I remember Nathan House’s 1997 “Planetary Traveler” which was entirely rendered in KPT Bryce.[amazon] It was an insane amount of work.

Back in 1996, rendering a full-resolution 720p image in Bryce took about 30 minutes per frame. (At 30fps for a 32 minute show, that’s some 30,000hr)

I have always admired the artists at NASA: they do incredible work – it’s hard to tell what’s a photo and what’s a rendering or a painting. Look at this:

There were times when I was watching that, that I had to remind myself, “it has to be a rendering because there’s no camera out there to record that.”

I got a bit choked up at the end of the Cassini video, even though the ending has already been thoroughly spoilered. (It’s like my dad said, when mom asked him if he wanted to go see Titanic, “Why? I already know how it ends.”)

Titanic: My grandfather was a kid when the Titanic sank. He never expressed any interest in going on big ships. And if he had the choice between flying and driving, he drove. To someone who remembers the cloth-covered stuff they were flying in WWI, “airplane” doesn’t have the same connotations as “United Airlines” does nowadays.