Sunday, December 21, 2008
In Memory of Jim Ludtke
This animation was done by a single artist, my dear friend Jim Ludtke, who left this planet far too soon. I miss you, Jim, and think about you all the time. You were a true creative genius, a one-of-a-kind human being. Jim did this all in Macromind 3D, one of the coolest 3D rendering and animation tools you probably never heard of, it wasn't around very long, but Jim made the most of it. From the Residents' "Freak Show" album and CD-ROM.
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This animation was done by a single artist, my dear friend Jim Ludtke, who left this planet far too soon. I miss you, Jim, and think about y...
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7 comments:
lord know I remember Macromind 3D! I did so much work in it. I loved it, but wow, the render times were long. I remember helping Jim out a few times with The Residents CD that this video is from, when he lived over near the Castro, so long ago.
Sparks,
So nice to see you again - and your sideburns are even cooler than mine!
Macromind 3D was some call stuff, and yeah, ALL render times were long as hell back then. The video is from Freak Show, a great CDROM. It all seems like another lifetime, right?
Jim was awesome. ThreeD was cool too, but Jim used EIAS for the animation on Freakshow. He did use Macromodel for most of the modeling.
Hi there, found your blog Googling Jim Luthke.
I was an art student in Copenhagen Denmark back in Ye 1990's and I remember well the Freak Show CD-ROM, Jim Luthke, and Macromind 3D
I studied at the School of Media Art and we had a Quadra 950 with Macromind 3D - and a whopping 8 mb's of RAM...
Jim's work inspired me enormously because he clearly had the mindset of an "avantgarde" artist, and not so much that of a designer, like most 3d artists I encountered at the time. I spend many long nights working with Macromind 3d and we also had Macromodel for modelling and MacRenderman for rendering (though I could never make that work properly) Later the department got a Digital Alpha machine (266 Mhz!)and SoftImage, and I did a two minute animation film with that, this was back in 1997, crazy days.
I'm gonna check out if I can find Freak Show on e-bay :-)
I just saw the coming attraction for a VR game called Albino Lullaby. Without a doubt, bastard children of Jim's ;) it's now 2015 and everything old is beta again:) just thought Jim would like to know.
Slava ti veliki umetnice
I also came to this page by googling Jim. I was lucky enough to work with him and The Residents on Freak Show—it still feels like a dream. Also: Macromind Director! There is a snippet in Single White Female where one of the characters is using it, and a fake version of it in Clueless. Always funny to see it pop up in things back then, I am sure no one gets the reference now. I so wish Jim was still around—a truly creative technologist. Thanks for the memory. xx Mikki
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