Solved Origin of this Beastie wallpaper

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In x11-themes/audacious-skins, there is a "FreeBSD" skin that's based on a (presumably really old) CGI wallpaper of Beastie standing on a rock at sunset/sunrise. Since I enjoy these classic 3D rendered wallpapers a-la Digital Blasphemy I'd love to get my hands on it. It'd be nice to know of its origins anyway since it seems lost to time (can't find it anywhere). Does anyone know who made it, or happen to have the original image?

Here is that skin by the way:

Screenshot-2022-05-21-19-52-43.png


On a somewhat related note, I'm a bit involved with the Trinity Desktop Environment project (a fork of KDE 3.5) and there were a lot of 3D CGI wallpapers made for KDE 3-3.5 that no one knows who created them. It'd be nice to get something together to find these sorts of things. :)
 
hbsd said:
View attachment 13992
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Wow, that was fast! How did you find it?

mer said:
hbsd nice to see I'm not the only one with it as a background.
OP I think the picture is often called something "Daemon at sunset"
I don't know the origins of it
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Interesting. Would be so cool if we had the source code / project file to make a 1080p version but its probably been long lost.
 
While searching for "freebsd Daemon at Sunset" I found this website with early FreeBSD splash screens. It has two versions of the wallpaper with the FreeBSD logo on top. The comments say that the original artwork is by Tatsumi Hosokawa (lines up with the hard to read signature in the bottom right).
 
I tried reducing the noise, using high pass filter, etc. but unfortunately it doesn't look great after all that as a wallpaper, probably because it's upscaled and the image is 4:3. It probably would look good on my 1024x768@85hz CRT:)
 
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I do really like these CGI ones myself and wish people still made things like it these days, but now its all flat, minimalist garbage. Its a bit of a bummer to discover this was made using Bryce 3D and what appears to be MacOS (so it wasnt made with free software at all) but for the time period its understandable.

Today it would make more sense to show off "the power" of a free operating system, as a lot of that CGI art would imply, by using the kind of tools we have now. It certainly ain't "the style" nowadays though..
 
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I think AI-assisted upscaling algorithms would handle this one quite well and give you something very decent for 4k monitors.

Ask your favourite search engine for "AI image upscaler".
 
Deleted member 67862 said:
In x11-themes/audacious-skins, there is a "FreeBSD" skin that's based on a (presumably really old) CGI wallpaper of Beastie standing on a rock at sunset/sunrise. Since I enjoy these classic 3D rendered wallpapers a-la Digital Blasphemy I'd love to get my hands on it. It'd be nice to know of its origins anyway since it seems lost to time (can't find it anywhere). Does anyone know who made it, or happen to have the original image?

Here is that skin by the way:

View attachment 13986

On a somewhat related note, I'm a bit involved with the Trinity Desktop Environment project (a fork of KDE 3.5) and there were a lot of 3D CGI wallpapers made for KDE 3-3.5 that no one knows who created them. It'd be nice to get something together to find these sorts of things. :)
Click to expand...
Wow, this brings back memories. I used the original image for many years as wallpaper and decided to make this theme for xmms and winamp back in the 90's. I stopped updating it when winamp decided to force resolution upgrades on everyone and they de-listed it, then xmms went away. Happy to see it was repackaged and is still in use today. As mentioned before, I started with the image author's website(maybe it was gopher). But this image was the first search result for "freebsd wallpaper" for decades.
 
unhooked said:
Wow, this brings back memories. I used the original image for many years as wallpaper and decided to make this theme for xmms and winamp back in the 90's. I stopped updating it when winamp decided to force resolution upgrades on everyone and they de-listed it, then xmms went away. Happy to see it was repackaged and is still in use today. As mentioned before, I started with the image author's website(maybe it was gopher). But this image was the first search result for "freebsd wallpaper" for decades.
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The funny part is, this thread came up when I was searching for the original image today as I wanted to turn it into a lightbox.
 
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