Media The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII... in 1996

[UglyBastard]

I've stumbled across a blog with a very interesting post about how the Final Fantasy VII was developed back in the 90s. Here's some of the things I'd like to share with you guys:
The picture below was the animator battlestation for the game. Pretty comfy if you ask me.

It's not mentioned on the blog post but the mouse sitting at the right seems like a Logitech T-CD2-6F.

“In August of '95, one of the US's largest CG conventions, SIGGRAPH, was held in Los Angeles. At that time we were not sure what the next generation RPG game should look like, so as an experiment we created a CG based, game like, interactive demo to be presented at the show. It focused on battle scenes that were 100% real time and polygon based.” - Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy)

Now let's dive into the machine:

Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400’s) — ranging from 100 MHz to 250 MHz.

The RAM on these machines were not industry standard — they were proprietary, 200 pin SGI RAM modules available in 16MB, 64MB, or 256MB variants. The memory board (known as MC3), had slots for 32 memory modules — and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version).

Powering the SGI Onyx was the IRIX operating system — which was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. The specific version used during the production of the “Final Fantasy SGI Demo” would have likely been IRIX 6.0.

The middle screen​

That is Genera.
“What the heckatarnations is a Genera?!”
Genera is an operating system, originally developed in the early 1980s, by Symbolics. And it was a pretty impressive system in it’s own right.

Genera was, in reality, a fork of the LISP Operating System developed at MIT. Virtual memory, a full GUI and window manager, neworking, Emacs… this thing had it all.

Back in 1982, the Symbolics Graphics Division was founded to build graphics software, with a heavy emphasis on 3D, on top of Genera — known as the “S-Graphics” suite of tools.
These were incredibly high end graphics tools used in quite a lot of movies throughout the 1980s and even into the mid 1990s, including: Star Trek III, Real Genius, and Free Willy.
So it absolutely makes sense that the Squaresoft team would be utilizing a Genera powered workstation in the development and rendering of the 3D used with Final Fantasy VII.
Based on the timeframe, odds are good that machine is a Symbolics XL1201 Compact Workstation running Genera version 8.x.

Read the full post here.​