Documentary - The 3D Toolkit from dvgarage

Those of us who were around on the boards here back during the heyday of Star Wars fanfilms in the early to mid 2000s may remember the 3D Toolkit from dvgarage, basically a slightly cut down version of Electric Image Universe 2.9 that was sold from 2001-2006ish for 80-90% off the full Electric Image price and came with many hours of training taught by a veteran of ILM's "Rebel Mac" unit, Alex Lindsay.

If anyone remembers DaftMaul and Storm Ahead, the 3D Toolkit was what he primarily used. I actually bought the Toolkit myself back in the day for use on a (fortunately never completed fanfilm) and always wondered what happened to it and why it seems to have vanished without a trace.

DaftMaul was kind enough to do a lengthy email interview with me on his experience with it, and with that, plus a few months of researching and heavy use of the Wayback machine (and lots of digging through archived theForce.net forum threads), I was able to put together a half hour documentary on the history of the 3D Toolkit, how it was used, and draw some conclusions about why it eventually vanished.

Figured there might be one or two other old timers around here that might get a nostalgic kick out of this

 

Ha, very nice! That certainly was a trip down memory lane for sure. Completely forgot about DV Garage. It was cool seeing some Duality stuff on there. I remember watching that film as well as RvD and thinking that I HAD to get a Canon GL-1. Thanks for the time you put into that.

SB

 

I wanted a GL-1 so badly back then...I was trying to shoot my fan film with a cheap little 600 dollar DV camcorder that was so poor with color that it made green screen basically impossible to key (the fact that I didn't know how to light a 30 foot by 10 foot green screen set didn't help...one foil covered piece of cardboard as a reflector plus a single shop light was umm...not really helping things ).

I just added the full email interview I did with David to our Substack, there was a decent amount of additional information he gave me that didn't fit in the video.

Full Interview

 

Hah! Just saw this today. Left a comment on the YouTube video, but figured I'd share it here too....

Hah.. @15:50 "..paying only $65"... Hey! That's me!

Wow... we're getting really close to that being 20 years ago.
Time flies when you're having fun.

Who would have thought that in those two decades I would have had a career in feature film VFX and since moved on to teaching computer graphics at a university. Actually.... even more surprising is that Disney now has an entire business model around making internet fan films.

Ah well. Thanks for the memories.
Have fun.

 

Very cool! I responded on YouTube, but I'll ask the same questions on here:

How did the 3DToolkit help you and did it play any role in your career? What are you using these days for 3D? And of course the big question...what is your opinion on why the Toolkit seemed to make little to no impression?

 

And of course the big question...what is your opinion on why the Toolkit seemed to make little to no impression?
Actually, the 3DToolkit was the tip of the spear for a massive transformation in how film and video is produced.
In short, this toolkit made a MASSIVE impression.... and I can remember one year were I and two others who had started out with this toolkit were each in different parts of the country, watching the Academy Awards in anticipation because we had each worked on a different film that was up for the Best VFX Oscar. I don't think any of the three of us would have reached the point we had just a few years after pickup up the Toolkit had we not had that opportunity as our entry point.

Based on your video, it seems like at least part your assessment of "little to no impression" is based on what you could find in terms of internet videos...
but this actually disregards a big part of what David shared in his interview with regards to just how difficult video hosting was at this time. "internet video" really wasn't much of a thing at all at this time. Even demo reels had really just transitioned from VHS to CD and/or DVD.

While I did use it for personal and commercial projects, there's a compounding factor in that the 3D Toolkit was really designed as an on-ramp for bigger things for those that dove in, rather than intended entirely as an ends to itself.
Which leads to.....

How did the 3DToolkit help you and did it play any role in your career?
The big deal is to remember that the Toolkit was not simply a stand-alone software product. It came with a collection of digital lessons/tutorial resources... and eventually connected to forum and ultimately a nominal-dues-to-participate community (mini-guild actually) called the Pixel Corps.

This predates anything like it. In short, this was the gateway into an entirely new paradigm, preparing a cohort of new digital artists, distributed around the world, for what was to come when the internet (in the future for that time) would reach speeds that would make it feasible to routinely transfer production files digitally instead of the most common approach of its day.... files copied to a hard drive or burned DVD and shipped via FedEx.

Seriously ... this was a time when burning a 3Gig file to DVD and shipping via FedEx was faster and more reliable than trying to upload/download via the internet.

But as the community that the 3DToolkit led to grew in numbers and skills, other software companies took notice and began to offer cheap or free tools for use by the group in exchange for the group developing training materials. David mentioned C4D, but I can also remember FormZ, Modo, and others, as well as deep dives into things like Photoshop, AfterEffects and general on-set greenscreen work. In particular, I was introduced to Shake (compositing), Kaydara MotionBuilder (for mocap), RealViz Matchmover Pro (camera tracking) and RealViz PhotoModeler (photogrammetry) tools. Beyond the individual tools (many of which no longer exist or where "eaten" by bigger companies), the Pixel Corps facilitated members' ability to develop skills and demo reels through training, enabling community learning, and even engaging in production work (both volunteer based and paid).

Certainly, many members were truly hobbyists or moved on to other career paths, but there were a good number of us that leveraged the experience to launch related successful careers.

What are you using these days for 3D?
For most of the nearly 20 years since I picked up 3DToolkit I mainly used Maya and Nuke, with a splash of other tools including
These days, most of that is converging into Unreal Engine / Virtual Production.

I'm on a live webinar tomorrow (March 11) at 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific if you want to learn a little more about some of that:
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8174098616285859083

Hope this helps.
Have fun.

 

Thank you so much for your very detailed response and feedback, I find your perspective very interesting and I really appreciate your taking the time to write it out.

I did want to explain my conclusions a bit more, as my (obviously subjective) opinion still has not changed on the 3DToolkit's lack of impression on the broader industry. Based on my research, I came to this conclusion for the following reasons, which I may not have delineated in the video as clearly as I could have:

1. The 3DToolkit was originally Mac only (which David mentioned), greatly limiting its potential market in the indie and fanfilm area. This also had the side effect of those creators who were running PowerMac G3 and G4 systems (I believe Duality's creators used both G3 and G4 systems), which were of course higher end, probably having the money to purchase the full Electric Image, if they were so inclined. Once the PC version was available (which did happen quite quickly in all fairness), you were then running up against all the hacked copies of 3DStudioMax.
2. Electric Image was basically in free fall in the 2000s, which had a severe knock-down effect on people evaluating the 3DToolkit as a purchase option. If you want to start the extensive process of getting your head around the full 3D pipeline, why use a product whose full version costs a similar amount to competing products (Lightwave, 3DStudioMax, Maya) which had far better support and were used far more widely in the industry? I think I own the only two significant Electric Image books, (The Electric Image Handbook from 1999 and Professional 3D With Electric Image Universe from 2003), there really was a paucity of learning materials apart from what the Toolkit came with. Additionally, once Electric Image lost the Modeler, you were no longer getting the full package and learning the Modeler in the Toolkit didn't really help you since it was no longer relevant (I think the modeler program is still around as a stand alone product, I looked at its website while researching for the video. So presumably some people are still using it, but its got to be a very small amount of people). Furthermore, the Toolkit stagnated after 2.5 and never received any further update, as well as being removed from Electric Image's website. I don't know if this was due to dvgarage going a different way, or Electric Image, struggling with a collapsing market share and losing the Modeler, deciding to just focus on Animator/Camera and drop everything else?
3. I understand that the Toolkit was supposed to be an on-ramp for amateurs to learn professional skills on a professional piece of software, and the amount/quality of tutorials that came with it were definitely a huge stand-out feature(you and Nutley both cite this). But it seems as if very few people bought it and used it in any capacity. I think the problem was maybe a marketing one? I remember being on the Toolkit forums in 2006-2007 back before they were moved to Pixel Corps, and they seemed like mostly a ghost town. Were they a lot more active earlier? Dvgarage was a small company, and with little to no help from Electric Image, perhaps they just didn't have the resources to really market the Toolkit as it deserved.
4. Its not that my gauge as to whether it made an impression or not relies solely on internet videos such as fanfilms or demo reels, its that I feel that those were the most likely people that it should have appealed to and those productions were the ones that could drive free advertising for the product, much as Duality did for Electric Image (and wasn't Dave Macomber from Duality somehow involved with the Toolkit?). But dvgarage's press page was rarely updated, reviews of the Toolkit were few and far between, and I don't think I found a single substantive review/feature on the Toolkit from after 2004 (I'm going off of memory on this, but I think that's right.) The Toolkit got a burst of publicity in 2001 when it was released, a few mentions here and there over the next couple years for features such as PC/OSX compatibility being added, and version 2 was released and that was pretty much it. How were people supposed to learn about it if no magazines mentioned it, no advertising was seen for it, and no videos/demo reels/renders (on DVD, printed in 3D magazines, or just stills posted on websites) were ever passed around about it? Storm Ahead looked amazing, but why was it the only project with any visibility?

Ultimately I stand by my judgement that the 3DToolkit was an extraordinary program packed with amazing tutorials that deserved to do far better but unfortunately failed to make much of an impression, probably due to factors outside of DVGarage's control.

On a different note: I remember drooling over Pixel Corps back in the day and trying to figure out if I could find the money for a subscription...but I never took the plunge. I do wish I had in retrospective, buying fewer video games would have probably paid for it and I might actually have learned something.

Once again, thanks for your perspective and memories, I really appreciate it!