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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."
http://www.3dconnexion.com/3dmouse/overview.php
If you like this, you'll love the book "Droidmaker"
http://www.droidmaker.com/contents.html
Those were common in early cadd systems, they didn't have a mouse. They used digitizing tables and 3d inputs like you see in the video.
I would have liked to know more about the technology, not just how he did it with "a computer". What cadd package was it? What hardware?
Most likely something from Unigraphics or Intergraph, as those were big 3d modeling packages of the era.
Nowadays 3d inputs are easier with spaceballs and a simple mouse, or a 3d mouse.
You can get a bunch of these: http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/
These used to be common, long ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial_box
The "3Dmouse" mentioned above is not a dial. It is a puck that's spring-loaded to stay centered.
You cannot rotate it freely, so it is a relative control and not an absolute control.
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
Without CGI the tv show Babylon 5 could have never been made (too many war scenes) for the cheap cost that WB could afford (half Star Trek's budget).
There's a big difference between using CGI for exterior shots (cheaper than models and looks fine; models and CGI both look better if you spend more time on them, but CGI looks better for the same investment) and using CGI for interior shots. Babylon 5 used it for backdrops on a few shots, but most of the sets were full of props. The newer Star Wars films had almost nothing except green boxes in the sets and added everything else later. In Babylon 5, all of the aliens used props. If they couldn't make realistic props, they made sure that you only saw part of the alien and only for a second or so. In Star Wars and AVP, they used CGI aliens everywhere.
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Flash movie of Battlezone Arcade in action: http://www.thelogbook.com/pdfmedia/1980/battlezone/ - Atarisoft version on C=64: http://www.lemon64.com/games/screenshots/full/b/battlezone_02.gif
Other vector-based games: http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/category/arcade/vector/
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
Are you sure about this 2001 info? I don't see John Whitney credited for 2001 on IMDB.
Actually, the Into the Monolith animations were done by Douglas Trumbull with his "slit scan" filming technique:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography
Also, while Kubrick chose the song Daisy to be sung because it was the first example of computer singing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk), the singing of Daisy in the film 2001 was not done by computer, but was voiced by Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL 9000) and was effected with an Eltro Mark II "Information Rate Changer" which you can read about here:
http://www.wendycarlos.com/other/Eltro-1967/index.html
John Carpenter, not James Cameron.
The first CGI used in a feature length movie was in Westworld (1973). Other notable uses are Futureworld (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Alien (1979), Looker (1981) and Tron (1982).
For my money, though, the biggest breakthrough was in 1984, with two movies which used what we would now think of as CGI visual effects (The Last Starfighter and Young Sherlock Holmes). If you don't count the star field warp effect in Star Wars, this was the first time that computers were used to produce the look of something in the "real world", as opposed to a computer display.
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To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
It wasn't phosphorescent paint and they didn't shoot it in the dark. They painted the boxes black, and used reflective tape to make the grid lines; then they lit the model brightly and panned the camera through it. With black background and super-bright glowing white lines, it must be pretty easy to find camera settings where all the film sees are the glowing white lines, and the rest is just undifferentiated black.
I have an old special-edition video tape of the movie and they showed this. It's probably in the special features on the DVD.
Another effect: when the helicopter lands toward the end of the movie, you see a ruined city in the background, with actors in the shot. The ruined city was literally a matte painting, painted on glass, with a window in the middle through which you could see the actors. A super-low-budget way to get the effect they wanted.
And if anyone is wondering: yes, James Cameron worked on special effects before he was a super-famous movie director. He didn't do the effects all by himself, of course, but he did work on Escape from New York.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely