90s SciFi TV Shows Made Possible By THIS Software!

A lot of the computer graphics seen in the early episodes of B5 was due to a combination of three things. They are the Amiga 2000, the Video Toaster, and Lightwave.

Don't forget: ID software used Lightwave to make Doom 3 (and maybe others), but more than that, the LWO's (and maybe some LWS) files were in the game folder directly; they were easy to load, so no export was needed.

1:52 speaking of Space: Above and Beyond, I witnessed some of the making of the pilot episode. It was filmed at RAAF Base Williamtown, NSW Australia, where I was based at the time. If only I knew R. Lee Ermey was there, I would have asked for his autograph

Thanks for this. I made my career by being a Lightwave early adopter. I work in the toy industry where I worked on toys where we would produce consumer hard goods (toys and collectibles) on these entertainment properties. We used to take the Lighwave geometry and use that as a template we would trace over in programs such as Pro Engineer, SolidWorks, and IRON CAD. Well whenever we needed to make a toy I would request the Lightwave geo and reconstruct it in a parametric CAD package or make the lightwave GEO water tight for 3D printing. Fun times!

Very fun! Classic Lightwave! I still use it every day for various work projects! 2015 and 2020 with octane :D

Another great vid “Q” 👍🏻 Thanks for the free entertainment 😉 I miss Space Above and Beyond… Great show. Another Fox show that got cut short 🙄😔

I remember seeing previews for a B5 space sim in magazines back in the days. The devs had access to the original 3d files, which made for some pretty nice screenshots. That somehow stuck with me for decades and, as I got into 3d modelling, I wondered what these early 3d files looked like and if copies have escaped into the wild.

I LOVED SeaQuest!

As far as I know, the Amiga was used for rendering Season 1 and 2 of Babylon 5 as well as the whole first season of seaQuest DSV (you can see Amiga computers in the making of B5). LW PC version wasn't released when B5 S1/S2 and seaQuest S1 were aired. The first LW PC version was released around 1995.

What you called the Agamemnon class is the Omega class. The Agamemnon herself was Captain Sheridan's first full command. I'm going to have to go rewatch all of B5 again soon.

Thank you for showing this! Have a great day!

I tried using Imagine 2.0 and Real 3D on the Amiga in the nineties, but the results weren’t great. I did not have the patience to learn the programs well and artistically I still had to learn. Having to wait hours for renders didn’t help either. A few years back I started using Blender with much greater succes! Blender started on the Amiga btw!

I learned on an Amiga 2000 with a 30 meg processor. Video toaster with Lightwave vers 2. I am self taught. Got me a job as animator/Supervisor for season 4 and 5 of B 5. By the time season 4 came we were all running the stand-alone Lightwave on PC. I miss the old toaster. Nothing compared to it for the time. 😊

Great stuff. Huge Babylon 5 fan. I was so sad Space: Above and Beyond got cancelled. Same with Firefly.

I recall reading that the rendering was offloaded to clusters of Raptor units (RISC based WinNT machines) networked to the Amigas

Oh yeah… i’m a longtime lightwaver!…. i missed the amiga era.. was still on an apple 2gs from 87-96… Then when to PC mainly due to newtek! - Framfactory / Video Toaster NT/2/3-5 and Lightwave! - Its nice to see LW back with new versions going forward.

As I remember there was an Amiga shop in Orlando on the corner of Colonial drive and Semoran BLVD at the height of B5 & Seaquest popularity. I’d be in there killing time and see people working the shows in there talking tech and showing off animations.

Babylon 5 is 100% responsible for my getting into 3d stuff at all. And I still use Lightwave today for most of my stuff!

So Many show has so much to thank this program for! I loved/love Babylon 5, Space: Above and Beyond (Slaget om Tellus, swedish titel) and Seaquest DSV (I have them all on DVD) J. Michael Straczynski (Maker of Babylon 5) said that the show would never been done without this program. Soo many great shows.

Seeing how things were going for the Amiga whilst working at Chicagolands Geneva CBM dealership, I jumped ship when I acquired the 1st PC laptop with a video input and 1GHz processor from a relatively unknown company Lenovo. Lightwave was already available on the PC and Mac so transition was quite easy. Hollyweird became irrelevant, so I went on to pursue my music career instead.