big red dragon

2025-11-06

In my last post about Blender 1.80 I mentioned in passing that since Blender is an Open Source Software, you can look into said source code to trace the origins of features and bugs, among other things. Well, while looking into the source I fell into a very deep rabbit hole of ancient Blender trivia. This was originally going to be a post about the time Blender had some features locked behind a premium key, where I'd poke some lighthearted fun like "could you imagine that [feature x] used to be a premium feature!??!". But what I found in that rabbit hole would overshadow a bit of my post, like I had made a "news article" with surface level fluff about a much more interesting blog post.

Instead of making such a news article, I'm instead going to describe how I fell into the rabbit hole in the first place, and guide you to enter it yourself if you so desire. The later half of the post will have some of the findings, because I could not resist putting images and videos into the post, I'm sorry.

Straight from the source

Blender is Open Source, and we know this is true because you can literally go to https://download.blender.org/source/ and find source releases all the way back to 2.26, which according to Blender's History is "The first truly open source Blender release".

They weren't lying, that open source is open for you to look at.

However, 2.26 is a lot more recent than 1.80 (which is the version I have been raving about for the past year and a half), so some of the code is definitely different and wouldn't hold all of the secrets behind things we find in 1.80. Thankfully the source page of Blender also has a treasure chest of even older stuff: https://download.blender.org/source/chest/ and in it we find the source code for 1.43, 1.72 and 2.03!

1.72 is the source I've looked into the most, since it's closest to 1.80 in vibes compared to 2.03 with its slightly refreshed UI and realtime capabilities. 1.71 released on 1999-11-29, so 1.72 was likely released in december 1999, about half a year before 1.80.

Initial findings

Having mucked around with 1.80 a lot, I started delving into the source code to find out information that would be Too New for the official Blender 1.5 Manual. And I started finding fun stuff right away:

There are 159 mentions of "Puno" in the 1.72 source. "Punos" As We All Know are the vertex normals in Blender's "turbo language". I can only guess as to why it's puno in particular, maybe something along the lines of point normal -> punt normal (dutch) -> puno. Either way it's a pretty fun word to say and it makes me think about puro.

The text editor, which I thought was a really barebones editor that let you write and erase text (because Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V wouldn't do anything) turns out to actually be a sophisticated editor with copy, cut and paste support (just that the keys are Alt+C, Alt+V etc.), and it even has a full undo buffer, making it the only part of these early Blender versions with an actual undo system! You can also run python scripts from the text editor by pressing Alt+P.

There are definitions of two object types I hadn't heard of before: "Life" and "Sector" objects. These are an early sign of the Blender game engine, and from my understanding the Life was a specific object used for giving, well ... life, to something. The game engine that would eventually release instead had you flag any object as an Actor instead. I'm not sure what exactly the Sector object type was for, but Life objects seem to require being in a Sector to function, so maybe the Sector represents the bounds or the static collision mesh of a level in a game.

Then, I noticed that the button for S-Mesh (subdivision surface) would only be drawn if TEST_C_KEY was nonzero. Hmm, C_KEY ... thats a familiar name! I remember seeing it in Blender's History:

• 1.60 – April 1999: C-key (new features behind a lock, $95), Windows version released.
• 1.6x – June 1999: BeOS and PPC version released.
• 1.80 – June 2000: End of C-key, Blender full freeware again.

Yeah, S-meshes used to be a "premium" feature! I know I poked a lot of fun about 1.80's implementation of S-meshes in my previous 1.80 post, and now I do feel a little bad about it. It truly was a custom subdivision algorithm and not Catmull-Clark. I'm sorry old blender you were trying your best!!

After looking at every part of the code that checked TEST_C_KEY (plus some extra information from the sources I'm about to talk about), here's a list of everything that was considered a paid feature at some point:

• S-Meshes (aka subdivision surfaces)
• Mesh Intersection (boolean)
• Radiosity
• Environment map textures
• Relative Shapekeys
• VRML and DXF (export formats)
• Python scripting
• Proportional Editing
• Library linking
• Texture and video sequencer Plugins
• Motion Blur
• Auto Smooth
• UV Editing

The Manuals and the Websites

While using Blender 1.80 I have often referenced two different manuals; the excellent 1.5 manual, and a PDF manual from September 2003. The 1.5 manual is a work of art, and explains pretty much every aspect of Blender up to version 1.5. It was also the first place I saw a mention of a "Blacksmith" demo file.

The PDF manual is newer than the book manual and it includes tutorials that are a lot more specific on how to achieve various effects. It also has links to Websites with tutorials. One day I was absent mindedly reading through the PDF manual and noticed that a section had links to a "vrotvrot.com". Sure enough the website is long gone, but Wayback machine has it archived.

That website was B@rt's Blender Corner. It had some Blender news, tutorials and art made by the author. And it was seemingly one of the originals of such sites, with the tutorials all having been made before or during 1.80 judging by the UI in the screenshots. The art there is super oldschool 3D render style and I mean that in the best way possible. It's honestly fascinating to look through the galleries and seeing the creativity on display.

This was only the top of the rabbit hole; B@rt's Corner was part of the Blender Web Ring. And there's a link to the full list of websites in the ring. There are many sites on there, and most of the ones I checked out have galleries with art made with Blender. Here's a small handpicked list of some that I liked:

• Blender.free.fr (there's some dinosaurs and a wolf)
• Blue Water Blending (there's a cute dragonair)
• Blendermania (art from a lot of people, though only the thumbnails were archived)

Other interesting sites I found:

• Michael's Blender Website selling 500+ models (converted from other software), but like, look at that spinning CD gif
• Blendermania tutorials, a number of tutorials all being relevant to the early versions of Blender. The table has its own row that says if a C-Key is required for the tutorial or not. The linked capture is from 2001, after C-key ended so they all say No.

The official blender website was also archived ... somewhat. Almost all the images are missing, which doesn't give us a complete idea of what this looked like back in the 90s. But at least we can see a few of the the T-shirt contest design entries. Later captures of the official site are more complete, and there's a small gallery.

The Complete Blender

Okay, time for the reveal. Apparently someone managed to capture the entire blender website in late 1999, with all the images and all, and it is incredible to look at. It's full of shiny metaball blobs and racetrack curbing. There's even a cute little 88x31 button (that's actually 90x36). The UserLinks page has even more buttons (there's even a cat one!!!!). Oh and the OG animation studio blender was developed at, NeoGeo has its own little gallery as well. Also, check out the Features page and all the sample rendered images.

There's also a FAQ, with one of the questions being:

10.1 What is the C-Key anyway?

Blender currently is being developed towards the 'complete' Blender (1.8). As features are added, some of them are reserved for owners of a software key, the C-key. This is a user-friendly way for NaN to finance continious Blender development, debugging and support.

A list of the C-Key features can be found at the Blender web site, The C-Key can be purchased in the Blender Shop (appr. US$ 100). A single C-Key is valid for the entire 1.x series of Blender and is licensed to the owner personally for all machines he/she uses.

Huh, so Blender 1.80 really is the culmination of all the development in the 90s! ... The same Blender 1.80 that I so mercilessly ripped apart in my last 1.80 post.

There's a whole page about Radiosity and what those cryptic SubSh E, ElMin and ElMax etc. parameters do!

there's even a page about the S-Meshes that I made fun of :cat_holding_back_tears:, complete with a picture of a dinosaur:

There's also two pages with benchmark results, based on the Blacksmith demo file mentioned in the 1.5 manual. On the original site you would be able to download the demo files from the Download page, but sadly none of the downloads are preserved here ...

Discmaster

The next step on the journey was to search "Blender" in the software category of the Internet Archive, and while I did find a few things none were really what I was looking for. And then I remembered that Discmaster exists.

Discmaster lets you search by file extension, so I did a search for .blend before the year 2003 ish and immediately found Very Interesting results. The results are grouped by category of file, and the site shows Image, Text, Poly (3D models) and unknown file types. The files recognized as polygonal 3D models even show a preview of the mesh!

The most interesting files are found in the unknown category, with files like: bat_key.blend and lostride3.blend dated to 1998 or 1999. Hovering over the links you can see the path the files are from, and in just a few moments of searching you will have found the contents of the Blender disc for E3 visitors in 2000

On the disc is a subfolder named ftpSite and it contains not only various builds of Blender from 1.69 to 1.74, but also blacksmith.zip, tutor_1.02.zip and tutor_1.6.zip. All of these contain various demo files that are all made prior to version 1.80, meaning they are an accurate time capsule of Blender's capabilities at the time.

blacksmith.zip

The blacksmith demo file is described in the 1.5 manual's "Cartoon animation and 3D" section, showing how you can import animated 2D image sequences and place them in a 3D scene while having them cast and receive shadows. A very early solution to the role that Grease Pencil fulfills in Blender of today.

The readme included in the archive states the following:

This animation of a blacksmith was originally made for Philips Electronics here in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. It is only 9.5 seconds taken from a larger animation, Morkramia II, which has a total duration of over 6 minutes.

"Morkramia" and the sequel "Morkramian Matters" are two animated films produced by NeoGeo and that "won the first prize at the European Film Festival" in 1994 and 1996 respectively. A teaser of the first movie from 1993 exists, and since Blender development started in 1994 it's more likely that Traces, the predecessor to Blender was used for the production of the first movie.

A teaser trailer for the first one can be found on youtube, it has some fun references to computer graphics:

Anyways, with the blacksmith file at our disposal, we can remaster it in HD by Simply Rendering It In 1920x1080 HD H.264 MPEG-4 part 10 (adjusting the camera so the view is extended rather than cropped)

tutor_1.02.zip

This archive holds 14 demo files, let's start with the most interesting one: lostride3.blend. This file has two scenes where a camera is animated along a futuristic railway track. The animations are seamless in that each segment starts and ends at a doorway.

The name of the file hints at what this is; it's two scenes from The Lost Ride, a 1998 CD-i game that NeoGeo made the graphics for. The blurb on the back of the game describes it as:

This is it! Stunningly rendered worlds: Mine World, Water World, Future World. Escape the maze and try to survive the surround sound ride. Your average speed is 140kmhour. This game never slows down.

On youtube you can find a review of the game, plus a cool montage of many of the game over scenes.
The next three files in the archive also relate to The Lost Ride:

bat_key.blend is the small bat enemy that flies in from the top of the screen (visible at 2:22 in the review video, plus in the 1.5 manual), showcasing shape key animation. I say small bat because it's different from the giant bat that fucking destroys your vehicle in one of the game overs.

parent_robo.blend is an underwater robot enemy that launches rockets at you (visible at 2:36 in the montage video), showcasing parent hierarchy animation. Apparently their name is Paul judging by the scene name?

sequence.blend is a demo of the video editor, showing how to make a transition between two image sequence strips, which are both from The Lost Ride.

spider2.blend isn't from The Lost Ride, but showcases the use of Ika objects to animate legs. It's that spider we saw in the manual earlier!. It also shows some of the limitations of Ika objects, not having very fine control over what part of the mesh deforms with each "bone", the body of the spider deforms a bit too much.

flytest.blend: a hallway with radiosity baked lighting, presumably for testing the fly camera navigation.
Fun fact: this scene appears at 3:29 in NeoGeo's 1992 showreel

The remaining files in the archive are less interesting, but each showcases a specific thing:

• vertexpaint.blend: a simple scene with vertex painted shapes
• deformtest.blend: a teddy bear head deformed by a lattice
• logo_shadow.blend: a logo with dropshadow
• camera.anim.blend: a camera flying zig zag between cubes, showing the keyframes in the viewport
• rotoscope.blend: a leopard texture used as background image, and three of the dots have been traced to mesh objects
• bevelcurve.blend: a curve using a curve circle as bevel object, turning it into a tube
• flaretest.blend: a single vertex object with a lens flare material
• man02.1.blend: the donut example from the small manual included with the first blender release

tutor_1.6.zip

The 9 files in this archive showcase more advanced rendering and modeling techniques. Mainly radiosity and environment map textures.

The Enji showreel

The E3 disc also includes a few videos, one of which is a 1997 showreel from Enji, the game development department of NeoGeo. It exists on YouTube with higher quality and sound and you Should give it a watch. (embedding it here didn't work, blame youtube)

This showreel has a number of interesting things:

• 0:49 shows various scenes from the Morkramia movies (presumably)
• 1:35 shows a game being developed with blender v1.11 with emphasis on the ability to test gameplay mechanics directly in blender. Sector object types are shown with what appears to be some form of frustum culling, and the UV editor also exists
• 2:43 shows a realtime dungeon scene
• 2:50 shows a realtime egypt scene
• 3:19 shows files from The Lost Ride, with the familiar bat appearing at 3:27

Other things

I also found Blender 2.02 on a "Mega Score 61" CD on discmaster, and sure enough it has a few demo files included:

• IKA_LAVA.BLEND: A part of the game that was shown in the 1997 showreel
• ORCUS.BLEND: the realtime dungeon scene from the showreel
• EGYPT.BLEND: the realtime egypt scene from the showreel
• SAUCER2.BLEND: a small game demo that seems unfinished
• SIMPLEDEMO.BLEND: game where you are a ball and you can shoot
• SORTA_BILLIARD.BLEND: you are a green ball and you collide with red balls

On a CD from 2001 (presumably) we find an 1.8 Manual Appendix to the official Blender 1.5 manual. It is more or less the content of the Complete Blender pages we saw earlier, but formatted in the same way as the manual. Even the S-Mesh raptor by Hiroshi Saito made it in!

Speaking of which, the raptor also appears in the 2.28c splash screen, as part of a demo file that showcases the radiosity rendering option that was added.

The demo file is included in an archive with other 2.28 demo files, so we can finally introduce the raptor to meowscarada:

Turns out Hiroshi made a more complete version of the raptor with teeth, claws and textures, as well as animating it. I could only find that in video form however:

Okay so what

I originally set out to write a really simple post, but every time I kept finding new stuff the scope exploded, but I hope this was at least somewhat coherent. I definitely glossed over a whole lot of things, like the 2.0 demo files, but that may be something I get into in the future if I want to make an interactive Puno project.

The cool thing about all these demo files being accessible is that you can put your own things into them if you want, like meowscarada going at 140 km/h in a dystopian scifi facility. I bet they never expected the possibility of that happening back in 1996 when they were producing the graphics for the game.