This utility will allow Blender to load object files created for use with VideoScape-3D, a rendering and animation package for the Amiga Computer. This is known to work on Blender 2.8x and 2.90.
You can watch me clumsily piece this together in my YouTube video.
This isn't an installable plugin yet. Until then:
- In Blender, click on the Scripting tab.
- In the central editing pane, click the Open button.
- Navigate to and open
import_vs3d.py. The plugin source code will appear. - At the top of the editing pane, click the Run button.
A file dialog will appear. Navigate to your VideoScape object file and select it. The object should appear in your workspace.
Both text and binary object formats are supported. Tolerance for files with errors is meh; please don't stress the parser.
Camera, motion, and scene files are not supported.
Surface colors and attributes are not yet supported. (Leave a comment here or on YouTube if you'd like to see that added.)
As a creative compromise for the lack of texture mapping, VideoScape supported "detail polygons" -- polygons that were rendered in specified order after the parent polygon, thereby allowing you to draw over the parent to add details.
It is unclear how to properly support or emulate detail polygons in Blender, especially since they are not required to be bounded by, or even co-planar with, the parent polygon (so it can't be faked with texture imagery). As of this writing, detail polygons are loaded as if they were "normal" polygons. You may consequently end up with co-planar polygons that will display/render inconsistently in Blender.
VideoScape supported N-gons, where N could be as few as 1. Single-point "polygons" were used to create star fields (each star a single pixel). 2-point polygons were used to render straight lines (one pixel wide).
As of this writing, 1- and 2-point polygons are loaded by the plugin but, as they are degenerate polygons with zero area, Blender will not display or render them outside of edit mode.
Advanced VideoScape users have been known to use negative indices in polygons to "reach back" into previously loaded object(s), linking their meshes together and allowing animation of different pieces of the mesh to achieve stretching/bending/deformation effects. This technique was brittle, and required precise knowledge of the load order and vertex layout of objects.
This will not work, and almost certainly cannot be made to work. As of this writing, loading objects with negative polygon indices will cause the load to abort.
In 1987, Aegis Software published VideoScape-3D, written by Allen Hastings for the Amiga Computer. It was one of the very first 3D packages available for personal computers, Its low cost made it quite popular, and gave many people their first exposure to 3D rendering and animation.
Allen Hastings later joined NewTek to write LightWave 3D, an explosively successful rendering/animation suite that saw wide use in television and video games throughout the 1990's and early 2000's. He then went on to co-found Luxology where he designed and wrote Modo. Luxology was acquired in 2012 by Foundry Visionmongers.