Newly Digitized Film Shows Ed Catmull's 3D Graphics From 1972 95
Posted
by
timothy
from the wasn't-even-conceived dept.
from the wasn't-even-conceived dept.
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.
Re:patent implications (Score:4, Informative)
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:Disappointing lack of technical details. (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [geekfun.com]
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.