Discreet Flame 9.5

Behold the mighty Flame. After days of attempts I managed to install the software and have all the hardware and drives properly recognised and functioning. I can’t thank enough the people of the Irix NETWORK forum. Special thanks to gijoe77, def13 and irikinus for their direct help and support.

As a professional compositing supervisor it’s amazing to be able to play again with this software on the original SGI hardware.. actually in this case the very same machine I used 20 years ago.

The original workstation came with Flint 7.6 installed, after some testing and consideration the best version of a discreet product that can run well on my Octane is Flame 9.5 from 2005. Finally with the version 8 they introduced resolution independent projects management and v 9 was completely rewritten as a 64 bit application. After this release Discreet launched another 2 versions of Flint / Flame for Silicon Graphics hardware, the last one named Flame 2008. Sadly I would need more memory and a V12 graphic card instead of my V10… soon or later I will upgrade : P

I copied via FTP a bunch of clips that I had in my photo library just to play a bit with the software. I am still quite impressed by the smoothness and responsiveness of playback, 3d space and painting tools.

Quite shocking how the system handles real time reflections on a 3d object… on a video card with 32 Mb of memory of which only 8 dedicated to textures.. yes megabyte!

Mac Calligraphy

Here’s a quick sketch inspired by a cave painting.

Mac Calligraphy is one of my favourite software on classic Macs. It is basically a Japanese version of MacPaint that allows you to modulate the “ink quantity” in an ingenious way. Drag you mouse fast enough and the brush will release just a little bit of ink. Go with slower movements and the stroke will be thicker. A very detail review by James Wages can be found at this link. Take your time and visit his channel!

To enjoy the full Mac Calligraphy experience boot your 68 Mac directly from the floppy disk, you will be welcomed with a custom System, with themed icons and desktop background. So far tested on a Mac SE. Something newer like a Classic or Classic II won’t boot from the disk.

MacPaint

“Lighthouse” inspired by the game “World of horror”. Slowly painted with the mouse on a Macintosh Classic with MacPaint. Such a simple software but a real joy to use. I work at the very top of the visual effects industry and it’s so fascinating going back to something so essential. Black and white, 512 pixels on your screen, 4Mb of memory if lucky.

The great wave. Mouse only on a Macintosh SE.

Experimenting with some pattern. Since the only possible interpolation is “near” pixel, using the rotation tool it is possible to degrade the image and achieving interesting, organic results.