[dougb]

Back in the 90s, Joel Welling and Chris Nuuja at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at CMU developed a similar system called P3D. It was really cool, and they had a bunch of backends to render on different high end graphic workstations. We even had a Pixar Renderman hooked up to a laser disk recorder. You could script a 3D scene with different light sources and cameras and over the course of a week, render some high quality NTSC video.

P3D: a Lisp-based format for representing general 3D models https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/110382.110608

P3D DESCRIPTION AND DEFINITIONS http://netghost.narod.ru/gff/vendspec/p3d/p3d_desc.txt

[kaveh808]

> over the course of a week, render some high quality NTSC video.

I remember those days. :)

[eschaton]

Was any of the actual code or other artifacts of the work preserved?

[dougb]

I looked, but I couldn't find a .tar.gz or anything. I emailed Joel and asked him to put it up on his github page, https://github.com/jswelling He has something called DrawP3D, but I think its just a library that you can call from C or Fortran that uses the P3D rendering backend. I could be wrong it was a long time ago.