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.

Comments

patent implications

[lkcl]

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...

Re:patent implications

[Rockoon]

GPU's dont use the lighting techniques seen here, in spite of the fact that the summary claims that the technique is "modern."

Specifically, nobody does gouraud shading anymore. Hell, even in the days before GPU's people stopped using that technique in favor of phong shading.

Gouraud calculates the lighting at each vertex and then interpolates the light intensity across the polygon.
Phong calculate the surface normal at each vertex and then interpolates the normals across the polygon (calculating light intensities from those normals on a per-pixel basis.)

Hell, nobody does phong any more either. Generally the normal is now either a direct lookup (bump mapping and so forth) or derived from the zbuffer itself using differed shading.

Re:patent implications

[snowgirl]

Abstract ideas are concepts like pure mathematics and algorithms. You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an application of that formula. Thus, while you cannot patent a mathematical formula that produces nonrepeating patterns, you can patent paper products that use that formula to prevent rolls of paper from sticking together.

Source

Starting from the given "formula cannot be patented", there is no way to construct a non-contradictory soliloquy to the contrary. I understand what people do, and I understand that software is patentable, however the specific formula apart from its application cannot be patented.

It's a pretty crappy distinction that the law makes, but it is still there. Arguing things like "you can't copyright a number, but since every computer text can be converted into a number, and you can copyright that text, then you can therefore copyright a number." No. You copyright the text regardless of medium. The number that is equivalent to the text is not the text without a "decoding" process, and therefore is not equivalent to the text itself... unless that number is specifically representing the copyrighted next.

This whole post is equivalent in my coding scheme to the number 42, therefore, I have a copyright on the number 42? No, because people can use the number 42 without it representing this specific set of text.

They're razor thin distinctions yes, but they exist, and your argument is not going to change that.

Re:Westworld?

[amiga3D]

Nah! You noticed you were wrong. The total idiots never figure that out.

Some (too much?) background on Ed and Pixar

[tehdaemon]

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

gratuitous snark

[tverbeek]

It may not be as technologically advanced, but it has a better plot than [insert recent digitally-rendered feature film here]!

Re:Disappointing lack of technical details.

[Gumber]

I dug into the technical details a bit and posted some of what I found on my blog, along with links to the papers describing the hand and facial animation work in more detail: http://geekfun.com/2011/09/03/early-cgi-animation-by-ed-catmull/

The short answer is that the facial animation was produced by software written in Fortran and run on a pair of PDP-10s, and the hand animation was likely running in the same environment. When each frame was finished, it was displayed on a CRT and captured to film using a 35mm animation camera. For the facial animation, each frame took about 2.5 minutes to render.