How completely bizarre to see the interest in this weird one-off system LOL. I find myself strangely capable to answer all your questions. I spent 5 years being an FGS-4000 animator. I was the first computer animator in Ireland in 1986, and the largest post-production house in the country, Windmill Lane Pictures, bought one to create shiny logos and VFX for a busy commercials and music video business, and I was hired to drive it. It was a crazy thing - huge hardware, took up almost two full racks with a racket of cooling fans - we kept it in a glass-fronted AC closet. I'm not a CS guy, but what I can remember is that it was a Motorola 68000 based CPU (which matched the Mac Plus on our desk), with a 16-bit, bit slice processor (which on its own, spanned the full width of the rack). I think it had 16MB RAM. It had an 8" floppy drive and two hard drive units, each of which contained two 25MB drives, one fixed, one removable, for a total of 100MB storage. Interface was a large custom keyboard with both hard and soft keys, and six dial knobs, and a pressure-sensitive pen, tablet and multi-button puck.
The mid Eighties marked the emergence of commercially available CGI animation systems (prior to this, there was really only companies like the early Pixar project who wrote their own systems, which were not possible to buy - it was their own IP), but the market was very small. At that time there were pretty much only four options if you wanted to go out and buy something you could create 3D computer animation on - Alias, Softimage, TDI, and the Bosch FGS-4000. Weirdly, only the Bosch was American (they were located in Salt Lake City - was it built by Mormons I often wondered?). Alias and Softimage were in Quebec, and TDI was French. The Bosch was unique among the four in that it was a hardware-based solution - the other three were software-only solutions running on Unix workstations (typically SGI or Sun). So the while the other systems could only display wireframes on a computer monitor as you created the work, the Bosch displayed solid flat shaded objects 100% of the time via a PAL or NTSC video monitor, and wireframes weren't used at all - there was no benefit in switching to wireframe even when the objects had become so complex realtime playback was no longer possible. This happened fairly soon - it didn't take a very complex object for frame rates to drop below realtime (maybe 10,000 triangles? I can't remember that much detail). Phong and Gouroud shaded objects would be rendered in software in the CPU instead of the GPU, a slow, video line by line operation viewable on the output as it rendered. It also featured a paint system, which wasn't bad, though definitely not as good as Quantel's Paintbox, which was quickly dominating that market. But, like all these things, it had some interesting tools.
Output was bonkers. Once the frame was rendered, a VTR in a separate machine room spun up, backed up 7 seconds, and rolled to make a 1-frame edit onto 1"C format video tape. That was the least reliable part of the process, as our projects became more complex and we'd spend two weeks rendering 24/7. All that spinning up and down (a 30-second commercial needs 750 edits) wore the hell out of the tapes and you could have a completely useless render because the video tape had dropouts. Ugh. I have stories of unhappy rendering experiences.
All the work I did on it was either for TV commercials with those metal shiny logos, or wacky FX for music videos, and paintbox-type effects, rotoscoping and the like. Everything had to spin in and land in those days, it was very MTV, hilarious and cheesy but it was a BIG deal at the time. After a few years, Bosch introduced a separate rendering device for it, which was a massive monster of a thing called the Pixelimator. It took up half a rack and was mighty heavy. It accelerated rendering like mad, which was becoming a bottleneck in CGI production by the late eighties as lighting and texture and bump mapped surfaces became more complex. The entire combo of the FGS and the Pixelimator cost over half a million bucks, no kidding. AFAIK, about 150 were built and sold around the world - it was really popular after the Dire Straits video (I was friends with those guys).
Eventually TDI slowly dropped away, Softimage did well for a few more years and I moved to that next, in the late 80s (it was way more sophisticated), and the Bosch's initial hardware lead faded away. But Alias just got stronger and stronger and more and more widely accepted, turned into Maya, and has ended up pretty much dominating CGI ever since.
I've never visited your forums before but I hope you can enjoy the read. I haven't ever written or thought about the FGS in 35 years, and to blunder into this thread had me laughing like a drain.
, only capable of face lighting. My, how far we've come...
