Second Reality

Introduction

First, the introduction plays, demonstrating text rendering on a background. After that is done, several ships appear and fly away from the camera, demonstrating 3D rendering. After some distance the ships disappear, sending out a shockwave (reminiscent of the Praxis explosion effect seen in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). The screen fades to display a rendition of Wendigo, at which point Purple Motion's main musical score for the demo begins. The image then flattens and falls horizontally to become a 3D, polygonal checkerboard.

Bouncing polyhedron

The music has now finished its introductory notes at this point and the first melody starts. Next, a glenz (additively blended) polyhedron appears and bounces on the checkered surface, in perfect timing with the orchestra hits in the score, demonstrating 3D rendering and real-time mesh deformation. After a while, another larger polyhedron appears and the smaller polyhedron begins bouncing inside the larger.

Tunnel

The next scene is a winding, fluid tunnel built up by discrete points that move towards the camera. This creates a feeling of rushing through the tunnel for the viewer.

Oscillating circles

The tunnel fades out into some oscillating circles which soon fade into the next scene.

Moiré patterns

A scene that could be described as a light show. The scenes consist of multiple moiré patterns interacting. Moiré patterns were quite popular in demos of that time.

Creature

Next an image of Ulik rolls in from the right, and fades away. Some leaves and water are displayed, along with text characters floating downstream. The text says "Another way to scroll" and is an example of a scroller, which was present in most demos of the time.

Magnifying and rotating head

After the text has floated by, again the scene changes to display a demonic-like human head (clearly inspired by the mascot Violent Mind of the band Kreator) with a pentagram engraved on his forehead. A sphere comes down from the top left corner simulating the below surface being refracted through a magnifying sphere. This is where the soundtrack utters the cult phrase "I am not an atomic playboy", quoting Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy's remarks before the Bikini nuclear test. The sphere vanishes down in the lower right corner and the camera begins to spin while zooming in and out to reveal a repeating pattern of heads, demonstrating a technique known as rotozooming. The camera then falls down and bounces back up on the surface twice, after which the scene again fades out.

Plasma Effect

When the image fades in, the camera is placed close to a surface changing texture every time. This is a continuation of their work in Unreal where they first introduced the 'unreal' plasma effect.

Colored spinning cube

After a few surfaces have been displayed, a cube with animated surfaces attached comes up and spins around while translating towards and away from the camera.

Vector Balls

After a while, this scene fades and many small vector balls fall onto the screen and begin bouncing off the ground and morphing into various spiral patterns. Because of a bug, this part will crash if the demo is installed in a directory with the complete path length exceeding 30 characters.

Raytracing

Again there is a fade out and a fade in, this time we are looking at a scene with two spheres, the words "Ten seconds to transmission" are spoken (sampled from the 1989 movie Batman),[6] and a sword starts translating towards the camera. The spheres will display a reflection of the sword as well as a reflection of the aforementioned reflection in the other sphere. The scene was rendered using Future Crew's homemade ray tracing software.

Water

Water

As the scene changes again, this time the image rendered will be of a surface changing shape, similar to that of water. This scene is rendered using a Voxel landscape rendering technique.

Bouncing bitmap

After this, an image will fall in from above, depicting a rider on what appears to be yet another fantasy creature. The image will hit the ground and bounce up while behaving like jelly.

The image filename is named "ICEKNGDM.LBM" ("Ice Kingdom Interleaved Bitmap"), Future Crew call the image "Ice Kingdom";[7] and it is an artistic rendering created by a member of Future Crew, but based[8][9] on a painting used in a Rumple Minze alcohol advertisement from the early 1990s.[10]

3D spacecraft fly-through

In the next scene, a craft reminiscent of the TIE/Advanced fighter from Star Wars: A New Hope flies around in a large 3D city, leaving it and heading up right over the text "Future Crew". This was later redone by some of the previous members of Future Crew working for Remedy Entertainment as part of the benchmarking demo Final Reality. Flat shading is used for the buildings and Gouraud shading for the smooth trees and lettering at the end.

Future Crew bitmap

The image fades out and the final scene fades in, an image of two nuts with the text "Future Crew" written on them.