THE FUTURE OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS 2000 and beyond

Past, present and near future: 2000-2005....

Prologue

Regardless if a person is religious or not, or regardless of what religion one follows, the New Year is a good way to round things of in the society or in ones life in general. When we learn history it helps to divide it centuries or decades. This very document is divided in decades and that's how we relate to history. The 60's, the 90's and so on. As such, the shift to a new millennium holds a significant importance. It divides history!

Everything that happens after December 31:st 1999, belongs to the next decade, century and millennium. When the day comes and people will be talking about the 20:th and even the 21:st century in the past tense they will tell you that the American civil war was in the 19:th century, the Pentium III was released in the 20:th and the Voodoo 4 in the 21:st.

So what comes in the near future?

Most of you who follow the graphics industry have a pretty good idea about what to expect in the coming years. On this page I report what is coming and when future becomes history I update the predictions with facts. Here's the story so far.

2000
The year 2000 really was 'the year of nVidia'. In december, nVidia acquired core assets of the once mighty 3DFX. This was a good reminder to all of us how quickly things can change in the industry. ATI are still going strong and Matrox has announced new products, but overall, nVidia has become the clear and undisputed 'standard' for home-computing. There are still some other manufacturers that compete on the professional market and still give nVidia a good match, but that too is probably only a temporary glitch for what now seems as the 'unstoppable' nVidia.
But let's not forget how unstoppable 3DFX seemed only a few years ago...

2001
2001 saw a continuation of nVidia's dominance of the computer graphics market with an occasional competing product from ATI.
Nintendo release the Gamecube in September 2001 (Japan). Click here for the specs.
Gameboy Advance was released 1H 2001. The big event of 2001 was probably be Microsoft's Xbox console. With nVidia developed graphics chip, HardDrive, fast Intel CPU & more, it's designed to kick ass! Main competitors will be Playstation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube. The once so influential SEGA has given up it's hardware business and will now concentrate on software. The company's new aim is to become one of the major players in the software biz.

The movie scene had it's share of limit-pushing movies, including Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, maybe the first real attempt to create realistic humans in a completely computer generated motion picture while Pixar's Monsters Inc features some pretty convincing fur.
Jurassic Park 3 did it again, of course, with dinosaurs so real, even a graphics artist can sit down and enjoy the movie without thinking about the special effects. The movie A.I. featured extremely well produced special effects, but they were simply evolutionary works based on the same techniques created for the landmark movie Terminator 2. (Interestingly, it was the same crew Dennis Muren/ Stan Winston that worked with the FX.) The biggest movie of the year award goes to Lord Of The Rings featuring some very ambitious scenes.

Those of you who watch the television series Star Trek will no doubt asked yourself the question why all the alien races look like humans with some minor cosmetic changes such as different nose or some crap glued to the forehead. The answer is of course cost! Star Trek: Voyager actually features a race known as species 8472, which is computer generated. However, the screening time of that species is sparse to say the least. Thanks to the lower prices of special effects, who knows, the latest Star Trek series Enterprise may feature lot's more CG aliens assuming it will live for the standard 7 seasons. (It didn't, ED note)

2002
Q1 2002 saw the release of nVidia's Next-gen GPU. The nv25 chip (GeForce 4 Ti). This is the chip that will make Xbox users understand how fast graphics technology is moving forward. A top-of the line PC in 1H 2002 is already many times more powerful than the Xbox (but of course also more expensive).
ATI released the R300 chips (R200 successor) in July. Powerful DirectX 9.0 chip that will hold the performance crown at least until nVidia releases it's nv30 chip. So you can be sure that as soon as this Christmas, the consoles will be clearly inferior to a decent PC. Because of this, Sony are already releasing details about the Playstation 3 and Microsoft are already working on Xbox 2.
Speaking of ATI, they were responsible for leaking an early version of id Software's Doom III game. This game is the brainchild of programming legend John Carmack. The leaked version spread around the world like wildfire and people quickly realized 2 things. First of all, the game looked incredible, the atmosphere was more movielike than any other game in history. And secondly, they realized that this game is going to force a whole lot of hardware upgrades among the wannabe users. This game was clearly going to need faster GFX chips than were available at the time.

On the movie scene Star Wars: Episode 2 displayed a dazzling amount of incredible CGI shots. They weren't doing things that have never been done before, but they are perfecting what was seen in Episode 1... The visuals aren't perfect yet, but for most of the time, it's difficult to imagine if & how they can be improved. Perhaps one of the greatest advances was made in cloth simulation. Robert Bridson, Ronald Fedkiw (Stanford University) & John Anderson (Industrial Light and Magic) presented a paper on 'perfect' cloth simulation at SIGGRAPH 2002. In many scenes in SW2, the actors were actually replaced by digital stunt-doubles and all the clothing needed to be simulated perfectly to fool the eye.
At the end of 2002, fans of Lord of the Rings in particular and CGI fans in general had the opportunity to watch just how far CGI has come. The Two Towers features a computer generated main character (Gollum) which, while not 100% convincing, looks pretty damn photo realistic anyway. The motion was captured from a live actor and the interaction between the CG character and the physical environment was among the best we've seen so far.

2003
At the end of 2002 everyone was waiting for nVidia to launch their latest graphics chip (GeForce FX, alias nv30). While it was announced earlier, the actual shipments started in January 2003 and even then, it was very rare. Pretty soon it became clear that the chip wasn't exactly what people were hoping for. Even nVidia realized that and immediately started to work on the slightly modified successor (nv35) which they finally announced in May 2003. As always, ATI were there to match their product line quite nicely. Competition is usually good for the customer, but I must say that 2003 also shown exactly what is wrong with this situation. By years end, the Graphics Card market is absolutely flooded with different models released by nVidia & ATI. For someone not very familiar with the market, it's next to impossible to make out exactly which model may be best for them.
Still, the graphics chips are rather useless unless there is some good software that puts them to good use. For a long while, 2003 seemed to be one of the most exciting years for a very long time for gamers and movie fans alike. Ultimately, there were release postponements so the year ended in disappointment, but let's take a look at what happened.
The E3 show was the main event where all the big game titles were revealed. Doom III was shown again, but the game everyone was talking about was definitely Half Life 2. The sequel to the immensely popular Half Life, released in 1998. Carmack himself has said that gaming has reached a 'golden point' graphics-wise because it's possible to do pretty much anything the artist can come up with. The characters in these games look extremely lifelike compared to previous generations of games and they certainly set a new standard for computer game developers everywhere. Another thing that impressed the HL2 audiences was the incredibly sophisticated physics simulation within the game. (Physics engine provided by Havoc ^TM) Add some very advanced AI to that, and you soon realize that HL2 offers a new kind of gameplay compared to older generations of games. (Doom III will be a similarly realistic experience) As I mentioned, it turns out, neither Doom III nor HL2 were released in 2003. So now they are officially 2004 releases.

Even though the postponed releases disappointed the gaming community, 2003 was a quite extraordinary movie year. Like in the game biz, a lot of much anticipated sequels were launched during 2003. X-Men2 offered pretty much 'standard' special FX (and some lovely non CG footage of Mystique ;-). Matrix 2 again manages to shock audiences with incredible and unique special effects that make everyone go 'how the hell did they do that??'. Terminator 3 was another blockbuster sequel and considering that T2 was such an important landmark in movie-production, it had much to live up to. At the end of the day, the effects in T3 were very nice and polished but in truth not revolutionary at all. Matrix Revolutions featured tons of special effects (in fact too many for some) but at this point we are being so spiled that we hardly raise our eyebrows although admittedly, the quality of the effects was stunning. Certainly the big 2003 finale was the release of the last LOTR movie, The Return of The King. Most if not all special effects were almost perfect, but the most impressive thing was possibly the seamless blend of real and CGI footage. The visualization of the attack on the White City was quite remarkable even by today's standards and I can honestly say that I have not seen anything quite like it before. One thing is certain, all the good stuff in 2003 will spoil the audience to a degree that it's going to be pretty much impossible to impress them in the future... Ah well, there's always Star Wars Episode 3 in 2005. They have their work cut out for them, that's for damn sure.

2004
2004 was a great year for graphics in computer games. Many of the titles that were expected in 2003 actually shipped in 2004. And just as many of us knew, a couple of games in particular raised the bar for graphical quality we expect from video games.
The first positive surprise of the year was the game FarCry which was pretty much the first game to utilize the next-generation graphics and could make use of the latest advancements in computer graphics such as Direct X9.0 shaders. The second big title was the eagerly anticipated Doom3, the sequel to the legendary and revolutionary Doom series. Although the game itself might have left one or two players disappointed, no one could deny that the graphics were nothing short of brilliant making use of dynamic lightning, shadows and very moody surround sound. it truly was more of an interactive horror movie than just a game. Then, towards the end of the year, possibly the most anticipated game of all time finally arrived. It was of course Half-Life 2. Being in development for some 6 years, people were starting to wonder if they could ever live up to the hype, but luckily the answer is YES! Apart from the incredibly realistic graphics, the game also added a whole new dimension of gameplay through it's cleverly implemented physics engine.
All in all, 2004 will be remembered by games as the year when computer graphics took a giant leap forward. All new games will inevitably be compared to the above mentioned milestones. That is good news for the gamers and many sleepless nights for the game developers.

These new landmark titles of course demanded pretty fancy hardware to run as they were supposed to, causing many gamers (including me) to upgrade their hardware. nVidia were struggling with it's FX (GF5) line allowing ATI to gain market share. However, in 2004 nVidia made a glorious comeback with their nv40 hardware. Full PixelShader 3.0 support and massively parallel architecture was the medicine that cured the FX plague. ATI of course released their own products (R420) but the gap from the previous generation of hardware was gone. As it turned out, both nVidia and ATI signed special deals with the makers of Doom3 and Half-Life 2 respectively, making sure the games would run optimally on their hardware. At the end of the day, top of the line models from both makers were more than adequate to play all games perfectly well.
As 2004 was the introduction of a new level of graphics quality in games, it is understandable that the level will stay there for the first year or so, because other game developers will release games based on licensed Doom3 and HL2 engines. It takes a long time to write a new revolutionary 3d engine and the only new engine on the horizon right now is the Unreal 3 engine, expected to arrive in 2006.
One more thing that deserves to be mentioned is the development of graphics power in handheld devices. Both nVidia and ATI now offer 3D graphics chips for mobile phones and PDAs. This is probably where the graphics development will be most noticeable for the next few years. In late 2004 Sony also took a step into Nintendo dominated territory by releasing its PSP console. It's a handheld device with a fairly high resolution widescreen display and hold roughly the same graphical power as the Playstation 2. At the time of writing, the device is yet to be released outside Japan, so time will tell if it a success or not.

As far as movies go, there was a slight feeling of anticlimax after the amazing movie year 2003. The Terminator, Matrix and Lord Of The Ring trilogies seem to be concluded. It seems that special effects have matured to a point where people barely care about them anymore. It seems as if it has all been done already. The purely computer animated movies continued to make it big at the box office. Shrek 2 and Pixar animation's The Incredibles are two examples. Perhaps the most noticeable thing is that the development time for a computer animated feature film has been cut down drastically. It used to take Pixar 3 or more years to complete such a movie, but now they seem to release a new movie every year.

2005
The next generation of video consoles including Playstation 3 and the successor to Nintendo's GameCube (Probably going to be called Revolution) will be released in 2006. Microsoft however, decided to steal this Christmas by releasing its successor to the Xbox (Called Xbox 360) this year. And not only did Microsoft have the only Nex-Gen console this Xmas, they also decided for a simultaneous worldwide release rather than the classic sequential release schedule which often leaves the Europeans waiting for a year or so (Well, it actually was sequential, but it was only a week between the US and the Euro releases). Personally, I think the Playstation 3 hardware could have been rushed out in 2005 but probably not the software. You don't wanna launch your console with a meager library of buggy software. Most Xbox360 launch titles are glorified -current generation- PC games. It will take a couple of year before we really se games utilizing the full potential of these new super-consoles. To be honest, the only E3 demo that really impressed me was the (albeit pre-rendered) PS3 demo 'KillZone'. If that's what the games will look like, then sign me up for a PS3 ;-). If the new Xbox 360 is anything to go by, the games will look better but play-wise they'll be no different than the previous generations of games/consoles.
Needles to say, nVidia and ATI continue to battle each other. The really interesting battle has already been fought. As it turns out, the Playstation 3 is powered by nVidia graphics which in combination with the Cell processor deliver a remarkable 2TFLOPS computational power. The other two consoles, the Xbox360 and Revolution are both powered by GPUs from ATI and CPUs from IBM. However, rumour has it Nintendo will aim for a cheaper console so even though it will be released after the Xbox 360 it may not be as powerful. However, Ninteno's next gen offer is the only console that includes a dedicated physics chip. Nintendo also chose an untraditional controller for its console. Time will tell if that was a wise choice, but considering how little the gameplay experience has changed from the old Xbox to the new one, maybe it's time to start a Revolution (which is also the name of Nintendo's console).

The work done on the consoles usually translates into PC products in the shape of new graphics chips. This time around that particular transition went very fast and nVidia already offers a PC solution that is far more powerful than even the yet unreleased PS3 (2xSLI GF7800GTX512). Both nVidia and ATI also have during 2005 brought forth solutions for combining multiple graphics cards to increase rendering performance. nVidia calls its solution SLI which is a tribute to the technology developed by 3Dfx in the late 1990's (Also called SLI back then but the acronym now means something else - ScanLine Interleave vs Scalable Link Interface). ATI calls its multirendering solution *Crossfire* and fancy names aside, this technology suddenly changes the rules a bit (again). It means that if you buy the fastest graphics card on the market you can still get better performance by buying another one and run them in SLI or Crossfire. This is of course mostly for enthusiasts and hardcore gamers but the point is that the next generation graphics card doesn't look so spectacular if it's only twice as fast as the old one as it then only matches the old generation in SLI mode. It may be cheaper, but for enthusiasts, performance and status is more important than economy.
And guess what, the hardware is being developed much faster than software these days. You can of course run out and buy two nVidia G70 or ATI R520 based cards but there aren't really any games that will stress them at the moment. We will have to wait for Unreal 3 based games to see what these new chips can do. However, people who work with professional graphics will of course welcome the extra performance. 2005 may turn out to be another exciting year for computer graphics but personally I'd still like to see better 3d graphics in handheld devices such as mobile phones. 2005 will probably be remembered as the year when the graphics companies went crazy and released more power graphics than 99,9% of the user base needs (it may be useful in workstations, but the game development lags behind this crazy tempo of new releases.)


The biggest movie of 2005 was probably StarWars Episode III. It might be the very last movie in the StarWars saga so I'm guessing that Lucas wanted this one to absolutely spectacular. As always the amount of digital effects was staggering and you can tell that the people working with the special effects have become better and better with each movie. For example, the computer generated Yoda was very well done and even when the camera zoomed in on the eyes, he still looked very convincing. Perfection is not far away - although this is more true for some scenes than others. Another cool thing used frequently in Episode III was the use of digital face mapping. All the actors were scanned and the stunt doubles then got their faces (digitally) mapped with the faces of the actors they doubled for.
One other movie that also relied heavily on special effects was Peter Jackson's King Kong. While the quality varied somewhat, the main character (King Kong obviously) was absolutely spectacular. Although still not perfect, I think this is the highest quality computer generated main character to appear in a film. It seems people these days take perfect special effects for granted, but that is of course a major misconception that great visual effects "make themselves" at the touch of a button. That kind of quality takes a lot of very talented people enormous amount of time to get right.

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The Future: The years ahead...

Photo-realism to the people!

'Difficult to see.. always in motion the future is..' (Yoda)

It is obvious that we are heading towards photo-realism. In the early 90's, there were no true 3D games at all (Wolfenstein and Doom don't qualify as true 3D games) and 1999 saw the release of Quake 3. A game that featured all the latest (at the time) tricks of the industry at the time. some 5 years later, Doom III made its appearance and yet again the distance to the previous generation is extremely noticeable to say the least.
The path that the gaming industry has chosen will eventually bring them to the movie industry. In the future, the artists will be using the same 3d models in games and in movies. As movie footage doesn't have to be rendered in real-time, they will always be allowed to do more complex things, but there will be a certain point in the future when this border between realtime and pre-rendered graphics will be so blurry, only the industry experts will be able to tell them apart.
The next big leap in visual quality will come with the introduction of the next generation consoles. I'm guessing that certain types of games such as car/racing games will look so realistic that it will fool more than one person into thinking that they are watching actual TV footage. The industry is learning more and more tricks about making things look realistic.
It's noteworthy though, that the focus might not just be on pushing more and more polygons around on the screen. According to nVidia's David Kirk, the GFX R&D teams might focus on solving age old problems such as how to get realtime Ray-tracing and Radiosity. The thing is, again according to David Kirk, these things aren't far away at all, and again, come 2006/7 we might be doing Radiosity rendering in realtime. When that happens, there will be another huge leap towards photo-realism in computer games. (Until now, most games use pre-calculated radiosity rendered shadow-maps applied as secondary textures).

It's interesting too look back for a while and look at the rapid development in consumer graphics. As late as in 1997 SGI's multimillion dollar 'Onyx 2, Infinite Reality - Dual rack' (consuming some 14,000 Watts of power) was among the best the graphics biz had to offer. In 2005 a GeForce 7800GTX graphics card can be bought for $300 and GFX performance-wise it completely outclasses the Onyx 2 setup.

So what about the movies?

The 90's saw many milestones in cinematographic special effects. This decade will be no different. The milestones will not be the same, but there will be new ones. What lies ahead can be summarized in three words: Faster, better, cheaper! Long gone are the times when ILM was the only company that could deliver state of the art special effects. Nowadays, competition is hard and that results in those 3 words I mentioned above...
The times when people invented new revolutionary algorithms to render photo realistic scenes are more or less behind us. Currently, photo-realism IS possible, but what still prevents us from creating e.g. perfect humans is within the creation process not the rendering. The software used to model, animate and texture objects is still too clumsy. It's still nearly impossible for an artist to model and texture e.g. human skin that would pass as photo realistic from close range. Other, less complicated objects, such as space ships can already be rendered photo-realistically. Be sure though, that the first decade of the new millennium will see photo realistic humans in a movie. After seeing Star Wars Episode III and the new King Kong I'm confident that photorealistic humans aren't far off in the future. 100% realistically rendered humans may be the final milestone to achieve before computer graphics really can replace anything. (That doesn't mean that it will be practical to do so, but Gollum in LOTR certainly made some real actors look mediocre). Look forward to an amazing (remainder of the) decade of CGI!

Source : http://hem.passagen.se

HISTORY OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS 1990-99

In May of 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0. It followed a GUI structure similar to the Apple Macintosh, and laid the foundation for a future growth in multimedia. While in 1990 only two of the nation's top ten programs ran under Windows, this rose to nine out of ten just a year later in 1991.

Later that year, in October, Alias Research signed a 2.3 million dollar contract with ILM. The deal called for Alias to supply 3D, state of the art computer graphics systems to ILM for future video production. While ILM in turn would test these new systems and provide feedback.

NewTek, a company founded in 1985, released the Video Toaster in October of 1990. The Video Toaster is a video production card for Amiga personal computers that retails for $1,595. The card comes with 3D animation, and 24-bit paint software and offers video capabilities such as a 24-bit frame buffer, switching, digital video effects, and character generation. The practical video editing uses of the Video Toaster made it very popular, and today it is used on broadcast television shows such as Sea Quest and Babylon 5 for 3D computer graphics.

Also in 1990, AutoDesk shipped their first 3D Computer animation product, 3D Studio. Created for AutoDesk by Gary Yost (The Yost Group), 3D Studio has risen over the past four years to the lead position in PC based 3D computer animation software.

Disney and Pixar announced in 1991 an agreement to create the first computer animated full length feature film, called "Toy Story," within two to three years. This project came as a fulfillment to those early NYIT'ers who had the dream of producing a feature length film. Pixar's animation group, with the success of their popular Listerine, Lifesavers and Tropicana commercials, had the confidence that they could pull off the project on time and on budget.

"Terminator 2" (T2) was released in 1991 and set a new standard for CGI special effects. The evil T-1000 robot in T2 was alternated between the actor Robert Patrick and a 3D computer animated version of Patrick. Not only were the graphics photorealistic, but the most impressive thing was that the effects were produced on time and under budget.

The same year another major film was released in which CGI played a large role, "Beauty and the Beast." After previously having one success after another with computer graphics, Disney pulled out all the stops and used computer graphics throughout the movie. In terms of the beauty, color and design Disney did things that they could not possibly have done without computers. Many scenes contained 3D animated objects, yet they were flat shaded with bright colors so as to blend in with the hand-drawn characters. The crowning sequence was a ballroom dance in a photorealistic ballroom complete with a 3D crystal chandelier and 158 individual light sources to simulate candles.

The effect of these two movies in 1991 on Hollywood was remarkable. Catmull explains, "So what happened was in 1991 'Beauty and the Beast' came out, 'Terminator 2' came out and Disney announced that they had entered into a relationship with us to do a feature length film computer animated film for them. Beauty and T2 where phenomenal financial successes and all of a sudden everybody noticed. That was the turning point, for all the ground work that other people had been doing yet hadn't been noticed before. It all turned around in 1991, it was the year when the whole entertainment industry said 'Oh my God!' and it took them by storm. Then they all started forming their groups and their alliances and so forth."

Early in 1991, Steve Jobs gave the ax to all application development at Pixar. Fearing that the selling of application software would discourage other third party software developers from writing software for Job's NeXT computer he halted all application development at Pixar. He gave the employees 30 days to try and spin off a separate company to focus on application software. This of course did not prove to be enough time, so the president of Pixar, Chuck Kolstad, along with about 30 employees (almost half of Pixar's workers) were laid off. Ed Catmull moved back into the position of president. Pixar lost a lot of talent including Alvy Ray Smith who went on to start a new company called Altamira (funded by Autodesk) and created a PC version of his IceMan image editing software he created at Pixar. This product is now commercially available on the market under the name, Altamira Composer.

A Technical Award was given to six developers from Walt Disney's Feature Animation Department and three developers from Pixar for their work on CAPS. CAPS is a 2D animation system owned by Disney that simplifies and automates much of the complex post-production aspects of creating full length cartoon animations.

In 1993, Wavefront acquired Thomson Digital Image (TDI) which increased Wavefront's market share in the high-end computer graphics market. Wavefront immediately begin integrating products from TDI into their own line of computer graphics software.

Early in 1993, IBM, James Cameron (writer/director/producer), Stan Winston (special effects expert) and Scott Ross (visual effects executive from ILM) joined forces to create a new visual effects and digital production studio called Digital Domain. Located in the Los Angeles area, Digital Domain hopes to give ILM a run for its money. Not to be out done, ILM followed with their own announcement in April to form a joint "media lab" with Silicon Graphics Inc. called JEDI (Joint Environment for Digital Imaging). ILM will get the latest and greatest SGI hardware and SGI will get to use ILM as a testing facility.

PDI opened their Digital Opticals Group in Hollywood to create special effects for motion pictures such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Batman Returns," and "The Babe." Now, PDI has become one of the leaders in digital cleanup work such as wire removal, for motion pictures. Often wires are used for special effects like people flying or jumping through the air. Sometimes scratches occur on irreplaceable film footage. For "Terminator 2," PDI used image processing to erase the wires that guided Arnold Schwarzenegger and his motorcycle over a perilous jump. PDI uses software to automatically copy pixels from the background and paste them over the pixels that represent the wires.

Another edit for T2 involved a semi truck crashing through a wall and down into a storm ditch. The original shot was made at the wrong angle. So the director wanted the footage flipped left to right, to keep the continuity consistent with surrounding shots. Normally this would not be a problem, yet in this instance a street sign was in the picture, and even the driver could be seen through the windshield of the truck. So these elements prevented the normal flip that any studio could have performed. To solve these problems, PDI first flipped the footage. Then they cut the sign from the unflipped footage and pasted over top of the flipped sign. Then they copied and pasted the driver from the left side of the truck to the right side. The finished sequence looked flawless.

PDI performed many other sleights of hand for the movie "Babe," a documentary about baseball legend Babe Ruth. A number of challenges faced the producers, one of which was that the main actor, John Goodman is right handed, while Babe Ruth was left handed. As you can imagine, this really threw off many scenes where John had to pitch the ball. To resolve this problem, PDI used digital image processing.

To create the effect of a pitch, John Goodman simply mimed it, without using a ball. Then they filmed a left handed pitcher throwing the ball from the same position. Then the baseball from the second shot was composited onto the first shot. However, the actor playing the catcher had to fake it along with John Goodman and the result was he didn't catch the ball at the same time it arrived. To solve this problem, they split the scene down the middle and merged the catcher from the second shot into the first shot. This resulted in a flawless left-handed fastball. "Cleanup" special effects like this have become a mainstay for computer graphics studios in the 80's and 90's.

Nintendo announced an agreement with Silicon Graphics, Inc. (the leader in computer graphics technology) to produce a 64-bit 3D Nintendo platform for home use. Their first product, Ultra64 will be an arcade game to be released in 1994, while a home version will follow in late 1995. The home system's target price will be $250.
[The console was released as the 'Nintendo 64' in 1996.]

In the early 1990's Steven Spielberg was working on a film version of the latest Michael Crichton best seller, "Jurassic Park." Since the movie was basically about dinosaurs chasing (and eating) people, the special effects presented quite a challenge. Originally, Spielberg was going to take the traditional route, hiring Stan Winston to create full scale models/robots of the dinosaurs, and hiring Phil Tippett to create stop-motion animation of the dinosaurs running and movements where their legs would leave the ground.

Tippett is perhaps the foremost expert on stop-motion and inventor of go-motion photography. Go-motion is a method of adding motion blur to stop-motion characters by using computer to move the character slightly while it is being filmed. This new go-motion technique eliminates most of the jerkiness normally associated with stop-motion. As an example, the original King Kong movie simply used stop-motion and was very jerky. ET on the other hand used Tippett's go-motion technique for the flying bicycle scene and the result was very smooth motion. Tippett went to work on Jurassic Park and created a test walk-cycle for a running dinosaur. It came out OK, although not spectacular.

At the same time, however, animators at ILM began experimenting. There was a stampeding herd of Gallimimus dinosaurs in a scene that Spielberg had decided to cut from the movie because it would have been impossible to create an entire herd of go-motion dinosaurs running at the same time. Eric Armstrong, an animator at ILM, however, experimented by creating the skeleton of the dinosaur and then animating a walk cycle. Then after copying that walk cycle and making 10 other dinosaurs running in the same scene, it looked so good that everyone at ILM was stunned. They showed it to Spielberg and he couldn't believe it. So Spielberg put the scene back into the movie.

Next they tackled the Tyrannosaurs Rex. Steve Williams created a walk-cycle and output the animation directly to film. The results were fantastic and the full motion dinosaur shots were switched from Tippett's studio to the computer graphics department at ILM.

This was obviously a tremendous blow to the stop-motion animators. Tippett was later quoted in ON Production and Post-Production magazine as saying, "We were reticent about the computer-graphic animators' ability to create believable creatures, but we thought it might work for long shots like the stampede sequence." However as it progressed to the point where the CGI dinosaurs looked better than the go-motion dinosaurs, it was a different story, he continues, "When it was demonstrated that on a photographic and kinetic level that this technology could work, I felt like my world had disintegrated. I am a practitioner of a traditional craft and I take it very seriously. It looked like the end."

However, Tippett's skills were very much needed by the computer animators. In order to create realistic movement for the dinosaurs, Tippett along with the ILM crew developed the Dinosaur Input Device (DID). The DID is an articulate dinosaur model with motion sensors attached to its limbs. As the traditional stop-motion animators moved the model, the movement was sent to the computer and recorded. This animation was then touched up and refined by the ILM animators until it was perfect. Eventually 15 shots were done with the DID and 35 shots were done using traditional computer graphics methods.

The animators at ILM worked closely with Stan Winston, using his dinosaur designs so the CGI dinosaurs would match the large full-scale models Winston was creating. Alias Power Animator was used to model the dinosaurs, and the animation was created using Softimage software. The dinosaur skins were created using hand-painted texture maps along with custom Renderman surface shaders. The final scene which is a show-down between the T-Rex and the Velociraptors was added at the last minute by Spielberg since he could see that ILM's graphics would produce a realistic sequence. The results were spectacular and earned ILM another Special Effects Oscar in March of 1994.

In February 1994, Microsoft Corporation acquired Softimage for 130 million dollars. Microsoft's initial use of TDI technology will be internal, to enhance their multimedia CD-ROM products and interactive TV programs. Microsoft also plans to port the Softimage software over to its Windows NT operating system. This may be the first move in starting a trend for the shifting of high-end graphics software from workstations to personal computers.
[Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid in June 1998.]

The summer of 1994 featured blockbusters full of computer graphics. Some effects however, were so photorealistic that the computer's role was undetectable. For example in the movie "Forrest Gump," artists at ILM used digital compositing, overlaying different video sequences on top of each other, to give the illusion that the actor Tom Hanks was in the same scene as some famous American politicians like John F. Kennedy. They also used standard image editing techniques to "cut" the legs off of an actor who played the part of a wounded soldier who lost his legs in war. They simply had him wear knee-high blue tube socks. Then after the film was scanned into the computer, the artists used Parallax software to copy portions of the background over the blue tube socks in every frame. The result is that Tom Hanks picks the actor up off a bed and it looks as if the actor really has no legs.

Another major project for ILM was the movie, "The Mask." In this movie, the computer graphics artist at ILM had full creative freedom in producing wild and extravagant personalities for the character of the Mask. In one case, they digitally removed his head and replaced it with the head of a computer generated wolf. In another scene, they animated a massive cartoon style gun that the Mask pulls on a couple of criminals. This gun has multiple barrels, swinging chains of machine gun bullets, even a guided missile with a radar locks on the criminals. All of it was created photorealistically using 3D graphics and then composited onto the live action shot.

1995 saw the release of the first full-length computer 3d animated and rendered motion picture. It came from Pixar and was called Toy Story. It did not feature any revolutionary enhancements, however just by being a full-length motion picture it had a major impact on the way people perceived computer graphics.

By 1995 the audiences worldwide were used to amazing graphics in motion pictures, but there was another graphics revolution, which started that year. Sony released their Playstation (X) game-console worldwide. (It was actually released in December 1994 in Japan) Until then the so-called Video Game consoles only managed to display 2 D graphics, but the Playstation (which was sold all the time for the rest of the decade) actually contained a chip (besides the CPU) for hardware-accelerated 3D capable of drawing 360.000 polygons/sec.

After Toy Story basically all the major milestones were reached. An ever-increasing number of movies released after 1995 featured some kind of digital effect and these days it is more a rule than an exception. The movie 'Independence Day' was released in 1996 and contained massive amounts of computer generated effects.

1996 may have not been the most exciting year for CGI in movies but the gaming industry experienced a breakthrough in 3D graphics with the release of ID Software's Quake. Hardware accelerated 3D was the buzzword and at least two manufacturers released 3D Graphics accelerators for PC's. (Diamond Multimedia's Diamond Edge featuring the nVidia NV1 processor, and S3's Virge.) It has to be said though that this first generation of 3D accelerators were basically useless. Quake did not require one and even when used, the accelerators offered poor performance.

1997 was another important year for CGI in movies. The sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World was released and it contained much improved animation over it's prequel. At this point anything seemed possible. Other movies featuring advanced CGI were Starship Troopers (featuring amazing space scenery and not-so-amazing CG bugs), 5:th element, Men in Black and the classic Titanic. Titanic was an amazing display of discrete CGI. The most impressive thing about Titanic was the number of CGI shots that were so photo realistic that they stayed undetected even to a trained eye (water, sky, ship, animated people etc.). The digital effects in Titanic proved that CGI indeed had evolved since the release of Jurassic Park in 1993.

The gaming industry again experienced a revolution, this time it was the 3DFX Voodoo 3D accelerator. This 3D chip completely smashed the competition with it's impressive and extremely useful 3D performance. This was the turning point for Hardware accelerated 3D. After the Voodoo, there was no looking back. 1997 also saw the release of Quake 2. The benefits of a good 3D accelerator were obvious and the catch-phrase was: If you want to play cool games, you'll have to buy a 3D accelerator (and at the time, preferably a 3DFX Voodoo).

In 1998 the movie Godzilla was released. It featured the huge monster previously known from Japanese low-budget movies. The movie contained a number of difficult shots where the huge Godzilla interacted with real-life environment. It was a high quality production, but at this point the audiences were barely impressed.
Two pairs of suspiciously similar movies were released in 1998. The first pair had the theme 'meteorite hits Earth'. The movies were Armageddon and Deep Impact both featuring some interesting CGI. The second pair were the two computer animated full-length movies Antz and A Bugs Life. Even though the quality was high, none of them was setting any new standards.

The PC gaming industry continued to evolve and 1998 was another good year with the release of the Voodoo 2 accelerator and it's first true rival, the nVidia TNT. The 'quake-killer' Unreal was released as was the revolutionary Half Life.

It took a Star Wars movie to impress the audiences again. The long-awaited prequel to the earlier Star Wars movies was released in May 1999. As expected, it was extremely successful at the box office preceded only by Titanic and the original Star Wars movie. What amazed most was not the quality of the CGI but the sheer amount of it. Some 95% of the imagery was digitally manipulated in one way or another. The movie even featured a CG main character (the infamous Jar Jar Binks). The other big SciFi movie of 1999 was The Matrix also putting CGI to good use. In the very last month of the decade (and yes, century & millennium), December 1999, Toy Story 2 was released.

1999 was probably the most exciting year yet for gamers all over the world. NVidia finally managed to outperform 3DFX in the 3d chip battle with its TNT2 processor. Not even the Voodoo 3 could match the TNT2 (and TNT2 Ultra) chip. nVidia didn't stop there though. In October they released the worlds first consumer-level GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), the GeForce 256. The GeForce (code named nv10) was the first gaming 3D card to feature a Hardware Transform & Lightning-engine. No titles released in 1999 supported this option with the (somewhat reserved) exception of Quake III, which was released in December. Among those who reviewed the 3d cards released in late 1999, the 'holy grail' seemed to be for a chip to run Quake 3 at minimum 30 fps in 1600x1200x32bit. No card managed that (not even the GeForce with DDR RAM) however. That will be 'the score to beat' in the next millennium.
Just so that people won't think that nVidia and 3DFX are the only players I'll mention the rest of the best: Matrox (Matrox G400), ATI (ATI Rage Fury Maxx), S3 (Savage 2000)

Considering the quality and realism that we see in computer graphics today, it's hard to imagine that the field didn't even exist just 30 years ago. Yet even today the SIGGRAPH, the conference and exposition, continues to excite the computer graphics community with new graphics techniques. And while companies have come and gone over the years, the people haven't. Most of the early pioneers are still active in the industry and just as enthusiastic about the technology as they were when they first started. Many of these pioneers that were discussed can be readily reached on the Internet. This access is similar to being an artist and being able to pick up the phone and call Monet, Michelangelo, Renoir, or Rembrandt.

Source : http://hem.passagen.se

HISTORY OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS 1980-89

During the early 1980's SIGGRAPH was starting to really take off. Catmull explains, "SIGGRAPH was a very good organization. It was fortuitous to have the right people doing the right things at the right time. It became one of the very best organizations where there is a lot of sharing and a lot of openness. Over the years it generated a tremendous amount of excitement and it was a way of getting a whole group of people to work together and share information, and it is still that way today."

At the 1980 SIGGRAPH conference a stunning film entitled "Vol Libre" was shown. It was a computer generated high-speed flight through rugged fractal mountains. A programmer by the name of Loren Carpenter from The Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington had studied the research of Mandelbrot and then modified it to simulate realistic fractal mountains.

Carpenter had been working in the Boeing Computer Services department since 1966 and was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. Starting around 1972 he started using the University's engineering library to follow the technical papers being published about computer graphics. He eventually worked his way into a group at Boeing that was working on a computer aided drawing system. This finally got him access to computer graphics equipment. Working there with other employees, he developed various rendering algorithms and published papers on them.

In the late 70s Carpenter was creating 3D rendered models of aircraft designs and he wanted some scenery to go with his airplanes. So he read Mandelbrot's book and was immediately disappointed when he found that the formulas were not practical for what he had in mind. Around this time "Star Wars" had been released and being a big fan of the imagination Carpenter dreamed of creating some type of alien landscape. This drove him to actually do it; by 1979 he had an idea about how to create fractal terrain in animation.

While on a business trip to Ohio State in 1979, Carpenter ran into a person who knew quite a few people in the computer graphics field including individuals like Ed Catmull. He explained how Catmull had just been hired by George Lucas to set up a lab at Lucasfilm. Carpenter was immediately interested but didn't want to send in his resume yet, because he was still working on his fractal mountain movie. "At the time they were getting enough resumes to kill a horse" explains Carpenter.

Carpenter continues, "I wanted to demonstrate that these (fractal) pictures would not only look good, but would animate well too. After solving the technical difficulties, I made the movie, wrote a paper to describe it and made a bunch of still images. I happened to be on the A/V crew of SIGGRAPH 1980, so one of my pictures ended up on an A/V T-shirt. I had this campaign to become as visible as possible because I wanted to work at Lucasfilm and when I showed my film, the people from Lucasfilm were there in the audience. Afterward they spoke to me and said, 'You're in, we want you.'" Later, in 1981 Carpenter wrote the first renderer for Lucasfilm, called REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw). REYES would eventually turn into the Renderman rendering engine and today, Carpenter is still with Pixar.

Turner Whitted published a paper in 1980 about a new rendering method for simulating highly reflective surfaces. Known today as Ray Tracing, it makes the computer trace every ray of light, starting from the viewer's perspective back into the 3D scene to the objects. If an object happens to be reflective, the computer follows that ray of light as it bounces off the object until it hits something else. This process continues until the ray of light hits an opaque non-reflective surface or it goes shooting off away from the scene. As you can imagine, ray tracing is extremely computational intensive. So much so that some 3D animation programmers (such as the Yost Group who created 3D Studio) refuse to put ray tracing into their software. On the other hand, the realism that can be achieved with ray tracing is spectacular.

Around 1980 two individuals, Steven Lisberger, a traditional animator, and Donald Kushner, a lawyer-turned-movie distributor decided to do a film about a fantasy world inside a video game. After putting together a presentation, Lisberger and Kushner sought backing from the major film companies around Los Angeles. To their surprise, it was Tom Wilhite, a new production chief at Disney, that took them up on the idea. After many other presentations to Disney executives, they were given the 'OK' from Disney to proceed.

The movie, called "Tron," was to be a fantasy about a man's journey inside of a computer. It called for nearly 30 minutes of film quality computer graphics, and was a daunting task for computer graphics studios at the time. The solution lay in splitting up various sequences and farming them out to different computer graphics studios. The two major studios were Triple I and MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group Inc.). Also involved were NYIT, Digital Effects of New York and Robert Abel & Associates.

The computer generated imagery for "Tron" was very good but unfortunately the movie as a whole was very bad. Disney had sunk about $20 million into the picture and it bombed at the box office. This, if anything, had a negative influence on Hollywood toward computer graphics. Triple I had created computer graphics for other movies such as Looker in 1980, but after "Tron," they sold off their computer graphics operation. Demos and Whitney left to form a new computer graphics company called Digital Productions in 1981.

Digital Productions had just got started then they landed their first major film contract. It was to create the special effects for a Sci-Fi movie called "The Last Starfighter." In Starfighter, however, everyone made sure that the story was somewhat good before generating any computer graphics.
Digital Productions invested in a Cray X-MP supercomputer to help process the computer graphics frames. The effects themselves were very impressive and photorealistic but the movie cost $14 million to make and only grossed about $21 million - enough to classify as a "B" grade movie by Hollywood standards - it still didn't make Hollywood sit up and take notice of computer graphics.

Carl Rosendahl launched a computer graphics studio in Sunnyvale, California in 1980 called Pacific Data Images (PDI). Rosendahl had just graduated from Stanford University with a degree in electrical engineering and for him, computer graphics was the perfect solution for his career interest, television production and computers. A year later Richard Chuang, one of the partners, wrote some anti-aliasing rendering code, and the resulting images allowed PDI's client base to increase. While other computer graphics studios were focusing on film, PDI focused solely on television network ID's, such as the openings for movie-of-the-week programs. This allowed them to carve a niche for themselves. Chris Woods set up a computer graphics department in 1981 at R/Greenberg Associates in New York. In August of 1981 IBM introduced their first personal computer, the IBM PC. The IBM PC, while not the most technologically advanced personal computer, seemed to break PCs into the business community in a serious way. It used the Intel 16-bit 8088 microprocessor and offered ten times the memory of other personal computer systems. From then on, personal computers became serious tools that business needed. With this new attitude toward PCs came tremendous sales as PCs spread across the country into practically every business.

Another major milestone in the 1980's for computer graphics was the founding of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) by Jim Clark in 1982. SGI focused its resources on creating the highest performance graphics computers available. These systems offered built-in 3D graphics capabilities, high speed RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) processors and symmetrical (multiple processor) architectures. The following year in 1983, SGI rolled out its first system, the IRIS 1000 graphics terminal.

In 1982, Lucasfilm signed up with Atari for a first-of-its-kind venture between a film studio and video game company. They planned to create a home video game based on the hit movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They also made plans to develop arcade games and computer software together. Some of Lucasfilm's games included PHM Pegasus, Koronis Rift, Labyrinth, Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus and Strike Fleet. They also developed a networked game called Habitat that is still very popular in Japan. Today the LucasArts division of Lucasfilm creates the video games and is a strong user of 3D computer graphics.

In 1982, John Walker and Dan Drake along with eleven other programmers established Autodesk Inc. They released AutoCAD version 1 for S-100 and Z-80 based computers at COMDEX (Computer Dealers Exposition) that year. Autodesk shipped AutoCAD for the IBM PC and Victor 9000 personal computersthe following year. Starting from 1983, their yearly sales would rise from 15,000 dollars to 353.2 million dollars in 1993 as they helped move computer graphics to the world of personal computers.

At Lucasfilm, special effects for film were handled by The Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) division, yet early on they didn't want much to do with computer graphics. Catmull explains, "They considered what we were doing as too low of a resolution for film. They felt it didn't have the quality, and they weren't really believers in it. There wasn't an antagonistic relationship between us, we got along well, it was just that they didn't see computer graphics as being up to their standards. However, as we developed the technology we did do a couple pieces such as the Death Star projection for 'Return of the Jedi.' It was only a single special effect yet it came out looking great." For "Return of Jedi" in 1983, Lucasfilm created a wireframe "hologram" of the Death Star under construction protected by a force field for one scene.

The computer graphics division of Lucasfilm was next offered a special effects shot for the movie "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn." There was an effect that could have been done either traditionally or with CGI. The original screenplay called for the actors to go into a room containing a coffin shaped case in which could be seen a lifeless rock. The "Genesis" machine would then shoot this rock and make it look green and lifelike. ILM, however, didn't think of that as very impressive, so they went to the computer graphics division and asked if they could generate the effect of the rock turning life-like. Then Alvy Ray Smith came back and said, "Instead of having this rock in front of this glass box why don't we do what's meant to be a computer simulation and a program showing how it works for the whole planet." Thus Smith came up with the original idea and ILM decided to go for it. And so they generated a one minute long sequence. It was largely successful because it was meant to be a computer generated image in the movie, so it didn't need to have the final touches of realism added to it. The effect was rendered on Carpenter's new rendering engine, REYES. It turned out to be a very, very successful piece. As Smith would later say, "I call it 'the effect that never dies' It appeared in three successive Star Trek movies, Reebok and other commercials, the Sci-Fi channel, you see it everywhere." Following the "Genesis" effect, Lucasfilm used computer graphics for the movie "Young Sherlock Holmes" in 1985. In this movie, a stained glass window comes to life to terrorize a priest.

Tom Brigham, a programmer and animator at NYIT, astounded the audience at the 1982 SIGGRAPH conference. Tom Brigham had created a video sequence showing a woman distort and transform herself into the shape of a lynx. Thus was born a new technique called "Morphing". It was destined to become a required tool for anyone producing computer graphics or special effects in the film or television industry. However, despite its impressive response by viewers at the conference, no one seemed to pay the technique much attention until a number of years later in 1987 when LucasFilm used the technique for the movie "Willow" in which a sorceress was transformed through a series of animals into her final shape as a human.

Scott Fischer, Brenda Laurel, Jaron Lanier along with Thomas Zimmerman worked at the Atari Research Center (ARC) during the early eighties. Jaron Lanier, working for Atari as a programmer in 1983, developed the DataGlove. A glove for your hand wired with switches to detect and transmit to the computer any movements you make. The computer interprets the data and allows you to manipulate objects in 3D space within a computer simulation. He left later that year and teamed up with Jean-Jacques Grimaud; together they founded a company 2 years later in 1985 called VPL Research, which would develop and market some of the first commercial virtual reality products. Zimmerman, an MIT graduate who had developed the "Air Guitar" software and a DataGlove that allowed you to play a virtual guitar, also joined VPL Research. Zimmerman left in 1989 while Lanier stayed with VPL Research until November of 1992.

AT&T formed the Electronic Photography and Imaging Center (EPIC) in 1984 to create PC-based videographic products. In the following year they released the TARGA video adapter for personal computers. This allowed PC users for the first time to display and work with 32-bit color images on the screen. EPIC also published the TGA Targa file format for storing these true color images.

Early animation companies such as Triple-I, Digital Productions, Lucasfilm, etc. had to write their own software for creating computer graphics, however this began to change in 1984. In Santa Barbara, California a new company was formed called Wavefront. Wavefront produced the very first commercially available 3D animation system to run on off-the-shelf hardware. Prior to Wavefront, all computer graphics studios had to write their own programs for generating 3D animation. Wavefront started a revolution that would shape the future of all computer graphics studios. Also in that same year, Thomson Digital Image (TDI) was founded by three engineers working for Thomson CSF, a large defense contractor. TDI released its 3D animation software in 1986.

Up until this point, all of the image synthesis methods in use were based on incidental light, where a light source was shining directly on a surface. However, most of the light we see in the real world is diffused or light reflected from surfaces. In your home, you may have halogen lamps that shine incidental light on the ceiling, but then the ceiling reflects diffuse light to the rest of the room. If you were going to create a 3D computer version of the room, you might place a light source in the lamp shining up on the ceiling. However, the rest of the room would appear dark, because the software is based on direct light, incidental light and it would not reflect off the ceiling to the rest of the room. To solve this problem, a new rendering method was needed and in 1984 Cindy Goral, Don Greenberg and others at Cornell University published a paper called, "Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces." The paper described a new method called Radiosity that uses the same formulas that simulate the way heat is dispersed throughout a room to determine how light reflects between surfaces. By determining the exchange of radiant energy between 3D surfaces very realistic results are possible.

In January of 1984, Apple Computer released the first Macintosh computer. It was the first personal computer to use a graphical interface. The Mac was based on the Motorola microprocessor and used a single floppy drive, 128K of memory, a 9" high resolution screen and a mouse. It would become the largest non IBM-compatible personal computer series ever introduced.

Around 1985, multimedia started to make its big entrance. The International Standards Organization (ISO) created the first standard for Compact Discs with Read Only Memory (CD-ROM). This new standard was called High Sierra, after the area near Lake Tahoe, where ISO created the standard. This standard later changed into the ISO 9660 standard. Today multimedia is a major marketplace for personal computer 3D animation. In that same year, Commodore launched the new Amiga personal computer line. The Amiga offers many advanced features, including a hardware level compatibility with the IBM personal computer line. The Amiga uses Motorola's 68000 microprocessor and has its own proprietary operating system. The base unit's retail price is $1,295.

Daniel Langlois in Montreal, Canada founded a company called Softimage in 1986. Then in early 1987 he hired some engineers to help create his vision for a commercial 3D computer graphics program. The Softimage software was released at the 1988 SIGGRAPH show and it became the animation standard in Europe with over 1,000 installations world-wide by 1993.

During this time, Jim Henson of Muppets fame approached Brad DeGraf at Digital Productions with the idea of creating a digital puppet. Henson had brought with him a Waldo unit that he had previously used to control one of his puppets remotely. The device had gotten its name from NASA engineers years earlier. They in turn had taken the name from a 1940's Sci-Fi book written by Robert A. Heinlein about a disabled scientist who built a robot to amplify his limited abilities. The scientist's name was Waldo. Thus when NASA (and later Henson) built their own version of the unit, they dubbed it Waldo.

The programmers at Digital Productions managed to hook up the Waldo and create animation with it, but that animation was never used for a commercial project. Still, the idea of Motion Capture was born. Today motion capture continues to be a major player in creating computer graphics. As for Digital Productions, at the time things were going great. They had purchased a Cray X-MP supercomputer because it was the fastest computer that money could buy. They were interfacing film recording and scanning equipment and they had about 75 to 100 employees. They had just finished their fist big movie project, "The Last Starfighter" and they did some special effects scenes for the movie 2010 (the swirling surface of Jupiter). They also worked on "Labyrinth" in 1986. Things were going very well for Digital Productions, perhaps things went too well.

In 1986 the two largest computer graphics houses in the United States were bought out by Omnibus Computer Graphics Inc. in hostile takeovers, Digital Productions (in June) and Robert Abel & Associates Inc. (in October). The reason this is significant, is that both companies had invested heavily in high-end supercomputers like the Cray X-MP (which cost about $13 million each). This had put the focus on buying the fastest number cruncher money could buy and then creating your own custom software.

As soon as Omnibus took control of Digital Productions the two co-founders of Digital, John Whitney and Gary Demos, sued the majority owner of Omnibus, Santa Clara-based Ramtek, for a portion of the sale proceeds. Omnibus subsequently locked both of them out of their offices at Digital Productions in July of 1986. In September Omnibus obtained a temporary restraining order against Whitney and Demos alleging that Whitney and Demos founded a competing firm, Whitney Demos Productions, and had hired at least three employees away from Omnibus and were using software and other information that belonged to Omnibus. The restraining order required Whitney and Demos to return certain property temporarily to Omnibus.

In October, Omnibus acquired Robert Abel & Associates Inc. for $8.5 million. However, by March of 1987, Omnibus started defaulting on the $30 million it had borrowed from several major Canadian creditors. Most of the debts were the result of acquiring Digital Productions and Robert Abel & Associates the previous year. In May, Omnibus officially closed down and laid off all its employees.

According to Gary Demos, "Abel & Associates was sunk just the same as us. At the time, we were the two largest effects studios, and that crash fragmented the entire industry. It changed the whole character of the development of computer graphics." Talented people from both studios found their way into other animation studios. Jim Rigel went to Boss Films, Art Durenski went to a studio in Japan, some went to PDI, some went to Philips Interactive Media (then known as American Interactive Media), others went to Rhythm & Hues, Metrolight, and Lucasfilm. Whitney and Demos created Demos Productions in 1986. It lasted for two years, then they split up and formed their own companies in 1988. Whitney formed US Animation Labs, while Demos formed DemoGraphics.

In the personal computer field, computer graphics software was booming. Crystal Graphics introduced TOPAS, one of the first high-quality 3D animation programs for personal computers, in 1986. Over the years, Crystal Graphics would continue to be a major contender in the PC based 3D animation field. The following year, Electric Image was founded and released a 3D animation package for both SGI machines and Apple Macintosh computers. In Mountain View, California, a new 3D software company was founded under the name Octree Software Inc.. They later changed their name to Caligari Corporation and now offer 3D animation programs for both the Amiga and PC platforms.

Also in 1986 computer graphics found a new venue, the courtroom. Known as Forensic Animation, these computer graphics are more geared to technical accuracy than to visual aesthetics. Forensic Technologies Inc. started using computer graphics to help jurors visualize court cases. Still creating Forensic animation today, they have been in the business longer than any other company. Now they use SGI workstations from RS-4000's up through Crimson Reality Engines. For their 3D software they exclusively use Wavefront but have a few interfaces to CAD modeling packages. For 2D animation they use a program called Matador by Parallax.

In that same year, Disney made its first use of computer graphics in the film "The Great Mouse Detective." In this first Disney attempt at merging computer graphics and hand draw cel animation, they only used the computer for some of the mechanical devices such as gears and clockworks. A Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) department was formed and went on to work on such films as "Oliver and Company," "The Little Mermaid," "Rescuers Down Under," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin." With the highly successful results of "Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast," Disney has increased the animators in the CGI department from only 2 to over 14.

About this time at Lucasfilm, things were getting a little complicated. The computer graphics division wanted to move toward doing a feature length computer animated film. Meanwhile ILM was getting interested in the potential of computer graphics effects. Catmull explains, "Lucas felt this company was getting a little too wide and he wanted to narrow the focus into what he was doing as a filmmaker. Our goals weren't really quite consistent with his." So the computer graphics division asked if they could spin off as a separate company and Lucas agreed to do that.

It took a year about a year of trying to make that happen. Catmull continues, "One of the last things I did was hire two people to come in and start a CGI group for ILM because they still wanted CGI special effects capabilities. So I went out to a number of people but mainly focused on Doug Kay and George Joblove. They turned us down the first time. We talked to them and interviewed them and they called up and said 'We decided not to come up, because we have our own company.' So I put down the phone and thought 'damn I have to keep on looking.' Then that night I called back again, and said 'Doug, you're crazy! This is the opportunity of a lifetime! Something went wrong in the interview. Come back up here and let's do this thing again.' He said 'OK!' so I brought him up again, we went through it all again, and this time they accepted."

The computer graphics division of ILM split off to become Pixar in 1986. Part of the deal was that Lucasfilm would get continued access to Pixar's rendering technology. It took about a year to separate Pixar from Lucasfilm and in the process, Steve Jobs became a majority stockholder. Ed Catmull became president and Alvy Ray Smith became vice-president. Pixar continued to develop their renderer, putting a lot of resources into it and eventually turning it into Renderman.

Created in 1988, Renderman is a standard for describing 3D scenes. Pat Hanrahan of Pixar organized most of the technical details behind Renderman and gave it its name. Since then Hanrahan has moved to Princeton University where he is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science.

The Renderman standard describes everything the computer needs to know before rendering your 3D scene such as the objects, light sources, cameras, atmospheric effects, and so on. Once a scene is converted to a Renderman file, it can be rendered on a variety of systems, from Macs to PCs to Silicon Graphics Workstations. This opened up many possibilities for 3D computer graphics software developers. Now all the developer had to do was give the modeling system the capability of producing Renderman compatible scene descriptions. Once it did this, then the developer could bundle a Renderman rendering engine with the package, and not worry about writing their own renderer. When the initial specification was announced, over 19 firms endorsed it including Apollo, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, NeXT, MIPS, Prime, and Walt Disney.

An integral part of Renderman is the use of 'shaders' or small pieces of programming code for describing surfaces, lighting effects and atmospheric effects. Surface shaders are small programs that algorithmically generate textures based on mathematical formulas. These algorithmic textures are sometimes called procedural textures or spatial textures. Not only is the texture generated by the computer, but it is also generated in 3D space. Whereas most texture mapping techniques map the texture to the outside 'skin' of the object, procedural textures run completely through the object in 3D. So if you were using a fractal based procedural texture of wood grain on a cube, and you cut out a section of the cube, you would see the wood grain running through the cube.

The interesting part however was that Kay and Joblove (along with the other CGI specialist at ILM) became so efficient and the CGI grew and grew until today the CGI group is ILM. Its not a major department, it is...ILM. This is viewed by some as one of the most stunning developments in computer graphics history. One of the reasons the CGI department became so important is that it succeeded in what it intended to do. They set goals, budgets and they met them. Meanwhile, back at Pixar in December of 1988, Steve Jobs stepped down from his post of Chairman of Pixar, and Ed Catmull took his place. Charles Kolstad, the company's VP of manufacturing and engineering, became the new president.

Paul Sidlo had worked as Creative Director for Cranston/Csuri Productions from 1982 until 1987 when he left to form his own computer graphics studio, ReZ.n8 (pronounced resonate). Since then, ReZ.n8 has continued to be a leader in producing high quality computer graphics attracting such clients as ABC, CBS, Fox, ESPN, NBC along with most of the major film studios.

Jeff Kleiser had been a computer animator at Omnibus were he directed animation for the Disney feature film "Flight of the Navigator." Before Omnibus Kleiser had founded Digital Effects and worked on projects such as "Tron" and "Flash Gordon." As things started to fall apart at Omnibus he did some research into motion capture. Then when Omnibus closed, he joined up with Diana Walczak and formed a new company in 1987, Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company. Their new firm's specialty was human figure animation. In 1988 they produced a 3-1/2 minute music video with a computer generated character named Dozo. They used motion control to input all of her movements.

Brad DeGraf, also from Omnibus, joined forces with Michael Wahrman to form DeGraf/Wahrman Production company. At the SIGGRAPH conference of 1988, the showed, "Mike the Talking Head" which was an interactive 3D computer animated head. Using special controls, they were able to make it interact with the conference participants. Later DeGraf would leave Wahrman and go to work for Colossal Pictures in San Francisco.

The Pixar Animation Group made history on March 29, 1989 by winning an Oscar at the Academy Awards for their animated short film, "Tin Toy." The film was created completely with 3D computer graphics using Pixar's Renderman. John Lasseter directed the film with William Reeves providing technical direction.

At the 1989 SIGGRAPH in Boston, Autodesk unveiled a new PC based animation package called Autodesk Animator. As a full featured 2D animation and painting package, Animator was Autodesk's first step into the multimedia tools realm. The software-only animation playback capabilities achieved very impressive speeds and became a standard for playing animation on PCs.

In 1989 an underwater adventure movie was released called "The Abyss." This movie had a direct impact on the field of CGI for motion pictures. James Cameron, director and screenwriter for Abyss, had a specific idea in mind for a special effect. He wanted a water creature like a fat snake to emerge from a pool of water, extend itself and explore an underwater oil-rig and then to interact with live characters. He felt it couldn't be done with traditional special effects tools and so he put the effect up for bid and both Pixar and ILM bid on it. ILM won the bid and used Pixar's software to create it. Catmull explains, "We really wanted to do this water creature for the Abyss, but ILM got the bid, and they did a great job on it."

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HISTORY OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS 1970-79

The 1970s saw the introduction of computer graphics in the world of television. Computer Image Corporation (CIC) developed complex hardware and software systems such as ANIMAC, SCANIMATE and CAESAR. All of these systems worked by scanning in existing artwork, then manipulating it, making it squash, stretch, spin, fly around the screen, etc. . . Bell Telephone and CBS Sports were among the many who made use of the new computer graphics.

While flat shading can make an object look as if it's solid, the sharp edges of the polygons can detract from the realism of the image. While one can create smaller polygons (which also means more polygons), this increases the complexity of the scene, which in turn slows down the performance of the computer rendering the scene. To solve this, a Henri Gouraud in 1971 presented a method for creating the appearance of a curved surface by interpolating the color across the polygons. This method of shading a 3D object has since come to be known as Gouraud shading. One of the most impressive aspects of Gouraud shading is that it hardly takes any more computations than Flat shading, yet provides a dramatic increase in rendering quality. One thing that Gouraud shading can't fix is the visible edge of the object. The original flat polygons making up the torus are still visible along the edges of the object.

One of the most important advancements to computer graphics appeared on the scene in 1971, the microprocessor. Using Integrated Circuit technology developed in 1959, the electronics of a computer processor were miniaturized down to a single chip, the microprocessor, sometimes called a CPU (Central Processing Unit). One of the first desktop microcomputers designed for personal use was the Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS). Coming through mail-order in kit form, the Altair (named after a planet in the popular Star Trek series) retailed for around $400. Later personal computers would advance to the point where film-quality computer graphics could be created on them.

In that same year, Nolan Kay Bushnell along with a friend formed Atari. He would go on to create an arcade video game called Pong in 1972 and start an industry that continues even today to be one of the largest users of computer graphics technology.

In the 1970's a number of animation houses were formed. In Culver City, California, Information International Incorporated (better known as Triple I) formed a motion picture computer graphics department. In San Rafael, California, George Lucas formed Lucasfilm. In Los Angeles, Robert Abel & Associates and Digital Effects were formed. In Elmsford, New York, MAGI was formed. In London, England, Systems Simulation Ltd. was formed. Of all these companies, almost none of them would still be in business ten years later. At Abel & Associates, Robert Abel hired Richard Edlund to help with computer motion control of cameras. Edlund would later get recruited to Lucasfilm to work on Star Wars, and eventually to establish Boss Film Studios creating special effects for movies and motion pictures and winning four Academy Awards.

In 1970 Gary Demos was a senior at Caltech when we saw the work of John Whitney Sr. This immediately developed an interest in him for computer graphics. This interest was further developed when he saw work done at Evans & Sutherland, along with the animation that was coming out of the University of Utah. So in 1972 Demos went to work for E&S. At that time they used Digital PDP-11 computers along with the custom built hardware that E&S was becoming famous for. These systems included the Picture System that featured a graphics tablet and color frame buffer (originally designed by UU).

It was at E&S that Demos met John Whitney Jr., the son of the original graphics pioneer. E&S started to work on some joint projects with Triple I. Founded in 1962, Triple I was in the business of creating digital scanners and other image processing equipment. Between E&S and Triple I there was a Picture Design Group. After working on a few joint projects between E&S and Triple I, Demos and Whitney left E&S to join Triple I and form the Motion Picture Products group in late 1974. At Triple I, they used PDP-10s and a Foonley Machine (which was a custom PDP-10). They developed another frame buffer that used 1000 lines; they also built custom film recorders and scanners along with custom graphics processors, image accelerators and the software to run it. This development led to the first use of computer graphics for motion pictures in 1973 when Whitney and Demos worked on the motion picture "Westworld". They used a technique called pixellization which is a computerized mosaic created by breaking up a picture into large color blocks. This is done by dividing up the picture into square areas, and then averaging the colors into one color within that area.

In 1973 the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) held its first conference. Solely devoted to computer graphics, the convention attracted about 1,200 people and was held in a small auditorium. Since the 1960's the University of Utah had been the focal point for research on 3D computer graphics and algorithms. For the research, the classes set up various 3D models such as a VW Beetle, a human face, and the most popular, a teapot. It was in 1975 that a M. Newell developed the Utah teapot, and throughout the history of 3D computer graphics it has served as a benchmark, and today it's almost an icon for 3D computer graphics. The original teapot that Newell based his computer model on can be seen at the Boston Computer Museum displayed next to a computer rendering of it.

Ed Catmull received his Ph. D. in computer science in 1974 and his thesis covered Texture Mapping, Z-Buffer and rendering curved surfaces. Texture mapping brought computer graphics to a new level of realism. Catmull had come up with the idea of texture mapping while sitting in his car in a parking lot at UU and talking to another student, Lance Williams, about creating a 3D castle. Most objects in real life have very rich and detailed surfaces, such as the stones of a castle wall, the material on a sofa, the wallpaper on a wall, the wood veneer on a kitchen table. Catmull realized that if you could apply patterns and textures to real-life objects, you could do the same for their computer counterparts. Texture mapping is the method of taking a flat 2D image of what an object's surface looks like, and then applying that flat image to a 3D computer generated object. Much in the same way that you would hang wallpaper on a blank wall.

The z-buffer aided the process of hidden surface removal by using zels which are similar to pixels but instead of recording the luminance of a specific point in an image, they record the depth of that point. The letter "z" reflecting the depth (as does Y for vertical position and X for horizontal position). The z-buffer was then an area of memory devoted to holding the depth data for every pixel in an image. Today high-performance graphics workstations have a z-buffer built-in.

While Gouraud shading was a great improvement over Flat shading, it still had a few problems as to its realism. If you look closely at the Gouraud shaded torus you will notice slight variations in the shading that reveal the underlying polygons. These variations can also cause reflections to appear incorrectly or even disappear altogether in certain circumstances. This was corrected however by Phong Bui-Toung, a programmer at the UU (of course). Bui-Toung arrived at UU in 1971 and in 1974 he developed a new shading method that came to be known as Phong shading. After UU, Bui-Toung went on to Stanford as a professor, and early in 1975 he died of cancer. His shading method accurately interpolates the colors over a polygonal surface giving accurate reflective highlights and shading. The drawback to this is that Phong shading can be up to 100 times slower than Gouraud shading. Because of this, even today, when animators are creating small, flat 3D objects that are not central to the animation, they will use Gouraud shading on them instead of Phong. As with Gouraud shading, Phong shading cannot smooth over the outer edges of 3D objects.

A major breakthrough in simulating realism began in 1975 when the French mathematician, Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot published a paper called "A Theory of Fractal Sets." After some 20 years of research he published his findings and named them Fractal Geometry. To understand what a fractal is, consider that a straight line is a one-dimensional object, while a plane is a two-dimensional object. However, if the line curves around in such a way as to cover the entire surface of the plane, then it is no longer one dimensional, yet not quite two dimensional. Mandelbrot described it as a fractional dimension, between one and two.

To understand how this helps computer graphics, imagine creating a random mountain terrain. You may start with a flat plane, then tell the computer to divide the plane into four equal parts. Next the new center point is offset vertically some random amount. Following that, one of the new smaller squares is chosen, subdivided, with its center slightly off-set randomly. The process continues recursively until some limit is reached and all the squares are off-set.

Mandelbrot followed up his paper with a book entitled "The Fractal Geometry of Nature." This showed how his fractal principles could be applied to computer imagery to create realistic simulations of natural phenomena such as mountains, coastlines, wood grain, etc.

After graduating in 1974 from UU, Ed Catmull went to a company called Applicon. It didn't last very long however, because in November of that same year he was made an offer he couldn't refuse. Alexander Schure, founder of New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), had gone to the UU to see their computer graphics lab. Schure had a great interest in animation and had already established a traditional animation facility at NYIT. After seeing the setup at UU, he asked Evans what equipment he needed to create computer graphics. He told his people to "get me one of everything they have." The timing happened to be just right because UU was running out of funding at the time. Schure made Ed Catmull Director of NYIT's new Computer Graphics Lab. Then other talented people in the computer graphics field such as Malcolm Blanchard, Garland Stern and Lance Williams left UU and went to NYIT. Thus the leading center for computer graphics research soon switched from UU to NYIT.

One talented recruit was Alvy Ray Smith. As a young student at New Mexico State University in 1964, he had used a computer to create a picture of an equiangular spiral for a Nimbus Weather satellite. Despite this early success, Smith didn't take an immediate interest in computer graphics. He moved on to Stanford University, got his Ph.D., then promptly took his first teaching job at New York University. Smith recalls, "My chairman, Herb Freeman, was very interested in computer graphics, some of his students had made important advances in the field. He knew I was an artist and yet he couldn't spark any interest on my part, I would tell him 'If you ever get color I'll get interested.' Then one day I met Dr. Richard Shoup, and he told me about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). He was planning on going to PARC to create a program that emulated painting on a computer the way an artist would naturally paint on a canvas."

Shoup had become interested in computer graphics while he was at Carnegie Mellon University. He then became a resident scientist at PARC and began working on a program he called "SuperPaint." It used one of the first color frame buffers ever built. At the same time Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs was creating his own paint program.

Smith on the other hand, wasn't thinking much about paint programs. In the meantime, he had broken his leg in a skiing accident and re-thought the path his life was taking. He decided to move back to California to teach at Berkeley in 1973. "I was basically a hippie, but one day I decided to visit my old friend, Shoup in Palo Alto. He wanted to show me his progress on the painting program, and I told him that I only had about an hour, and then I would need to get back to Berkeley. I was only visiting him as a friend, and yet when I saw what he had done with his paint program, I wound up staying for 12 hours! I knew from that moment on that computer graphics was what I wanted to do with my life." Smith managed to get himself hired by Xerox in 1974 and worked with Shoup in writing SuperPaint.

A few years later in 1975 in nearby San Jose, Alan Baum, a workmate of Steve Wozniak at Hewlett Packard, invited Wozniak to a meeting of the local Homebrew Computer Club. Homebrew, started by Fred Moore and Gorden French, was a club of amateur computer enthusiasts, and it soon was a hotbed of ideas about building your own personal computers. From the Altair 8800 to TV typewriters, the club discussed and built virtually anything that resembled a computer. It was a friend at the Homebrew club that first gave Wozniak a box full of electronic parts and it wasn't long before Wozniak was showing off his own personal computer/toy at the Homebrew meetings. A close friend of Wozniak, Steve Jobs, worked at Atari and help Wozniak develop his computer into the very first Apple computer. They built the units in a garage and sold them for $666.66.

In the same year William Gates III at the age of 19 dropped out of Harvard and along with his friend Paul Allen, founded a company called Microsoft. They wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800 and put it on the market. Some five years later in 1980, when IBM was looking for an operating system to use with their new personal computer, they approached Microsoft and Gates remembered an operating system for Intel 8080 microprocessors written by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) called 86-DOS. Taking a gamble, Gates bought 86-DOS from SCP for $50,000, rewrote it, named it DOS and licensed it (smartly retaining ownership) to IBM as the operating system for their first personal computer. Today Microsoft dominates the personal computer software industry with gross annual sales of almost 4 billion dollars, and now it has moved into the field of 3D computer graphics.

Meanwhile back at PARC, Xerox had decided to focus solely on black and white computer graphics, dropping everything that was in color. So Alvy Ray Smith called Ed Catmull at NYIT and went out east with David DiFrancesco to meet with Catmull. Everyone hit it off, so Smith made the move from Xerox over to NYIT; this was about two months after Catmull had gotten there. The first thing Smith did was write a full color (24-bit) paint program, the first of its kind.

Later others joined NYIT's computer graphics lab including Tom Duff, Paul Heckbert, Pat Hanrahan, Dick Lundin, Ned Greene, Jim Blinn, Rebecca Allen, Bill Maher, Jim Clark, Thaddeus Beier, Malcom Blanchard and many others. In all, the computer graphics lab of NYIT would eventually be home to more than 60 employees. These individuals would continue to lead the field of computer graphics some twenty years later. The first computer graphics application NYIT focused on was 2D animation and creating tools to assist traditional animators. One of the tools that Catmull built was "Tween," a tool that interpolated in-between frames from one line drawing to another. They also developed a scan-and-paint system for scanning and then painting pencil-drawn artwork. This would later evolve into Disney's CAPS (Computer Animation Production System).

Next the NYIT group branched into 3D computer graphics. Lance Williams wrote a story for a movie called "The Works," sold the idea to Schure, and this movie became NYIT's major project for over two years. A lot of time and resources were spent in creating 3D models and rendering test animations. "NYIT in itself was a significant event in the history of computer graphics" explains Alvy Ray Smith. "Here we had this wealthy man, having plenty of money and getting us whatever we needed, we didn't have a budget, we had no goals, we just stretched the envelope. It was such an incredible opportunity, every day someone was creating something new. None of us slept, it was common to work 22 hour days. Everything you saw was something new. We blasted computer graphics into the world. It was like exploring a new continent."

However, the problem was that none of the people in the Computer Graphics Lab understood the scope of making a motion picture. "We were just a bunch of engineers in a little converted stable on Long Island, and we didn't know the first thing about making movies" said Beier (now technical director for Pacific Data Images). Gradually over a period of time, people became discouraged and left for other places. Smith continues, "It just wasn't happening. We all thought we would take part in making a movie. But at the time it would have been impossible with the speed of the computers." Alex Schure made an animated movie called "Tubby the Tuba" using conventional animation techniques, and it turned out to be very disappointing. "We realized then that he really didn't have what it takes to make a movie," explains Smith. Catmull agrees, "It was awful, it was terrible, half the audience fell asleep at the screening. We walked out of the screening room thinking 'Thank God we didn't have anything to do with it, that computers were not used for anything in that movie!'" The time was ripe for George Lucas.

Lucas, with the success of Star Wars under his belt, was interested in using computer graphics on his next movie, "The Empire Strikes Back". So he contacted Triple I, who in turn produced a sequence that showed five X-Wing fighters flying in formation. However disagreements over financial aspects caused Lucas to drop it and go back to hand-made models. The experience however showed that photorealistic computer imagery was a possibility, so Lucas decided to assemble his own Computer Graphics department within his special effects company, Lucasfilm. Lucas sent out a person to find the brightest minds in the world of Computer Graphics. He found NYIT. Initially the individual went to Carnegie Mellon University and talked to a professor who referred him to one of his students, Ralph Guggenheim, who referred him to Catmull at NYIT. After a few discussions, Catmull flew out to the west coast and met with Lucas and accepted his offer.

Initially only five from NYIT went with Catmull including Alvy Ray Smith, David DiFrancesco, Tom Duff and Ralph Guggenheim. Later however, others would take up the opportunity. Slowly the computer graphics lab started to fall apart and ceased to be the center of computer graphics research. The focus had shifted to Lucasfilm and a new graphics department at Cornell University. Over the next 15 years, Lucasfilm would be nominated for over 20 Academy Awards, winning 12 Oscars, five Technical Achievement Awards and two Emmys.

Looking back at NYIT, Catmull reflects "Alex Schure funded five years of great research work, and he deserves credit for that. We published a lot of papers, and were very open about our research, allowing people to come on tours and see our work. However now there are a lot of lawsuits going on, mainly because we didn't patent very much. People then subsequently acquired patents on that work and now we are called in frequently to show that we had done the work prior to other people."

Catmull continues, "We really had a major group of talented people in the lab, and the whole purpose was to do research and development for animation. We were actually quite stable for a long time, that first five years until I left. However, the primary issue was to make a feature film, and to do that you have to gather a lot of different kinds of skills; Artistic, Editorial, etc.. Unfortunately, the managers of the school did not understand this. They appreciated the technical capabilities. So as a group we where well taken care of, but we all recognized that in order to produce a feature film we had to have another kind of person there, movie people, and basically those people weren't brought into the school. We were doing the R & D but we just could not achieve our goals there. So when Lucas came along, and proved that he did have those kind of capabilities and said I want additional development in this area (of computer graphics), we jumped at it."

Thus in 1979 George Lucas formed the new computer graphics division of Lucasfilm to create computer imagery for motion pictures. Catmull became vice president and during the next six years, this new group would assemble one of the most talented teams of artists and programmers in the computer graphics industry. The advent of Lucasfilm's computer graphics department is viewed by many as another major milestone in the history of computer graphics. Here the researchers had access to funds, but at the same time they were working under a serious movie maker with real, definite goals.

The ACM in 1976 allowed for the first time, exhibitors in the annual SIGGRAPH conference. This turned up 10 companies who exhibited their products. By 1993 this would grow to 275 companies with over 30,000 attendees.

Systems Simulation Ltd. (SSL) of London created an interesting computer graphics sequence for the movie "Alien" in 1976. The scene called for a computer-assisted landing sequence where the terrain was viewed as a 3D wireframe. Initially a polystyrene landscape was going to be digitized to create the terrain. However, the terrain needed to be very rugged & complex and would have made a huge database if digitized. Alan Sutcliffe of SSL decided to write a program to generate the mountains at random. The result was a very convincing mountain terrain displayed in wireframe with the hidden lines removed. This was typical of early efforts at using computer generated imagery (CGI) in motion pictures, using it to simulate advanced computers in Sci-Fi movies.

Meanwhile the Triple I team was busy in 1976 working on "Westworld's" sequel, "Futureworld." In this film, robot Samurai warriors needed to materialize into a vacuum chamber. To accomplish this, Triple I digitized still photographs of the warriors and then used some image processing techniques to manipulate the digitized images and make the warriors materialize over the background. Triple I developed some custom film scanners and recorders for working on films in high resolutions, up to 2,500 lines. Also in that same year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (before going to NYIT), James Blinn developed a new technique similar to Texture Mapping. However, instead of simply mapping the colors from a 2D image onto a 3D object, the colors were used to make the surface appear as if it had a dent or a bulge. To do this, a monochrome image is used where the white areas of the image will appear as bulges and the black areas of the image will appear as dents. Any shades of gray are treated as smaller bumps or bulges depending on how dark or how light the shade of gray is. This form of mapping is called Bump Mapping.

Bump maps can add a new level of realism to 3D graphics by simulating a rough surface. When both a texture map and a bump map are applied at the same time, the result can be very convincing. Without bump maps, a 3D object can look very flat and un-interesting.

Busy Blinn also published a paper in that same year on creating surfaces that reflect their surroundings. This is accomplished by rendering six different views from the location of the object (top, bottom, front, back, left and right). Those views are then applied to the outside of the object in a way similar to standard texture mapping. The result is that an object appears to reflect its surroundings. This type of mapping is called environment mapping.

In December of 1977, a new magazine debuted called Computer Graphics World. Back then the major stories involving computer graphics revolved around 2D drafting, remote sensing, IC design, military simulation, medical imaging and business graphics. Today, some 17 years later, CGW continues to be the primary medium for computer graphics related news and reviews. Computer graphics hardware was still prohibitively expensive at this time. The National Institute of Health paid 65,000 dollars for their first frame buffer back in 1977. It had a resolution of 512x512 with 8 bits of color depth. Today a video adapter with the same capabilities can be purchased for under 100 dollars.

During the late 1970's Don Greenberg at Cornell University created a computer graphics lab that produced new methods of simulating realistic surfaces. Rob Cook at Cornell realized that the lighting model everyone had been using best approximated plastic. Cook wanted to create a new lighting model that allowed computers to simulate objects like polished metal. This new model takes into account the energy of the light source rather than the light's intensity or brightness.

As the second decade of computer graphics drew to a close the industry was showing tremendous growth. In 1979, IBM released its 3279 color terminal and within 9 months over 10,000 orders had been placed for it. By 1980, the entire value of all the computer graphics systems, hardware, and services would reach a billion dollars.

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