Chipp - how very interesting and sooo impressive! Thanks for sharing with us.

Being that  it took me months to get to grips with vue, I hate to admit I actually also started on 'computer graphics' in 1979 :)  My filed of work was molecular graphics but the concepts were the same.
We did movies of 'dancing' molecules too. To start with we only had a black&white display, but we did color  movies on 35mm film, using mechanical color filters: for each frame we displayed all the parts that should be green, the computer triggered the green filter and the film was exposed, than all the reds were displayed and the red filter came down in front of the lens, same frame exposed, etc till all colors were done, then move to next frame...
I wonder if I can dig out some images/movies...

I must be one of the few that didnt use bryce. I got the program but didnt have a clue what to do with it. I started with poser 6 in order to use the characters as virtual models for my paintings, and then got vue 6 inf to have some descent context to pose them in. Poser isnt much fun to use, but I like vue a lot.
With all the available tuts, it is not hard to produce something that looks reasonable, but producing something that says something, that has a 'reason for being', and represents the creator uniquely- that's much harder.

"I paint that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence."
Man Ray, modernist painter
http://artpearl.redbubble.com/