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1977 Star Wars Computer Graphics
Noryungi writes "The interestingly named 'Topless Robot' has a real trip down memory lane: how the computer graphics of the original Star Wars movie were made. The article points to this
YouTube video of a short documentary made by Larry Cuba, the original artist, that explains how he did it. In 1977."
George Look Arse presents
STAR WHORES
starring
Topless Robot
Don't believe these lies.
The wireframe of the death star did not shoot first in the original.
...even for todays standards...
This is a pretty sweet video, if you think about how out of the box some of this was at the time it makes it even cooler. (Sad to think a calculator I used in high school could have done this easier...)
Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
After Effects
Alpha version of course...
The interestingly named "Topless Robot"
*click*
If you like this, you'll love the book "Droidmaker"
http://www.droidmaker.com/contents.html
about Star Wars was posted on tech website Slashdot today. The story garnered a great deal of interest.
In other news, there are ongoing rumors in the entertainment industry that producer George Lucas is nearing bankruptcy. A Lucas Arts spokesperson declined comment.
The space-ship consoles show CAD-drawings the ship aligning with landing pads. Also the astronauts debugging the supposedly broker communication module used graphics. Only these was faked with drafted animation cells because computer graphics wasnt advanced enough in the 1960s to this. There were only osilliscope vector graphics then. But Kubrick and advisers like Minsky were anticipating better graphics in the future.
CGI has ruined movies, they are so in your face that you can't enjoy the movie. What made the original star wars great was the animitronics for all the characters instead of jar jar binks super imposed cartoon characters.
Everyone knows that Babylon 5 is better.
Looker came out in 1980, and that featured some cool wireframe models of humans. IIRC it also had textures. Not sure if it was entirely CGI, but it looked wonderful nonetheless.
I had a job around 1990 using a digitizing pad. I used one of those four button mice that had the wire ring around cross-hairs that I would put over the point I wanted to capture. Very cool to see something like that again. Ah, the memories.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Slashdot was scooped by Digg on this 1.5yrs ago: http://digg.com/movies/Making_of_the_Computer_Graphics_for_Star_Wars_Episode_IV
This proves that real Jedi's do not use a light sword but a light pen.
Thank you for clearing that up.
May the force be with you!
... I remember DirectX 7 quite well.
The reason Larry Cuba could do real-time rendering in 1976 was that he was using a vector graphics display (http://www.cca.org/vector/). In a vector display, there are no pixels. There is no video RAM. Instead, there is a list of (x y) pairs (a list of positions on the screen, each with an off/on flag). The controller simply loops through the list over and over: the (x y) are fed to digital-to-analog converters, which drive the left/right and up/down deflectors for the CRT's electron beam. The on/off flags turn the beam on and off. In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
If you stick to black and white, you don't need a CRT mask to separately illuminate the red, green and blue phosphor dots. Without this mask, you can get some very sharp images.
If Cuba were using pixels instead, he would have needed megabytes to hold an image. I doubt anyone could afford a megabyte. Moreover, I doubt that in 1976 the electronics was fast enough to even read an image's bytes and turn it into a CRT signal. And that's just displaying the image on the screen. To create the image in the first place, he would have needed, for each line segment, to fill in all the pixels from endpoint to endpoint. There's no way he could have filled that many pixels in real time. But with a vector display, filling is done by the movement of the electron beam, and costs you zero computation.
Alejo
From the article:
And it reminds me of something -- when the Star Wars special editions were about to come out in '97, I was certain that Lucas was going to redo those computer effects, like from the Rebel briefing and on the Millennium Falcon's display during the TIE Fighter dogfight. Dead certain, because if anything dated the Star Wars movies (besides Hamill's hair) it was the computer effects.
Quite true. In fact, the original model effects of the whole battle still look pretty good, but other parts of the movie are quite dated, and not all of them were changed in the new versions. Another example is Yoda's death scene, where the muppet disappears and sheet slowly falls into the unoccupied space. It's an obvious piece of stop motion animation, and I'm surprised Lucas didn't redo it in CGI in some of the newer remakes of Star Wars (the ones where Han shoots at the same time). He already had a Yoda computer model by then from the prequels, which is half the work done right there.
Not a typewriter
The first digital computer I programmed was an IBM 1800 built in 1966 (and was donated to our university in 1975 where I got my hands on it) so I well know the level of computer power available when 2001 ASO was filmed. Back then analog computers were more suitable than digital computers for many real world tasks. Anyone studying computer science then was expected to be able to build an analog circuit to solve differential equations for example, that way was faster than the digital methods at the time. It would have taken quite a while to render a movie scene with the 4K that was left of the 1800's RAM after the compiler/runtime was loaded.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, Get off my lawn!
Great video, but I find it hard to believe that Star Wars/computer nerds are just now discovering this. I saw it a year and a half ago--the YouTube upload date is two years ago (November 20, 2007).
:q!
V is better.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Larry said he wrote the software to do the combining of the primitives for the trench, but what was the hardware? I've used E&S consoles similar to those, but those were VAX driven, which wasn't an option in 1976. The terminal looked similar to a VT05, but that was just an impression while watching.
}#q NO CARRIER
Taken from Motionographer
Greetings all.
I have a few comments about this post:
The Video:
This “making of” video was originally produced for my personal presentations as I was often asked to explain the process (back in the 70s and 80s when it was still obscure). Lucasfilm was vigilant in protecting its copyrighted material but OK’d this video at the time, since i had no intention of distributing it. (although copies apparently escaped) I wonder what they would say, now that the EVL in Chicago has resurrected it (after 30 years!) and posted it on YouTube.
The YouTube link to “Calculated Movements”:
It should be noted that this video is an *excerpt* from the film, posted by the EVL.I also posted my ‘official’ excerpt here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH0MXZ-T4Js
Some day soon, all of my films will be available on DVD. They should be projected large, if possible as scale is important when you’re dealing with visual perception.
Those who are interested, should watch my site for news, or sign my guestbook and I’ll notify you when it’s released.
http://www.well.com/~cuba/
Thanks for the attention.
Regards,
Larry Cuba
This reminds me of this application I had on my old 4Mhz PCjr that did nothing but draw a 3d wireframe of a cowboy hat. It took a good 30 minutes to draw that thing. I recall us running it on some faster machine some time later and it drew the thing in seconds. On one of my machines now I could have a far more complex hat, with textures, lighting and more and not only would it render the thing pretty much immediately, but it could move around at a nice framerate too.
Regarding effects in movies, I agree with what others have said, that nowadays the focus is on the effects not the characters or the story. Any movie with effects today has the obligatory gratuitous panning shots of fantastic environments. High tech devices are always unnecessarily complex and cumbersome to use, all for the sake reminding people how awesome the technology is. And characters are overly conscious about all these things. It would be like being dumbstruck every time you came up to street level from the subways in Manhattan. It would be like making great fanfare every time on your computer, and speaking in techno-babble with everyone about browsing the web.
I've also noticed this tendency over the last decade to depict everything in the future as overly polished and pristine. It's either that or then they make things so worn and weather-beaten that it's almost comical, like someone smashed their stuff with rocks and flushed it down the toilet for good measure. It's really not surprising since there's this compulsive need to make everything stupidly obvious.
There's also this cynicism people share towards special effects. When people watch any effects-laden movie what is invariably the first question asked? Are the effects any good? I've noticed it in myself. I'll sit there watching the movie with a critical eye towards the effects. So I'm ruining immersion because I'm constantly reminding myself this is a movie. Well, bad plot holes and stupid storylines manage to pull that off more effectively, but nevertheless the fact remains that there's a lot of fixation on effects on the part of viewers. Thinking back to when I was a kid, everything looked amazing. I didn't really question it and at the time it effects had to be truly awful for me not to find them convincing. But looking back on most movies, most effects were quite subpar by today's standards.
That said, there are a few that have managed to hold up quite well. I think that was accomplished not only by meticulous effects work, but I think it goes back to the initial point that the effects then served to support the movie, they weren't necessarily the central focus. Well, it's not so much that they weren't the focus, but rather they weren't trying to beat you over the head about how great the effects were. They were just there. A good example is Blade Runner. It just so happened that the movie took place in the future. But you could have just as easily depicted any of those scenes in modern day and it wouldn't look awkward. And everything had a adequately weathered look that made the world feel inhabited.
It's just too bad that they couldn't clean up all the slugs and garbage mattes in all the reissues since.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Perhaps we could train the butterknife to do acrobatics or sing Stairway to Heaven and it would be more interesting. Maybe cast the handle as a Mandelbulb http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/15/2032233
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
...even for todays standards...
For today's standards? Seriously?
Twenty years ago this is the kind of project a hobbyist could have taken on, working alone. A PC from that era would have been sufficient to do all the modeling and rendering work.
These days, a $300 computer would be plenty for modeling and rendering a superior final product. It's not just about raw rendering power, either - it's also about having access to software (Blender, for instance) which makes the modeling and animation tasks a lot easier to manage...
Don't get me wrong - I think early examples of early CG work in movies is cool stuff, and I love seeing how it was done. It was impressive stuff by the standards of the day. But today? No... It's only impressive if you look at it in terms of what the guy had to work with.
I gotta say, though, it's interesting that they chose to do that sequence with a computer. I would have thought that, since they were building models of everything anyway, it would have been easier to do the sequence as a set of model shots... With the right treatment and photographic process, a physical model could be used to create a shot that looks like a computer sequence... (Basically: paint it black, paint the edges white, light the hell out of it, and start filming... Or clear-cast a copy of the model parts, paint it black, sand off the paint on the edges, and light it from inside or behind... They could get a stark black/white shot out of that via photographic processes...) The downsides, I guess, is they'd have to have the models ready for this before shooting the briefing scene, and it would be a somewhat different look (more like a wireframe with occlusion, but shadows and such would probably blot out some of the edging, too...)
Bow-ties are cool.
I remember seeing, hearing or reading something, a long time ago, from one of the effects guys on the Buck Rogers TV series (the Gil Gerrard one.) He was describing an effect in which they needed a 3-D wireframe model of a spaceship rotating on a computer monitor (much like you see here.)
He said that he spent a fair bit of time trying to program a computer to do it, but couldn't get it to work (not really a math or computer guy at all). In the end, he fell back on what he knew best: mechanical effects. He whipped up a wireframe model using actual wire, painted it day-glo orange, mounted it on a gimbal, and stuck the whole thing inside a hollowed-out computer monitor with the insides painted black.
Sometimes the old ways are the best ways...
The ironic part about this is less is often more.
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
The fact that they stretched the current technology at the time helps in the total illusion of high-tech. Anything higher-tech would have just gave the impression of "magic" and lead to a completely different feeling for the movie go-er and limited the suspension of disbelief.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
Douglas Trumbull (who also did the visual effects for the original Close Encounters of the Third Kind) did the effects in finale of 2001 using what is called slit-scan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography photography combined with high speed photography of chemical reactions and solarization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarisation techniques on arial photography. No computers were involved.
I'm not talking about making the sequence more photo-realistic. I don't care about that.
What I said was that, no, that sequence is not "amazing by today's standards". It's amazing by the standards of 1977 in my opinion... And I can appreciate that. But saying it's anything special by today's standards is just factually wrong.
Computationally, in the present day, plotting a sequence like that would be light work for a scrap of Javascript thrown onto a webpage by somebody who wanted one more bit of eye candy. Modeling and animating a sequence like that would be dreadfully simple in a program like Blender. A piece of work like that is no longer innovative, special, ground-breaking in any way - out of context people wouldn't think much of it. So saying it's impressive by today's standards is just silly.
Bow-ties are cool.
The machine was a PDP-11. It was a PDP-11/45 running a one-of-a-kind graphics OS, called GRASS, the Graphics Symbiosis System written by Tom DeFanti, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle). Tom's appointment then was to the Chemistry Dept.; the GRASS system was used primarily for molecular modeling. It drove an Evans & Sutherland Picture System, a giant $100,000 vector graphics engine worth five times what the PDP-11 was worth.
Larry's work pushed the system to its limits. His work was done at night, on the QT, with Tom's permission. This was done by giving Larry his own disk pack with a copy of the system on it. Larry's use of the system worked around all sorts of bugs in that relatively early version of GRASS. The film was made by pointing a (film) camera at the E&S screen, and running a macro which would render a frame, click the camera, render a frame, click the camera... While the PDP-11 system could in fact render the Death Star trench in real time, by the time you included all the little bits and frobs, the E&S took long enough to draw it that the display flickered. Hence the need to do frame-by-frame. Also, there was no frame-sync hardware in the system; the camera and display were connected only by the solenoid that tripped the camera shutter.
I played with that disk pack a year or two after the fact and it was a hoot to fly around the Death Star by hand. GRASS pioneered the interactive control of complex graphics, so all the position (and other) variables could trivially be tied to dials, etc. I was discouraged by one thing: the final version of the run had apparently been deleted from the disk. The only version I could find had the big "dish" directly on the equator of the Death Star, not at 45 degrees north latitude as in the film.
Years after that, I happened to talk to Larry Cuba by phone about something else, and asked him about that. He said the version I saw WAS the final version. Years after that, when I went to my "farewell to Star Wars viewing of Star Wars", I saw he was right. The plans shown to the rebels show the dish on the equator. Obviously the plans were fake. Those rebels were all dead men.
Those of us without million-dollar graphics labs only got to do 2-D graphics at that time, or 3-D graphics using dots instead of vectors.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Tha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-an!
I came here to find out about the green squares around all of the TIE fighters. I demand to know, Slashdot
Exclamation mark
"But with a vector display, filling is done by the movement of the electron beam, and costs you zero computation."
The Vectrex was like that. The thing you forgot in your long dissertation was the use of long-persistence phosphors to compensate for the flicker.
And it reminds me of something -- when the Star Wars special editions were about to come out in '97, I was certain that Lucas was going to redo those computer effects, like from the Rebel briefing and on the Millennium Falcon's display during the TIE Fighter dogfight. Dead certain, because if anything dated the Star Wars movies (besides Hamill's hair) it was the computer effects.
Lucasfilm did nothing to update these dated CG effects - it took Adywan to fix it once and for all.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I have the console from the Lucasfilm VAX 780. Just the top part with a few switches and lights, and a key lock, on display on the wall in my office. I removed it before Pixar (which had spun off from Lucasfilm) threw the VAX away. Apparently this is the machine used for the Genesis Effect (Star Trek) and perhaps some later Star Wars effects shot using the Evans and Sutherland Picture System 2 or 3. It would have been purchased in 1981 or later.
Bruce Perens.
Not to mention the impending spector of "dimensionalization" which can convert old flat movies into 3D with variable success.
Indeed each of this new technology did it share of ruining.
It's not that these technologies are inherently bad. It was just the "latest toy around" and lots of directors felt compelled to over-abuse it and put it everywhere even where it definitely shouldn't be used. Directors started considering as a magic trick that will inherently make a film better as soon as it is used.
It happened with every single stuff you mention.
It happened in other media too - any one remember how "let's all go full 3D" completely killed old-school adventure games ?
And you can already bet that the next new technology (3D Stereoscopy, probably) will also get absurdly overused - with films going Stereo 3D, just for the sake of being Stereo 3D, without any need for it or without having any actual value to show.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I wonder how many Bothans died to bring us this YouTube video?
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
...that they had to deal with all the crap to make each scene and still had the energy and resources left to focus on the plot to make a good movie. When I watch the movies today, they are still great and the special effects come across as dated, but classy.
In comparison, the last three Star Wars releases could take advantage of advanced computing resources, yet somehow manage to look chinzy and the plots are horrendous to the point that the movies actually make me feel dirty.
And it isn't the fault of the CGI either, because the Lord of the Rings trilogy had excellent and tasteful CGI. Of course, they also didn't butcher the plot. I think Lucas just blew his wad 30 years ago and can't get over it.
I used to be a technician in the U.S. Army for the HAWK (Homing All-the-Way Killer -- gotta love that name, oh, and LASHE mode (Low-Altitude Simultaneous HAWK Engagement) -- YAY, takes me back!) and i had to diagnose and repair the RADAR display systems (TDECC - Tactical Display/Engagement Control Console) [among others systems and sub-systems] and this is EXACTLY how the display worked. It had a green phosphorescent display that "drew" the glyghs representing air-craft etc on the screen in real-time based on digitial inputs representing positions and vectors (shapes) to draw that were converted in A/D converters into voltage levels to drive the "Yoke" thereby deflecting the beam to the correct position on the phosphor.
I used to love figuring out problems with that system and fixing them. What fun! Even better was the refridgerator-sized Tactical Computer that had a RAM drawer the about 5 feet tall and 18 inches wide by about 36 inches deep with (count 'em) 16kiB (yes, virgnia that's Kilo-Bytes -- 16 x 1024 bytes) of "Magneto Core" memory cells.
AMERICA! FUCK YA!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I forgot to explain, in the above post, that the dish being shown on the Death Star's equator in Larry's wireframe plans was not Larry's fault. The only thing he had available to use in constructing his sequence was some pre-production artwork, presumably by Ralph McQuarrie, which showed the dish on the equator. After Larry had completed his work and it was too late to go back and fix it, the dish was moved to its final position on the Death Star.
I read that in Max Headroom's voice...
I void warranties.
when it looks flat, lifeless, unrealistic, out of place, and cartoony... when muscles don't move like they are supposed to, when gravity doesn't work like it's supposed to... even if you can jump and fly though the air.... you still do it in a gravitational field, like birds do.. when lighting is off, when eyebrows don't work right, when eyes are glassy and expressionless, when hairs don't crinkle properly. when the cruft and the crud are missing, the mud and bugs and spit and blood are nowhere to be found, when things crash and bang like they aren't supposed to.... when everything is too pretty, or prettily ugly, the sky too clear, everything too designed and prepped and coded..
then i can tell.
I heard it in Kirk's.
Sounds like Auto Tune to me.... :P
Probably because the distinctive sound of Auto Tune (that is, excessive Auto Tune usage) makes the original voice stick to the note too consistently - stamping out any variation or deviation. A primitive voice synthesizer would do pretty much the same thing - each bit of voice synthesis would be made up of a sequence of commands issued to waveform generators - getting it to hit a certain note would be easy (just change the frequency) but getting it to sound more natural by introducing variations and deviations, would require additional work.
For instance, a vowel sound like the "a" in "Daisy" would probably be done by having the waveform generator output a specific frequency and waveform type (triangle wave? I'm afraid I don't readily recognize the different waveforms by sound...) and set up the filter stage to pass a certain range of frequencies - and then just hold those settings for the length of the syllable.
Bow-ties are cool.
What voice do you read my signature in?
Sorry, couldn't resist! :-p
"Good news, everyone!"