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Newly Digitized Film Shows Ed Catmull's 3D Graphics From 1972
AlejoHausner writes "In 1972, Ed Catmull, then at the University of Utah, put together a film showcasing many of the 3D computer graphics techniques he and others had developed while working as students in Ivan Sutherland's lab. That film has been digitized and is available. All kinds of modern techniques like Gouraud shading, deformed meshes, and z-buffering are shown in the film. There is a segment showing Catmull digitizing a plaster model of his hand. Catmull later founded Pixar, but at the time the Utah lab pioneered many of the graphics techniques we take for granted today." I'm just sorry I missed when this film was first made available online earlier this year.
Thanks for that link, as a graphics artist - this brightened up my day!
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i wonder how much this buggers up any companies doing patents on 3D GPUs? the reason i ask is this: one of the problems that the ARM embedded SoC vendors face is that they are stuck on choice for GPUs, from companies who have had to design very low-power 3D engines (Vivante etc). these companies are quite young, and their relationship with the "big boys", who have had over a decade to establish their "arms-race" arsenal of patents, is unclear. so the embedded SoC 3D companies are LESS likely to release free software drivers. but if the very foundation of key parts of 3D patents is undermined through prior art.... i dunno...
The sound on that film is filling me with the urge to waste some super mutants.
Didn't the wireframe animation appear in a monitor in a scene in "Westworld"?
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And, uh, I forget now !! Too long ago !! But we walked to school in three foot snow, we did !!
Charles Csuri has a video like this from 1969. First NSF grant to an artist. Look it up. This is impressive but it's not the first. Csuri's students and coworkers went on to found Pixar. Note: I work with him and also have met Sutherland, et al. when I worked on the DARPA HPCS project at Sun.
Pixar - A Human Story of Computer Animation
If anything, this video is too long, but it gives a lot of background on Ed Catmull , the animated hand, and Pixar. Well worth the time, especially if you don't know what's the big deal with a crappy hand animation.
For example this video was probably made by taping polaroids to a CRT to get the images out of the computer and onto the film.
T
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I for one am glad that they didn't think to themselves "hey - I wonder if there's money to be made in the adult entertainment industry with this stuff..."
Seriously... it must have almost crossed their mind... and then we would have been without Toy Story and a whole load of other great films!
What trick did they use to animate the wireframe ? If it took them a 3d manual digitizer to recreate the 3D model, how did they animate fingers ? Did they digitize every frame ? Were they already using skeletal animation ?
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I remember seeing the faces (5'10" onwards) and some other bits on some BBC or Channel 4 TV documentary a while back now (late 90s) and being very impressed by the fact they'd been able to do that in 1972 (matter of fact, I'm more impressed with that than I was with the hand). In terms of quality, I would have guessed it was done years later, more like the late-70s.
Having looked for it online more recently (on YouTube and via Google) I wasn't able to find it anywhere, so it's great that these are now available.
(Side issue, but the music's different to the analogue synth swooshes I originally remember accompanying it, and which suited it better IMHO. I assume that the original film was silent and so there wasn't any "original" music anyway?)
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That was truly amazing. I'm impressed, and thanks for sharing that.
How, though, was it output? Obviously what we saw was a digitized version of film, but how was the film made in the first place? As a kid in the late 1970's, microcomputers (that's what we called PC's then) already output modulated signals which could be recorded on early VCR's. How were these put into film? And was it real time, or generated frame by frame a la Pixar?
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It may not be as technologically advanced, but it has a better plot than [insert recent digitally-rendered feature film here]!
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Actually what I love most about this film is how the B&W rendering and the use of intertitles and accompanying music, gives it the flavor of a silent movie, making it feel even older than it is.
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I never knew 3D computer graphics were developed back in the 70's. Interesting video buts its lacking any technical explanation of how they did it.
What computer was this developed on? What programming languages were used? Was there a need to develop any special hardware to enable this rendering? The animation looks like its running in real time, where computers of 1972 fast enough to handle this? Or was this filmed by rendering one frame at a time and exposing a single frame of film? The computers of those days were time shared so I bet they sucked up allot of resources on the universities computer. I bet you had allot of angry students and professors waiting for the 3D jobs to finish.
It would have been nice if some technical details were given.
Read "The Pixar Touch", a book on the foundation on Pixar. It goes from before the garage days (hippies trying to steal time on a frame buffer to do trippy digital artwork) to ultra corporate (disney takeover).
Awesome book all around
If you watch the documentary about Pixar (available streamed on Netflix) it shows the scene and talks a bit about the hand animation. This video actually shows a lot more though,
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All this 3D is just a fad that will fail like all the previous attempts. Most (but not all) of the heavily hyped 3D films lack a credible script. Lately, I saw an advertisement for a movie that was in 4D. It features a box that you hold to your nose for the smell of the current scene. (I'm quite serious about this I think it is the latest version of "Spy Kids".) Smell-O-Vision anybody? This is idea will certainly die when they try to create a remake of "Jurassic Park". Remember the scene where the paleontologist is digging through a fresh steaming pile of dinosaur dung? I can just imagine the people rushing out of the theater.
...and you get one smooth operation.
Cool footage btw.
Wow, neat. I was working on a project once to automate fitting of endographic stents and in my CG book there was a section on Catmull-Rom splines, which fit the bill (and the blood vessel) perfectly. I hadn't realized there was so much to the back story.
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Looks better than Crysis 2.
The model (of a hand) was "digitized" - get it?