How much did the equipment for the animation cost and how long did it take to render?
Nowdays you can play Call of Duty 4 and have the computer render incredibly detailed images in real time.
I remember back in the mid 90s I worked in the video industry, and Lightwave 3D came out. It took sometimes hours to render a single frame, and you recorded it onto videotape one frame at a time, which put a lot of use on VCRs. (And on a side note, oh the joys of match frame editing, I actually got it right once.
So going back even farther, even as crude is the animation is, I image it took a long time and some expensive equipment?
The Quantel Paintbox wasn’t for the 3D, it did the glowy lines on the headband and guitars.
I am going to guess that the 3D was really time consuming, as back then they didn’t really even have interfaces for the software, it was almost entirely done with complicated mathematics programming.
Here’s a video for a Mick Jagger song that came out around the same time, a more ambitious and creative CGI video that is much less well known.
The animation was done with a Bosch FGS-4000 CGI system. This was run on mini-computers. What I can recall was that it was a similar to 2 1/2D systems, mainly rotating 2D images in 3D space. It was rendered at fairly low resolution. It probably took something like 2 minutes per frame, but that would depend on the actual machines used. The scenes of the band were done by rotoscoping live images.
There was a lot of 3D rendering software emerging for Silicon Graphics work stations at the time that could outperform the Bosch system. Rob Abel’s Sexy Robotwas done at about the same time. This used full 3D at higher resolution with much better color, and probably rendered at the same speed.
