render a simulation of the camera's view in wireframe, flat (or optionally Gouraud) shaded or ray-traced with Phong shading. Sculpt 3D could be controlled through the Tri-View GUI or numerically via an included scripting language.

Later, Animate 3D was released which supposedly patched Sculpt 3D to layer in keyframe inbetweening capabilities of the 3D models. (This was a bit of misdirection as the Animate 3D updating software simply verified the Sculpt 3D application was available and completely replaced it with a more capable application with the animation features.) It also had features to control rendering of successive frames as well as combine the resulting images into delta compressed "movie" animation files with sound.

The next generation, Sculpt-Animate 4D was an application targeted at the professional animation market. The animation control was more integrated into the program and the rendering engine was more optimized. Considering that many Amigas were based on Motorola 7.16MHz 68000 processors with only 512KB of memory, SA4D had to do a lot with very little. However, owners of Amiga 2500,3000 and various turbo boards, with extra RAM, could unlock a lot more of the programs potential.

Amiga Sculpt family of software:

Sculpt 3D; Animate 3D; Sculpt-Animate 4D ;Sculpt-Animate 4D Jr. (included no raytracing or scripting controls)