Cassiopeia-The first ever CGI film???

Woah! What the balls is this!? 

The lost child born out of the ashes of Lance William's canceled THE WORKS?

Seems that way. What a way to start the new year.

This is Cassiopeia, a CGI film released in Brazil on April 1 1996.....

A good 5 or 6 months after the November 1995 release of Toy Story....

From what little info I can gather online, production on Cassiopeia began in 1992 and didn't enter the animation phase until 1993.... around the time Toy Story was still in the storyboard phase and was a nearly threatened a shutdown of production.

I've also read many claims that this was actually the very first all-CGI film made.....

But Toy Story came out first but you could say Cassiopeia was the first in production order.

And here's another tidbit, this film had 3d characters that were created entirely within the software... none of that clay model digitizing crap that Pixar and other companies used and the people who made this film were actually proud of it.

What's interesting is that instead of the film being made using SGI workstations and Sun Microsystems renderfarms like Toy Story was, Cassiopeia was actually made on PCs....

As in the x86 CPUs of the time.

That's right. As in computers that were marketed for office and home use

Like that PC.... well not like this Compaq shown below but close enough.

Which is strange because back in the 90s, the only way you could do movie quality CGI on computers using this modern form-factor was using workstations from the likes of SGI, Sun Microsystems, etc.

And those workstations were way out of reach for the general public not only due to the high cost of purchase for these machines but also due to the high cost of purchase of a license for the Software as well as the steep learning curve for most of these software. 

Not that the general public would have a use for these workstations when the only thing that matter to people who owned a PC was for playing games like WOLFENSTEIN 3D or DOOM, Jazz Jackrabbit, or Duke Nukem.

Speaking about Software, How much did Autodesk 3D Studio cost in the mid-90s?

And they say people would rather use Blender because it's free and we don't need to use uber expensive packages like Autodesk Maya.........

The first 3d models on Cassiopeia used a PC running on a 20mhz 386 SX but eventually, the film had it's final frames rendered on a cluster of 17 computers using 66mhz 486 DX2-66 CPUs.

Very long to render but was it worth the effort?

By the way, I also heard production was hampered when one of the computers were stolen during the rendering process.... OUCH!!!

Admittingly, I never even seen this film to begin with but would I really want to? 

I'm mostly just interested in the behind the scenes production stories of how these films are made than the actual product because you might actually like all the behind the scenes drama surrounding these films. 

ACCIDENTAL LINUX DELETE COMMANDS ANYONE?

90s CGI Cartoons...... Some of us have memories from when rendering had that plastic look and can only be done on expensive workstations from SGI.....

To the point where most people who make those dank memes prefer to use those frames from said era of plastic rendering limitations due to how surreal and uncanny they are.

We've come a long way with rendering 3D animation since those early days. Nowadays, we use RTX Graphic Cards or RTX derivatives to render our work or we just use the RT Cores to provide realistic lighting to our favorite video games.