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Ancient 4D

@ancient4d.bsky.social

92 followers 6 following 31 posts

Developing new old-fashioned modelling, animation and rendering software. by @hiddenasbestos.bsky.social

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Double sided material test. #retrocgi

A cup with a gold interior and bluish exterior

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

CGI melon render for #screenshotsaturday

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

A selection of renders from Ancient 4D

Red balls on a checkerboard plane in a light fog.

A normal mapped pot on a checkerboard floor.

A demo of a fog plane on the X axis, fogging objects on the left of the scene.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Buttons can have text and optionally ugly test icons ! I still need to settle on a UI style but the back-end is working properly.

Two user interface buttons with vaguely cuboid icons next to the word "vertices".

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

For UI I'm writing my own event driven toolkit on top of SDL3. So far it's working great and I have text rendering, scroll bars and buttons.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

* blows dust away * -- OK I'm using this account again ! To catch you up I've been working on a multi-threaded CPU renderer that uses a Blinn-Phong lighting model, which you can see below. This is now quite feature-filled, and fairly quick, so I'm turning my attention to UI work. #retrocgi

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Fixed the slice mode to support fillets. (Working in the command line and using modo to actually render it is really helping keep focus) - think my fancy cylinder generator is done

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Smooth fillets are done! - also semi-smooth chamfers and reverse-fillets where the top/side seams are sharp but things are smooth radially. #lowpoly

A cylinder with a semi-smooth top chamfer. There's a hard seam between the chamfer at the top / side.

A cylinder with a semi-smooth top reverse fillet. There's a hard seam between the chamfer at the top / side.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Hard vertex normals are now working for fillet/chamfer/reverse-fillet cylinder generation. Next up ... smooth normals. #lowpoly

A cylinder with a fillet on the top edge. Faces are selected in orange from top, around the fillet and into the side. Vertex normals, in pink, are subtly visible and show unique normals per face.

A cylinder with a chamfer on the bottom edge. Faces are selected in orange from base, up around the chamfer and onto the side. Vertex normals, in pink, are subtly visible and show unique normals per face.

A cylinder with a reverse fillet on the top edge. Faces are selected in orange from top, around the fillet and into the side. Vertex normals, in pink, are subtly visible and show unique normals per face.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I added the 'fillet mode' and since I'm running the radius/Y position through a shaping function - accidentally got it backwards and now I've fallen into a rabbit hole of options 😄

A cylinder with a reverese fillet, and indented quarter circle shape.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

So, fillet is underway. I realise that actually you might want to have a segmented chamfer though. So I'll add an option to explicitly select fillet or chamfer, rather than my initial plan of making "segments = 1" imply a chamfer.

A cylinder with segmented chamfered edges.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Started working on adding filleted edge support to the cylinder. I want each primitive to be packed with features rather than needing tons of nodes / stacked modifiers to meet common requirements. #lowpoly

A 3D model of a cylinder with gaps at the top and bottom edges where a fillet or chamfer will be added.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Added (and documented!) a new procedural Tube primitive to the growing roster. #lowpoly

A short tube with 8 sides. Also shown are the default UV mapping co-ordinates.

A half tube rotated to look like a tunnel. One of the sides is selected and shows the smooth normals splayed out slightly at the corners.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Trying not to repeat mistakes of the past and go off and only do code - I've made a start on some documentation !

A word document containing a long list of parameters and descriptions for the box generator in my software.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Gooch shading was available in Modo for like 10+ years before that video, so I'm glad it was popularised! (RIP Modo) It's really great for clearly shading hard surface models like a 3D blueprint. Definitely adding this feature. Uhm enjoy this example image 😬

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Current status. There is no UI. I wrote a command line tool that generates primitive shapes. Currently a box, plane, cone and cylinder. Definitely early days !

A truncated cone with a polished oak texture.

A Windows console window showing a list of named and typed parameters for the various shapes.

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Ancient 4D @ancient4d.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I'm working a new old-fashioned low poly 3D modelling (direct and procedural), animation (4D!) and rendering (Gouraud + Phong) software with a focus on #lowpoly and #retrocgi I'm calling it ... " Ancient 4D " ... it might take a while. Follow along to watch it grow !

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