big red dragon

a bit ago i put my fluffy skater into blender 2.49 but i kinda cheated, crossing version boundaries by exporting to .dae instead of taking advantage of blender's pretty decent forwards compatibility, which meant that not all data was brought along (mainly the shapekeys).

since then I've been toying with old blender from time to time - i find it interesting to see earlier versions of something familiar, especially if said version is so early that I never used it personally. I first ran into blender in late 2011, after 2.5 had modernized blender for the time, so 2.49 and before is kinda strange to me but also quite familiar, since a lot of the keybinds and concepts are the same.

the plan

blender is generally forwards compatible, in that you can usually open a newer blend file in an older version, especially if it has the same "minor" version number (eg. 2.80, 2.81, 2.82). Sometimes there's breaking changes in newer versions, but the last version before the change can usually be used to transfer data (e.g: 3.6 can read 4.0 files). People have tried this kind of thing before; taking a blend file from the latest version and going as far back as they can, but I want to see how far back I can get my fluffy skater with everything mostly intact:

• mesh (duh)
• armature (gotta be posable)
• textures (well, they're external files so not really that hard)
• shape keys (gotta be expressive)

2020 -> 2019 -> 2017

I start with the final blend file of back when I made the fluffy skater, in late 2020. I load it up in blender 2.80 (2019) and find out that it was apparently a 2.90 (2020) file, which checks out. A 2.80 file will appear blank when opened in 2.79 (2017), because 2.80 changed a lot about how scenes are structured in blender. The objects are still in the file and you can dig them out, but a quicker cheat is to go via the copy buffer; Ctrl + C in 2.80, Ctrl + V in 2.79. Since object structures remain the same (presumably), this works just fine to bring stuff across the 2.80 gap.

Once in 2.79, it's time to set up the materials of fluffy skater so they work with the blender internal renderer, because cycles is not going to be a thing when we go past 2011. It's been nearly a decade since I did anything using the internal renderer, so re-learning how to add textures and normal maps took some time, but I got it figured out without too much fuss. I had also forgotten that blender internal had an "approximate" gather method that allowed for basic indirect lighting(!). I added some planes and area lights to the scene, which will accompany our fluffy skater for the remainder of the journey.

2017 -> 2011 -> 2009

2.79 (2017) was the last of the versions using the UI that came out of the 2.5 recode. The earliest stable version of these is 2.57 (2011), so that's the one we'll be using to make the jump to the 2.4 era. The 2.79 fluffy skater loads up fine in 2.57, but we're immediately hit by the gamma issue I mentioned in the other post. For some unknown reason, blender versions 2.4x through 2.6x load up with washed out colors (on my system at least), as if the gamma is all wrong. It's only a cosmetic issue however, and any saved renders are unaffected.

We've now gone 10-ish years back in time and stuff still works fine, nice! But in 2009 there are problems. The 2.57 (2011) fluffy skater loads up fine in 2.49 (2009), apart from having to adjust some render settings to avoid getting a black empty result instead of a rendered image. I also learned that you can get rendering right in the viewport with the preview feature, similar to how the render border worked in 2.5-2.7. But oh my it is not particularly fast.

I also noticed that the normal map looks a bit off... this must have been the time before MikkTSpace. (Sure enough, Blender 2.57 is mentioned on that site!).

The normal map isn't the only problem however. If fluffy skater is saved in 2.49, the resulting file will no longer open (uh oh). This would be a deal breaker for my somewhat serious idea of trying to make a render for april fools with a pre-2.5 blender. I tried a lot of things to see if it made any difference:

• making the time jump from 2.60 (2011) to 2.49 (2009), no difference
• renaming non-ascii shapekeys in case ã¦ã£ã±ã¯Í¼å³ was corrupting the save, no difference
• removing shapekeys altogether, no difference
• appending the model instead of opening, no difference (still a crash)
• jumping from 2.57 to 2.47 (2008), 2.46 (2008), 2.45 (2007), 2.42 (2006), no difference

The corrupted saves could be opened in 2.41 (2005) however! but, the UVs were... missing. If saved in 2.41 and then opened in 2.49, the result is this:

This is quite a bummer, because it potentially means that if I am to make a 2.49 render then I'll have to do it in one go, no saving. That's easier said than done, because I managed to crash 2.49 more than once by just doing normal blender operations. I did at least manage to save one render before crashing, trying out the radiosity mode for actual rendering, instead of using the radiosity tool in the viewport which doesn't work with posed meshes. It works but the downside is that you get no control over smoothing, so it appears like everything is flat shaded, oof. But hey, at least we made it this far with the armature, shapekeys and textures intact!

2009 -> 2004 -> 2000

Since we can't stay in the time period for an extended amount of time, let's try going back even further, finding out what parts will stop working. The 2.49 save might not work in 2.49 anymore, but it can still be opened by 2.40 (2005) and saved to then open in 2.34 (2004), at which point we notice that the skeleton is mangled beyond repair (ouch!). This makes sense however, because 2.40 reworked the armature system and added shape keys, which are also gone by this point. EDIT: this is incorrect, shapekeys were always there, they were just accessible only from the Ipo window (the graph editor)

The last jump lands in 1.80 (2000), where not even the textures are working anymore, because there's no PNG support in this version. The bones of the armature are also completely gone, with the console notifying us about both of these facts.

The journey stops here. I could have gone to 1.60 but i was too lazy to download it. I hit F12 to get a final render of fluffy skater, stranded in the year 2000, petrified and without any shadows. Time travel is dangerous!

But hey, at least the wave modifier is there! (although it's called an Effect because modifiers weren't really a concept back then). And funnily enough blender was less usable in 320x240 than it is today