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Comment by Varriount | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what kind of process was used to create the original animation? Was each frame hand-drawn, or some other technique used?

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I would assume frame drawn, but back in the day there was ANI to GIF converters. So it could have been done in 3D Studio Max, or Maya on SGI or Lightwave on Amiga -> .ANI-> .GIF

This by the way, means there could be a way to extract/archaeology dig after the original project file and make a nice 8K render of it.

I'm imagining some hacked up workflow that includes:

- Something like Autodesk 3D Studio R3/R4 (DOS) or Lightwave 3D (Amiga) for the base animation and the light rendering - that would be hellish to do manually.

- Some custom-built software for palette optimization

- Photoshop on Mac for the compositing (the 'N' doesn't change)

- A bunch of manual work per frame

Not necessarily in that order.

(3d Studio Max was released in 1996, Maya in 1998.)

Edit: on the other hand: Netscape was founded and founded by Jim Clark (of SGI fame), so the 3d stuff was probably done on software running on an SGI machine.

No, it was all flat 2D BMP. Just a row of frames full of pixels. Super simple. Most were made with GIF Construction Set and MS Paint.

We are discussing how the original animation was (or might have been) created in 1993/1994. Not what tools were used by Netscape users when creating replacements of it 3-5 years later.

Before Maya there was Power Animator from Alias|Wavefront :)

It was a bitmap image that consisted of a strip of individual frames. It was common for a while to make them from animated gifs (which were plentiful and popular on the web). http://leighb.com/throbgif.htm

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