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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."
First post, and you still got modded redundant. :(
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Don't believe these lies.
The wireframe of the death star did not shoot first in the original.
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.
The interestingly named "Topless Robot"
*click*
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.
... 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!
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
...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
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.
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.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
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 ]
Using a mouse today isn't exactly clumsy in terms of 3D modeling. In fact, I'd venture a guess that today's software + input methods is a lot less clumsy than all those dials.. I'm a modeler (and texture artist/sometimes generalist) by trade, and it's pretty damn efficient and easy - and in no way clumsy. I think I'd much rather use a mouse and keyboard (and tablet for sculpting) than all those dials and knobs. The mouse gives you a central control tool, and the keyboard can let you quickly and easily apply tools, modifiers, etc, for how and what the mouse is used for. (Or of course, you can use the mouse to click on an icon instead of using hotkeys).
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?