3D STUDIO MAX KINETIX DEMO 1996

3D STUDIO MAX and CHARACTER STUDIO KINETIX DEMO - 1996

[skaruts]

The nostalgia.
It's amazing how powerful the program already was nearly 25 years ago.

[englishwithphil]

This brings so many nostalgic feelings! I remember 1998 when during a family day out in Moscow I saw this 3D Studio Max book with tutorials and a CD. It was quite pricey and my parents told me to choose either going to McDonald's (we could only afford that about once a month) or buying this book. I was 12 back then and I chose the book, a decision I still don't regret making!

[azynkron]

For those that weren't there, this was Science fiction to us. It can't be overestimated how much this was ahead of anything we had seen. The real time editing was just mind blowing.

[TheG_Boy]

Those 3D renders has such an appealing AESTHETIC to them

[Silentfox]

My father was a 3d modeller in the late 90s early 2000s. Him using this software constantly are some of my only memories of him. He left when I was 7. Haven't spoken to him in over 20 years now...

[Zarnubius]

there's something amazing about mid-late 90s CGI aesthetics (SGI included) that I find far more appealing than the hyper-realism of modern computer graphics, there was a sense of abstraction but also pure geometry, like you were exploring a different digital world of pure form and not just a digital recreation of our world. It's incredible what we can do now but this just had something magic.

[jasonrubik]

Story time: In 1996 I was taking Drafting 2 class in High School. The teacher let me mess around with the single copy of 3D Studio R4 running on the most powerful machine in the school, some 486 DOS machine. It was fun and I enjoyed the Shaper and Lofter, and setting up camera angles. Then later the teacher got this same Demo CD in the mail for Max. We had no machine to run it, so she asked me to decide if the school should buy a new machine and the full 3DS Max R1 program as well to run as a pilot program for the school. Well, we ended up getting the NT 4.0 machine and I spent about a month measuring classrooms in another area of the school and recreating them in Max. Then I mocked up how the rooms could be redesigned and made a walk thru video showing the new room layouts. This was then demo'd live during a school board meeting in hopes of getting more funding for the new "Graphics and Animation" department at the school. A few weeks later I graduated and went off to college. I wonder what ever happened to the high school graphics dept... I need to find out, I guess. During college, I ended up getting cracked version of R2, R3, and R4 and messed around with them a bit in my free time as an engineering student. In one of my general engineering classes, they asked us to "redesign the student study hall " in an old building. Well, I was ready for the challenge. It turned out that a fellow student in that class also had Max and tried to get a video for their team presentation. His render attempt crashed, but mine did not. So we had a great video walkthrough of the new room. Time went on, and I never really did much animation. Nowadays I hardly even think about 3D animation at all, but I think its time to dust off my legit copy of Max R8 that I got from a local high school during a robotics competition. p.s. I still have the Max R1 demo CD in a box somewhere, so I will try to record a copy of it as well, as this video here is missing the menus, and has the Character Studio segments out of order, since the behind the scenes erroneously showed first, before the final result with the characters.. ( this is backwards from how the other segments are presented). Fun times for sure !

[Gredran]

Please never delete this! I do CG now but this graphic style definitely is nostalgic to me as I grew up!

[Maneality]

I watched this as a child and dreamed about knowing how to make all of this. That dream is now a reality :)

Thank you for this video, it brings a good memories!

[jars]

This video is pure gold. Seeing it again after decades just might reignite the excitement I once had for learning 3D and trying to re-create everything I saw in the movies!

[tormint.mp]

I'm absolutely mindblown by how rich of a featureset this program had in 1996 and how familiar the user interface looks as someone who's only ever touched modern Blender and Cinema4D.

[ghosbear]

I remember using this version of 3ds Max on Windows 98 as a 10 years old kid, not knowing English, just clicking around trying to figure what does what. I didn't progress far but it was so fun.

[umonox]

this was basically the first version of todays 3ds max that i have ever touched - and it was the version that brought my attention to CG content creation in general. from that day on i knew there is a world to be explored. and im sooo happy that i invested all those painful days and weeks exploring how all of that stuff works - back in a time where there was no internet forum easy in reach to ask questions :)

[Vizeral]

Ah man, that flood of nostalgia. The video that got me into 3D, TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO.

[AndyTanguay]

Hello! I made most of what you see here in the feature demo area. I worked for an interactive company called Enlighten that did CD-ROM based software demos for Autodesk. I had come from Lightwave, and then to 3D Studio DOS, so these features were HUGE leaps at the time. Remember, Maya didn't even exist. Everything was TOUGH, and time consuming, to say the least. But we made the best of what it could do. We did screencaps frame by frame, then programmers would animate the cursor and flow in Macromedia Director. I don't remember the specs of the computer, but you can bet that it was a fraction of the power of your phone. I do remember having an early 3D graphics accelerator.

EDIT: For people digging on the music, it was all made specifically for these CD-ROMs...sadly I don't remember who did it. I wish I could remember and tell them that people are enjoying it.

EDIT2: I can't begin to tell you how happy reading the comments has made me. Knowing that these silly little animations made some kids want to get in to 3D/CG is just amazing.

[FictionCautious]

That creepy dance animation survived to this day.

[arnoldo]

I remember the day when my older sister gave me a magazine that contained a CD-ROM that showed this video. I had to wait until the weekend to go to a cousin house just because my PC didn't had a CD slot. When we insert the CD in that 686's CPU (My god haha)... and we saw that demo, we almost die watching all the things that the software can achieve. We jumped from "MS-DOS Paint" to 3dsmax and it was magical. Nowadays the 3D pay my bills and I still having that CD ROM in my collection! THANKS FOR SHARING THIS! This made me very nostalgic hahahaha

[DavidB-rxkm]

i remember Autodesk came into work in 2013 to discuss new features and what we might need on the next project (working on the Forza games) and they said they still had old code in Max that was uncommented and nobody knew what it did! A lot of the stuff exists in Max that is decades old, I've been using it professionally since the late 90's, I only use 10% of what it';s capable of and I love it to death.

[camocamel]

Can't wait to try this out, 1996 is gonna be wild

[DanielDelgado]

I was sixteen years old, the first time I saw this on my computer ... and now, yesterday, I saw what others managed to do for the demo of Matrix and Senua's 2 with Unreal 5. How great to live in this time, working on this !