HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT COMPANIES
So just what qualifies as ³historically significant²?
Abel Image Research
Abel Image Research (colloquially known as AIR Software)
was the subsidiary of Robert Abel and Associates that
sold its software commercially. Production companies that
bought AIR software included Electric Image in the UK,
Steiner Film in Munich Germany (used there by Ken Wesley and
Tom Nowak), as well as many others.
AIR software was built primarily by Bob Abel with
animation and rendering software by Bill Kovacs, Roy Hall,
Kim Shelly, Mike Sweeney and others including Christina
Hills. Code was initially cobbled together from various
sources to get started, including Bell Labs which licensed
code to Abel¹s virtually for free at just $1 per
³workstation².
AIR was in the process of being sold to ????? when it
was rather abruptly sold to Wavefront Technologies of
Santa Barbara in 1985 For $1million.
Alias Research Inc
(1982 to present)
-contributed to by Will Anielewicz, Andrew Pearce and
Kevin Tureski.
How Alias Got Started
Alias Research Inc., of Toronto, Canada was founded in 1983 by Stephen Bingham, Susan McKenna, David Springer, and Nigel McGrath with the goal of creating software for computer animation for film and video production. Stephen was a television producer, a director for the National Film Theatre of Canada, and an advisor to the government on the use of computer graphics for the visual display of quantitative data. Susan worked as an independent producer in the industrial video and film area and had some experience in fund raising in the industry. [FACTOID] The name ³Alias² was arrived at during a brainstorming session when Susan said ³What we need is an alias for the company². Nigel ran a local business, McGrath & Associates that specialized in computer graphic slide production. David was head of the CG lab at Sheridan College and would lead the software development. The founders obtained a grant of $61K from National Research Council (NRC), borrowed equipment from McGrath & Associates, and Secured SRTC (Scientific Research Tax Credits) for some funded research work on anti-aliasing that would be needed for their own product, ALIAS/1. [FACTOID] The first office was in an elevator shaft and rent was $150/month in the always-under-construction ³Much Music² building, Canada¹s version of MTV. The four principals were soon joined by employee¹s five and six: Will Anielewicz (recently ex of Omnibus and currently at ILM) and Mike Sweeney on software development. It was Will and Mike who, unbeknownst to management, made a conscious decision to make the Alias renderer the best looking (as opposed to the fastest), a feature that still accurately describes the current code. [MORE INFO] Please see the Programming chapter for a complete bio on Mike Sweeney By summer 1985, the product was complete and the company took it to market with the first activity being a small booth at Siggraph '85 in San Francisco. (Coincidentally, Wavefront launched their product the same year). The most unique elements of the ALIAS/1 system were (1) it's use of Cardinal splines (supported by Silicon Graphics GL language) instead of polygonal lines (2) the GUI with pop-up menus instead of command-line interface and (3) the integration of multiple functions (modeling, animation, rendering, paint, film recording) within a single interface. Alias/1 also provided the first paint system for the SGI IRIS 2400. Originally, ALIAS/1 was targeted to the post-production market primarily for advertising usage. One of the earliest customers, however, was General Motors. The fact that ALIAS/1 was based on splines was of great interest to GM who wanted to use the system for design work. Alias was reluctant to enter the design market as it was so distant from what it was founded to do, but by November 1995, they had signed a deal with GM to incorporate basis spline (b-spline) technology. Over the next year or so, Alias sold mostly to post- production customers - it's original target market, but as is common with emerging technologies there was a broad range of early adopters with a surprising number doing architectural visualization and scientific visualization. However, with the introduction of ALIAS/2 with b-spline geometry in late FY87, sales to industrial design companies started to take off. Then, with Alias V3.0, the same executable was marketed to industrial design as Alias Studio and to the entertainment markets as PowerAnimator. V3.0 was also the release that introduced NURBS which has become a standard for both markets. In 1996, Alias in-house artist Chris Landreth¹s short animation ³The End² was nominated for an Oscar® in the Best Animated Short category. [FACTOID] A little known fact: The name of the Alias image viewing utility ³wrl² came about when Will Anielewicz added to the existing code of ³rl² and wanted to change it¹s nameŠhence the self initialed w(ill)rl utility name we all know and love today. Will developed his skills in obscurity at Omnibus. One of his dozen-or-so variants of an extrusion program was called ³newtube2², and it¹s help went approximately as follows: newtube2: useage: file x y z xbang ybang zbang xtang ytang zbang file: a ppt file to extrube about x y z xbang ybang zbang: do the obvious xtang ytang ztang: use only if you wrote the code animators had to chain together dozens of unix programs using Cshell. In fact, Keith Ballinger, a TD, programmed ease- in/ease-out values with his TI-58 calculator. Others looked up the values in tables and typed them in with a text editor
Alias v1.0: 198? Design Paint Alias v2.0: 1990? Trim curves Alias v3.0: 1992 NURBS! Alias v4.0: 1993 Alias v5.0: 1994 Alias v6.0: 1995 Alias v7.0: 1996 New interface. Polygon modeling tools? Alias v7.5: 1996 Layers Alias v8.0: 1997 Alias v9.0: 1998
The Alias Renderer: ³Raycasting (as Alias called it) is the casting of 2.5D rays into 2.5D buckets of triangles. We call the rays (and geometry) 2.5D because they are in the projected screen space of the image, so they are 2D, but they still have a bit of Z depth information which we can use to generate a real 3D intersection point. Alias Raycasting is like ray tracing in that we can compute volume intersections (fog, particles, glows, et. al.) with the speed of a 2D intersetion test, but unlike raytracing in that no secondary rays are (or can be) generated due to the nature of the geometry which is already projected into 2.5D. The Raycasting algorithm is closest to the ZZbuffer (yes, 2 Z's) presented a Siggraph a few years back (the paper was unrelated to A|W). People also tend to think of rendering as a post process, separate task. The Maya renderer is completely integrated so that geometric, dynamic or other properties of the scene can affect the shading (ie. connect the Y coordinate of a sphere to the red channel of a shader and you've got a sphere that gets "redder" the higher it is translated).² Andrew Pearce
In 1998, a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award
from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was
presented to John Gibson, Rob Kreiger, Milan Novacek, Glen
Ozymok and Dave Springer for the development of the geometric
modeling component of the Alias PowerAnimator system.
For animators, the latest Alias tools include the most
advanced inverse kinematic (IK), a completely integrated
particle systems, and unique 3D model interpolation and
deformation controls.
Alias Research and longtime competitor Wavefront
Technologies were both bought by SGI in 1995 and now are
known by the new combined name of Alias|Wavefront.
Alias|Wavefront released a next generation complete 3D
animation system called Maya in February of 1998. Maya is
available for SGI IRIX and Windows NT. Maya v2.0 is expected
to ship in the summer of 1999. 800-447-2542 www.aw.sgi.com
-see also Wavefront, Silicon Graphics Inc.
Amiga
The Amiga was a color computer introduced by Commodore
Computer in 1985 after beginning development as the Amiga
Lorraine. Models included the 500, 1000, 3000, and 4000.
Original software including Sculpt-3D, and Deluxe Paint II. A
unique feature of the 1000 model was its built-in composite
video output. This allowed you to record to a VHS deck
whatever you saw on the screen in realtime. With masked brush
shapes and color cycling, you could really get some amazing
effects out of D-Paint II with this set up. (I should know, I
created my first short film in 1986 that way! Author)
Amiga also produced the earliest alternative input
devices for video games. The JoyBoard (1983) foot controller:
"You lean, you tilt, you bend, you turn." and ³The Power-
Stick² (1983) a one handed, thumb controller.
The Amiga is a perfect example of how the best product
does not always win the marketplace. The Amiga is still an
active platform today thanks to a loyal following of longtime
users. One particularly good 3D package is Tornado3D by
Eyelight at http://www.tornado3d.com . Surf the web for lots
of great software and newsgroup discussions, starting at:
www.amiga.com
[AMIGA TESTIMONIAL!] ³Amiga - the cool thing about the Amiga was/is (I have two in my house right now...) that it had a built-in graphics and sound co-processors and could do true multi-tasking on the Motorola 68000 series, which DOS, MS-DOS, WindowsX and MacOS never did on that CPU...or any other, for that matter. What a box!² - John Andrew Berton (ILM VFX Supervisor).
Apple Computer
(1967 to present)
Founded by Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak in 1976,
incorporated on Jan. 3rd of 1977. Apple began with the
introduction of the Apple I, followed by the Apple II later
in 1977 and the Apple III in 1980. While definitely not a
computer graphics company, Apple did bring many of the GUI
interface, desktop publishing graphics concepts to the masses
over the years. Several good book have been written about the
history of Apple Computer, but I offer some highlights here.
XEROX PARC VISIT: Jobs and his scientists was so
impressed by their visit to Xerox Parc in December of 1979
that Jobs completely rethought the direction of a graphic
interface project they were working on, code named ³Lisa²
(1983). However, Jobs was soon taken off the Lisa project and
began work on another named ³Macintosh². A year after the
introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs was voted out of
Apple by the board and the then President he himself had
hired, John Sculley.
-FACTOID: Macintosh: The original graphic user
interface personal computer for the masses. (The Mac was of
course based upon the brilliant Alto of Xerox PARC.)
Introduced in 1984 with a price of $2,495 and a bus speed of
8mhz! Included a built-in 500x384 black and white screen,
256k of RAM (that¹s k not m) and no hard drive. (Who
remembers switching between floppies over and over again? I
see those hands!)
As a side note, Microsoft had just released Windows 1.0
at this time and successfully negotiated a deal protecting
it¹s right to use a similar GUI design.
The Mac II was introduced in 1987, along with the Apple
LaserWriter and Pagemaker software. Together they all formed
the first affordable desktop publishing personal computer
system. The portable Powerbooks were first introduced in
1991, along with the ill-fated ³Newton² hand-held personal
digital assistant or PDA.
The PowerMac introduction in 1994 proved to be a
powerful addition to the Mac line, but more poor marketing
decisions caused rough financial times. Today, with Jobs back
at the helm of his old company as ³Interim CEO², Apple is
profitable again, and has introduced new products at both
ends of its line of personal computers. At the entry level is
the iMac, a low cost internet savvy PC that is as much fun to
look at as it is to use. On the high end the blazing fast G3
line include built in 3D acceleration. More so in this area,
in early 1999, Apple announced its licensing of the SGI
OpenGL 3D graphics standard; an important step in getting
serious about the 3D graphics market. 000-000-0000
www.apple.com
Atari Inc.
(1972 to present Š sort of)
Video game manufacturer founded in 1972 by Nolan
Bushnell (B.S. University of Utah 1969) and sold to Warner
Inc. in 1976. With the introduction of Pong (also created by
Nolan Bushnell), a simple ball and paddle style video game,
Atari led the video game revolution of the late 70s and early
80s before falling on hard times. The Atari 2600 (1977) home
video game console, with a blazing 1.19 Mhz clock speed and
128 bytes of RAM, still has a very loyal cult following, with
many devoted web sites and emulators available for nostalgia
buffs (like me). Enduring classics like Centipede, Missile
Command, Pong, Breakout and Tempest are still being updated
and re-released today with more modern 3D graphics.
ATARI FIRST!: Atari Lynx Handheld Video Game (Dec 1989)
was the world's first Color Portable Game Machine. The Jaguar
Video Game Console (1993) was the world's first 64-Bit Game
Console. The Jaguar lost its war against competitors Sega and
Nintendo and was discontinued
The short lived Atari Research Center (ARC) included Scott Fischer, Jaron Lanier, Brenda Laurel and Thomas Zimmerman. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality (VR) developed the DataGlove here in 1983. In 1984 Warner divides Atari Inc. The home division (Atari Corp.) is sold to the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel; and the arcade division (Atari Games/Tengen) becomes its own company. Atari Games is then bought by Time-Warner in 1993, and is later sold to WMS in 1996. Atari Corp. is merged with JTS Corp. in 1996, and then acquired by Hasbro Interactive (a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.) on March 16, 1998. www.atari.com
FACTIOD: Nolan Bushnell, creator of ³pong² and the founder of Atari Computers is also the founder of Chuck E. Cheese Pizza.
Blue Sky Studios
(1987 To present)
Located just outside Manhattan, Blue Sky Studios was
formed by a handful of key people from MAGI/SynthaVision.
Today the company is best known for their beautifully
realistic raytraced rendering and innovative character
animation.
[FACTOID] The company was also briefly known as Blue Sky Productions
Blue Sky was founded in May of 1987 by six people. (in alphabetical order) Alison Brown(Administration), David Brown(President), Michael Ferraro(Systems Architect), Carl Ludwig(VP of R&D), Dr. Eugene Troubetskoy(Chief Scientist), and Chris Wedge(vice president of creative Development). Other early key employees included Jan Carlée (Animation Director) and Tom Bisogno. Michael Ferraro developed the entire backbone of the modeling/rendering and animation environment, also designing the user interfaces and system interfaces. The programming language that he had designed integrated vector/matrix math into a simple interactive language. The language also included constructs to build procedural geometry and textures with an eye to re-implement Synthavision's ray-tracing as an "object-oriented" production environment. (Mind you this was well before C++ was well known and Java wasn't even a glimmer in someone's eye.) This work also included the development of what became the API and the job control environments for running on a network of computers, at that time still pretty much an unheard of approach. As Blue Sky¹s first TD, Michael used the language he had resigned to procedurally model and animate objects. For the next seven years as Chief Technical Director he would train and supervise the TD¹s as well as remain the ³computer scientist² of the group. Not bad for someone formally trained as an artist (BFA/Syracuse MFA/U.Mass). Michael would go on to co-found ³Possible Worlds² with partner Janine Cirincione. A major unsung pioneer of CG, Dr. Troubetzkoy developed the concept of "ray tracing" into the foundation of the company's proprietary software, CGI Studio. Today, this rendering system is considered by many in the industry to be the world's finest. Dr. Troubetzkoy developed the geometry and intersection calculations along side Carl Ludwig who handled the lighting, rendering and surface physics development. The software traces rays directly to NURBS patches without subdividing into polys as all other production code does. Dr. Troubetzkoy developed an extremely efficient method for evaluating these intersection calculations (27 coeficiants!) in order to represent mathematically perfect surfaces. Boolean operations are also used directly with NURB surfaces, circumventing again the many polygon approximation artifacts inherent to other renderers. Let it also be known that Dr. Troubetzkoy¹s brilliance is matched only by his modesty, which is the sole reason his important contributions to raytracing have gone relatively unrecognized.
[Blue Sky FACTOID] Blue Sky¹s very first jobs included a recycling campaign for the Glass Institute of NY in 1988 and a film job for "Famous Players", a theater chain in Canada. That job featured procedurally generated skies, clouds, sunset and water with a glass logo.
Later, Blue Sky¹s CG character work for the feature film
"Joe's Apartment" won several top prizes at international
festivals, including Imagina, the Annecy International
Animation Film Festival, the Ottawa International Animation
Festival and the World Animation Celebration.
Blue Sky & Chris Wedge's latest release, "Bunny," a
seven minute short animated film, uses a hybrid radiosity
technique; a time consuming global rendering process that
creates extremely realistic images. Bunny won the Academy
Award for the Best Animated Short Film of 1998.
[SIDEBAR] While radiosity and raytracing are very time consuming to calculate, the BlueSky software used clever Monte-Carlo techniques (instead of patch based) to render the seven minute film. (It still took an entire month to process the bulk of the film on a 160 processor DEC farm!)
Whatever the statistics of a given project, this short
film was the culmination of twelve years of a company¹s clear
direction: The finest imagery possible, with no compromises.
Blue Sky¹s unique imagery is clearly going to set a new
standard for the year 2000 and beyond.
Twentieth Century FOX acquired a controlling interest
in Blue Sky Productions in 1997 and merged the company
with LA based VIFX (Which was acquired by FOX a year
earlier). VIFX was in turn later sold by FOX to Hollywood CGI
house Rhythm and Hues in April of 1999.
Bo Gehring Associates
Louis (Bo) Gehring began work at Magi in 1972, starting
the Synthavision division with Bob Goldstein. While there, Bo
created several CG tests for Steven Spielberg's Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, before the idea was dropped
in favor of Doug Trumbull¹s traditional miniature and
practical effects approach.
Instead of returning to NY and Magi, Bo stayed in LA and
originally formed his company as Gehring Aviation in 1977.
Based on his experience with computer controlled machine
tools, he sought to capitalize on the new need for computer
driven motion control cameras for visual effects work. At
this time, the only systems in existence were John Dykstra¹s
at George Lucas¹s ILM from StarWars, and those at Robert
Abel¹s company.
At about this time, creative advertising agency icon
Harry Marks (Once VP at ABC, and then one half of Sullivan &
Marks) had recruited Doug Trumbull to do effects work for
him. Trumbull moved on to motion picture work, so Harry then
turned to his fellow UCLA alum Robert Abel to help create
visual effects for ABC. Bob Abel then left for Hollywood when
he began his initial work on the first StarTrek film. It was
then that Bo Gehring got the call from Marks to step in and
create visual effects where Abel and Trumbull had left off.
[INSERT MILESTONE] Bo Gehring Associates first feature film work in 1977 was the little know ³Demon Seed² sci-fi B-movie about a computer who becomes sentient and wishes to reproduce with his creators wife. (A late night classic now to be sure.) Bo provided vector graphics for computer displays on set, making this one of the very earliest examples of CG in a feature film
In 1983 Bo Gehring Associates had about 35 employees. It was then that they developed the amazing STAR (Scene Tracking Auto Registration) automatic scene-tracking ³Electronic Rotoscoping² system. Conceived by Bo and written by non-other than Jim Clark of SGI fame,(with the front end written by Bo himself) the technique was based upon discussions Bo had with others while at Magi as early as 1974. Both simple and revolutionary, the idea was to be able to automatically track as little as four points (6 were ideal) in a filmed scene, allowing the ³camera matrix program² to extrapolate matchmove information for compositing CG imagery perfectly ³into² a live action scene. Film footage was rear projected on a vertically mounted Calcomp 30x40 inch translucent plotting surface. An Oxberry based camera rig was used to increment the rear projection images one frame at a time. Most recently, Bo Gehring worked as Director of Audio Technologies at Reality By Design, Inc. in Wobern Ma. until April of 1999.
Buf Compagne
(1982 to present)
Pierre Buffin and Henry Seydoux founded B.S.C.A (Buffin
Seydoux Computer Animation) in 1982. In 1988, they finished
a 6 minute 3D animation about insects living in a computer,
The first "long animation" in France. Other early employees
were Patrick Albert, Olivier Gilbert ,Georges Lagardere,
Francois Blanchet, Christian Zumbiehl and Matthieu
Schonholzer.
Cambridge Animation
Andrew Berend set up Cambridge Animation with partner
Peter Florence in 198?.
Composite Image Systems
(197? To 198?)
Joe Matza, Ken Holland, and Price Pethel early
electronic pin-registration and compositing work. Price was a
founding member of Digital Domain, more recently joining
DreamQuest in 1998.
Computer Creations
(1982? to 198?)
Tom Klimek headed the company, located in the unlikely
location of Southbend Indiana (Jim Lindner was NY sales rep,
Gail Resnik was an employee.) Jim Lindner and Suazanne
Gavril, former marketing executives at Xerox, later broke
with Computer Creations and formed Fantastic Animation
Machine in Manhattan.
They used the first Digital Disk recorder system, the
ESS-1 made by Ampex, and used code they had written on PDP-11
minicomputers for rendering. In the later eighties, they
did a huge project for Williams (?) videogames. (CONFIRM
DETAILS AND GET ADDITIONAL INFO!)
Computer Film Company (CFC)
Founded in 1984 by Andrew Berend, Mike Boudry, and Nick
Pollock. Andrew come from a motion-control background and had
previously formed Computer FX Ltd. and worked for the
Moving Picture Company. Mike was the hardware guy, and
Nick was software. Neil Harris joined in 1986 as a software
programmer also.
The intent at CFC from the very beginning was full frame
digital manipulation and compositing of live action footage.
This was a unique charter among startup CG facilities until
very recently, that is not to be primarily concerned with
vector or raster computer generated imagery.
In 1985 CFC began researching what was available at that
time for computer hardware, input scanning and film recording
equipment. They happened upon another startup company called
Benchmark Technologies in London who were in the middle of
designing a computer system of their own. CFC was able to
collaborate with them, optimizing the new hardware for their
own specialized uses.
By mid 1987 a number of private investors were pooled
together (Thanks to a government tax break arrangement
similar to that done in Canada at the same time) and CFC
moved out of the garage and into a derelict factory building,
(complete with leaking roof and broken floor boards.)
The homemade scanner was done by now, built mostly from
scratch but based initially on a DataCopy CCD camera. The
Benchmark computer system was working, and the software was
also well along and ready for the first productions. A film
recorder was still a problem as several of the early
commercial systems were considered and rejected. (The Matrix
QCR was not deemed good enough, and the Celco CFR-700 cost a
prohibitive $300,000 US). Eventually they built a little
phone booth sized clean room in the building to house the
film recorder.
-Their First Digital Film Composite: While the
majority of early jobs consisted of television work, in 1987
CFC completed work on one the first ever full frame digital
film composite for a feature film, definitely the first
outside the US. The film was called ³Fruit Machine² in the UK
and released as ³Wonder World² for the US release. It
featured a scene with a character who dives into a pool of
dolphins, and then transforms into one himself. Without any
affordable disc storage at the time, CFC took advantage of
their double-headed film scanner to work on one frame at a
time. A single frame of the foreground element would be
scanned, along with a single frame of the background element,
both stored in frame buffer memory simultaneously. The image
manipulation was completed, with the final composite then
being sent to the film recorder. The process would then be
repeated one frame at a time, helped in part by the fully
scriptable and repeatable functions of the digital painting
software. By this time CFC had about 9 employees, including
management, a producer and Janek Sirrs who was quite possibly
the worlds first full time digital compositor.
CFC moved out of the factory in 1988 into a facility in
central London. It was also at this time that their work
attracted the attention of Kodak¹s ³Electronic Intermediate
Systems² group, who visited CFC to learn about their
technology. Key to CFC¹s work from the very beginning was
their software¹s capability to do sub-pixel accurate
motion tracking, a feature which did not become common in
commercial packages until very recently. Another major
advantage at CFC was the constant working relationship
between R&D and production. It resulted in very focused
research and the ability to bid beyond existing state-of-the-
art, knowing they could expand their capabilities for any
given project.
By 1988/89 larger and faster disc storage was in use and
the scanning/recording work process was de-coupled into the
more traditional arrangement familiar today. In 1990, the
first major Hollywood film CFC worked on was Memphis Belle.
CFC replaced about a dozen ³less than perfect² traditional
optically composited scenes of flying bombers with much
better quality digital composites. They also digitally
restored and colorized some old black and white WWII footage.
Mike visited LA in 1991 and started looking into
potential business there. CFC then opened an office in LA in
1992 which has gone on to contribute significant work to
dozens of major feature films including The Huddsucker
Proxy, MORE , etc.
CFC has been honored twice with Technical Achievement
Academy Awards. Once in 1995 for their contribution to
digital film scanning, and again in 199? For their pioneering
work in digital compositing.
In August of 1997 CFC sold 100% ownership to MegaloMedia
which also owns London¹s Frame Store post house and the Sachi
& Sachi company. Today, alongside Domino, Cineon, Matador and
Flame systems, CFC still uses their original Benchmark
computer systems, a true testament to how far ahead that
technology was when first designed over a dozen years ago.
-Where did everyone go?: Andrew would leave CFC to
help set up Cambridge Animation with Peter Florence.
Computer FX Ltd. (CFX)
(1982 to present)
Computer FX Ltd. (later called CFX Ltd, and today called
CFX Associates.) was formed by Andrew Berend, Ian Chisholm
and Craig Zerouni in 1982. They began by purchasing the first
IMI (Interactive Machines Inc) vector display device, a real-
time, monochrome, vector device which competed with E&S
products. (PDI may have bought the second IMI, or possibly
the other way around) This was the first real-time animation
system in Europe.
Craig wrote some code to generate realistic water and
reflections before anyone else in the UK. They also built a
frame buffer and render engine based on the Texas DSP chip.
It did all its render arithmetic in fixed point, and so was
very fast for what it cost.
[SIDEBAR COMMENT] I was once animating with a client, who said something like "this is amazing, how fast you can do this stuff. This must help you get it right very easily" to which I replied "We don't make any fewer mistakes than anybody else. We just compress the time between mistakes." - Craig Zerouni
Film output was accomplished by filming directly off the monitor through different colored gels. The camera and the gels were controlled by the IMI itself, so the original animation package had a scripting system that involved animation files, passes over the film, and colors. Since the number of colors in the wheel was limited (to 6, I think), sometimes a person would have to stand there in the dark and change filters between shoots. (Some of this hardware was also built by Mike Boudry.) Andrew Berend left in late 1984 to join Mike Boudry and co-found the Computer Film Company (CFC).
[QUOTE] ³Just as CFX was realizing that the wireframe
business was evaporating, and that our own home-grown raster
hardware/software wasn't going to get good enough fast enough
(we were always small), two guys called John Penney and Greg
Hermanovic phoned us up.
CFX constantly tried to reinvent the medium, partnering
with a traditional animation company called Shootsey, to try
to sell agencies on the idea of mixing the two media. That
never went anywhere; but they also built a motion control rig
of their own.
[QUIOTE] ³One of our first rendered jobs went to 1-inch
tape (remember that?) via a Sony BVH-2000 (or 2500, whichever
it was that allowed single frame edits). The frame buffer
would fill with the image, then a person had to hit "edit" on
the Sony, and it would pre-roll, run forward, record the
frame, and then stop. Then a person had to tell the computer
to render the next frame. That person was me. I had to stay
awake, hitting 2 buttons every 5 minutes, in the correct
order, for about 36 hours straight, in order to get it done
on time. The truth is, I did fall asleep for a few hours
around 5AM, so I lost some time, but I don't think it matters
now if I admit it.² Craig Zerouni
Relates Craig Zerouni: ³To do one job, I recall, we had
no way of getting digital video back and forth to a post-
house, so we ended up taking our 100 lb Abekas A60 and
putting in the back of a taxi as a method of getting the D1
back and forth. It took 2 or 3 people to do this, plus a
little wheely cart thing we had. It was, like everything else
about this business, completely mad.²
Computer Graphics Laboratory Inc.
Computer Image Corporation (CIC)
[QUOTE] ³In the 80's we produced graphics animation,
character animation and special effects direct to video.
This group is often overlooked because of the analog video
component of their systems. However, they implemented
computer control of many aspects of the animation process,
keyframing, hierarchical control structures and image
processing, years before many others in the field.² Jim
Johnson
Employees included Kirk Paulson, Phil Zimmerman. Jim
Johnson was a Director and Technical Director there for over
6 years, from 1980 to 1986. Jim Johnson (JJ) is now Executive
Producer at Deep Blue Sea in Miami, FL.
Cranston/Csuri Productions (CCP)
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
At is high, CCP employed some 80 people, many of whom
are active leaders in the field of CG today.
-Chuck Csuri left CCP in 1985 to return to his OSU
duties at CGRG. He is actively pursuing new technologies to
create new forms of computer graphic fine art.
-John Berton (Now a VFX Supervisor at ILM) was a TD who
did a CG logo for a Twisted Sister Music Video.
-Jeff Light wrote the code that ran the Celco at CCP and
is now Motion Capture Supervisor at ILM.
-Paul Sidlo founded RezN8
-Jim Kristoff and Dobbie Schiff went on to LA to form
MetroLight.
-Others employees included: Shawn Ho (now at SGI),
Julian Gomez (now at Lego), Michael Collery (PDI), Andy White
(ILM), Tom Hutchinson (ILM), Susan Van Baerle (LambSoft),
John Donkin (Blue Sky), Scott Dyer (Windlight/Nelvana).
deGraf/Wahrman
DemoGraFX
Digital Effects
Quick additions to in-house computing were a Harris 800
and a Dicomed film recorder. They also built a frame buffer
to see color images quickly, and wrote a paint system for it.
Digital Effects was one of four companies to create CG
for the film TRON. They producing the opening title sequence
where pieces of TRON fly in over a bright light source to
form his body, and also did all the scenes involving the
flying cuboid character ³Bit² who could say yes or no.
In the end, the many partners and employees wanted to
operate the company differently, and the politics and
personalities were causing work to go elsewhere. The best
solution was to simply shut down the company and have people
go their separate ways.
Jeff Kleiser went on to Omnibus/LA as the Director of
their new Motion Picture Special Effects division.
The Judson Rosebush Company was founded in 1986 and is
located in New York City. It is a creative multimedia studio
currently producing commercial and entertainment CD-ROM
titles and world wide web sites. www.rosebush.com
Digital Pictures
Digital Productions
³A Cray is a real headache. This one had like a $12,000
a month electric bill, and the maintenance and support bill
for the "Crayons", the people who attended to it and kept it
working came to like $50,000 a month. Its like a 747
jetliner. If its not in the air with seats full, you're
losing money!²
David Sieg dave@ns.zfx.com
DP¹s first major computer graphic project was for The
Last Starfighter, $4.5 million worth of state-of-the-art
high resolution CG animation. Beginning in Oct 83, Digital
Productions traded in the ³older² Cray-1S for the very first
Cray X-MP supercomputer. The Cray was fronted by a VAX
11/780 and was used to produce nearly 300 shots totaling 25
minutes of screen time. The team used E&S PS400's for
modeling and IMI vector motion systems for motion preview
with Ramtek frame buffers for display. When Triple-I had
wrapped the TRON work and decided not to continue in the CG
film business, DP leased the Digital Film Printer (DFP)
and hooked it up to on of the high speed channels of the
Cray. The Cray driven DFP could scan 35mm film at four
seconds a frame, and film out the 2000x2560 rendered images
at twelve seconds a frame.
For the first time, highly detailed computer generated
images were integrated with live action as realistic scene
elements, rather than as monitor graphics or deliberately
³CG² looking images. Gary Demos from the very begining always
had the drive to only produce the highest resolution, highest
quality imagery possible.
Kevin Rafferty(ILM) led the team that digitally encoded
(modeled) many of the forms designed for the film by Ron
Cobb. The technique used was to have top, front and side
views of the model drawn orthographically on blueprint-like
paper. A mouse/cursor (or ³puck²) with cross hairs would then
be used to input the lines of the drawing, one point at a
time. Details even included little 3D digital stunt actors
inside the Gunstar¹s cockpit.
-³PICTURE CARDS²
For The Last StarFighter, practical explosion
elements were licensed from John Dykstra¹s company Apogee
and were scanned into the computer. Code was written to pull
mattes from the explosion elements (which were often shot
against black), which were then applied to square polygons
and placed into the 3D scene. Scripts to play the running
footage on these ³picture cards² (as Gary Demos called them)
were written by Brad DeGraf. Other effects of note were the
fractal code written by Walter Gish used for the moon and
cave scenes. (Dually inspired by the work of Loren Carpenter
and Mandelbrot.)
³In another room is Ron Cobb, master of detail,
carefully designing every last square inch of those
spaceships. There was not one grommet on any of those ships
that didn't have a purpose that Ron could describe.²
³I remember one time I was animating the scene where
Alex had just blown away the Rylon cargo ship, deep in the
tunnels of the asteroid. The shot begins with the Gunstar
facing away from the camera, pointed into the dead-end of the
tunnel. Alex has just made his first real-life kill. The
storyboard called for the Gunstar to "turn around sadly." So
at this point I'm not exactly a seasoned animator, just a
couple of semesters of hand-drawn fishes and some computer
generated T-bone steaks under my belt. I show Ron the motion
test for the sad, turning Gunstar, which is sort of slow and
has a little kind of "Aw, shucks" kick to it. Ron's response
was to turn to me, look me in the eye, and say very sweetly
and kindly, "Well, Paul, I think maybe that's a little bit
_too_ sad, don't you?"
Paul Isaacs pauli@sgi.com "The Last Starfighter",
Digital Production Technical Director 7/83-5/85.
As the Last Starfighter production wrapped up (on time
and on budget) in April of 1984, a critical financial squeeze
occurred. DP was forced to purchase the $17 million Crap-XMP
instead of continuing the lease. This critical drain of cash
put DP in the vulnerable position of being the target of a
hostile taken over by Omnibus in 1986.
Craig Upson and Larry Yaeger worked on the Jupiter
destruction sequence with Boss Film for the film
2010:Odysee2.
Bill Kroyer designed, animated, and technical directed
the flying owl in the award-winning opening title sequence of
Labyrinth (1985/86), produced by Alan Peach.
Bill Kroyer and Chris Baily animated Mick Jagger's Hard
Woman rock video in 1985. The 4.5 minute long animation was
Co-produced by Nancy St.John and Alan Peach. Because of the
tught deadline, the team concentrated on the character
animation, with rendering being restricted to extremely
simplified tube-like forms.
Digital Productions also began creating many different
kinds of noteworthy projects at this time. New work included
Clio award-winning commercials and also test footage for
special projects, including Dune (1984) and Star Trek: The
Next Generation (1987) television pilot.
-COMMERCIAL WORK:
While the recent tests did not result in any work for
those projects, DP would create some 300 commercials in 1985
alone. Key to this success was the strict sign-off policies
and ³client control² skills of Sherry McKenna, the Executive
Producer. Sherry had come from Robert Abel¹s company, and was
tasked with producing some 60 overlapping commercial projects
in-house at any one time, each with a deadline of about 2
months. The storyboards for a job would be part of the
contract, and any changes requested would mean a new contract
, new budget and a new schedule. The hires model designs
would be signed-off on by the Art Directors, and lores
versions would then be used to generate motion tests. At the
same time, local and model lighting tests would be approved
as well as global scene lighting. The next step would be to
generate lores rendered animation scenes of the complete job,
which would be approved by the client before committing to
final hi-res rendering. Because of this strict incremental
process, the final job would seldom have to be re-rendered
more than once.
³Šwhere else would geeky programmers ever have had the
chance to meet the likes of Jim Henson, Mick Jagger, DEVO,
The Tubes, etc. etc.? I remember sending my parents a copy of
an article about the company that appeared in TIME magazine,
written about our first-ever use of a Cray supercomputer to
product special effects instead of military/defense
applicationsŠ. Lots of daytime meetings, arguing about
software architecture, that never mattered since we were
hacking our way through it every night at 2 am instead.²
-Emily Nagle Green egreen@forrester.nl Digital
Productions software designe and marketing 1982-1987
DP also had a division of the company that was set up in
1985 to provide computing services and graphics production to
the business and scientific community. The feature film and
commercial production cycles had slow-time that could be
filled by this other new area of CG. Cray time was sold to
such companies as General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and the
National Science Foundation. Stefen Fangmier(ILM), Craig
Upson(Protozoa), Phil Sherwood and Emily Nagle Green worked
for this part of the company. By now the total Digital
Production employee count was up to about 100.
-THE OMNIBUS TAKEOVER:
In about 1985, CDC and Ramtek were both breaking up or
going out of business themselves, and wanted out of the
digital movie making business at any cost. Anxious to cut
their losses, the board went along with a hostile takeover
bid by Omnibus, breaking there agreement with Whitney Jr.
and Demos. Backed by the Royal Bank of Canada, Omnibus
arranged for a leveraged buy-out that would burden them with
nearly $25 million in debt. Unable to prevent what they saw
as sheer folly, and also unable to afford a costly legal
battle to protect their company, John Whitney Jr. and Gary
Demos left to start up Whitney/Demos Productions. Digital
Productions was renamed "Omnibus Simulation" in June of 1986,
and declared bankruptcy (along with Omnibus and Abel) only 9
months later on April 13th of 1987.
Electric Image (EI)
Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation
(E&S)
Ex Machina
Fantastic Animation Machine (FAM)
Homer and Associates
Image West
³Digital image-making state of the art was a PDP-11 and a
$50,000 framebuffer, and a bunch of assembly or FORTRAN
programmers hacking away from scratch. Triple-I, NYIT, and
MAGI were about the only people going that route. Image West
had always had the advantage of "real time", meaning that
despite the limitations of the analog rescan technology, it
could run right before your eyes, and be adjusted on the fly.
Its big downfall was complete lack of repeatability, due to
all those knobs and patch wires. (Scanimate) After reviewing
all the options, Cliff Brown and I decided a good approach
would be to build a system based on the analog rescan
technology, but using digital computers to track and store
the setups needed to repeat a job. I did not realize at the
time how large a project this would be (VersEFX).²
-David Seig, Image West
[IMAGE] ED Kramer in front of Scannimate.
Image West moved from Hollywood to Studio City, CA in 1983.
³This was the first facility I had ever designed that
involved raised computer flooring. Half of the building was
on a level two feet lower than the other half. So we used
raised computer flooring to make the two floor levels equal.
This gave us about 20" under the floor for cables, power and
air conditioning.²
-David Sieg, Image West (http://vhost2.zfx.com/~dave)
The company faced increasingly hard times competing with
the trend of completely digital effects, 3D CG and digital
video effects boxes like the ADO. The new VersEFX system that
they had partnered with SFP on (the French TV production
company) had gone to France, and they were trying to build
one for themselves. But hybrid video technology was not going
to able to compete with the all digital systems, so they made
a deal with Symbolics to get one of their S-series systems
with both paint and 3D
Capabilities. Unfortunately, they could never return to the
revenue levels they had been working at with the Scanimates,
and in desperation, they attempted a public offering on the
Vancouver stock exchange. That attempt failed and the company
closed its doors in 1985.
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)
[FUNNY GEORGE STORY] The second floor of the building
was being completely renovated for the video editing space,
and George would come by occasionally to check up on the
work. One day he stops by and makes a casual question about
why a wall has a door put in a particular location. Some days
later he returns to find that the construction workers have
actually moved the door to another spot! Hoping to avoid
future misunderstandings, George tells the workers that just
because he asks a question doesn¹t mean they need necessarily
jump to conclusions and change something. Satisfied that all
is now well, he leaves the workers to finish the job.
Returning again sometime later, he finds that the workers
have moved the door back to its original position.
story related by Dr. Ed Catmull 3/99
A few years later the Graphics group would move to a new
custom office space up north in Bell Marin Keys, Novato.
(This was also the year of the big Marin County flood that
left 5 feet of water in down town San Enselmo). In 1983 the
permanent space for ILM in SanRafael was finished, and the
Graphics Group moved into ³C² building on Kerner Blvd.
Also during this time, many LucasFilm corporate and
management changes take place, with the original President
Charlie Weber being replaced by Bob Greeber, who is then
replaced by Doug Norby. The ³Egg Company² LucasFilm location
in LA is closed down, and development on SkyWalker Ranch was
ongoing.
The Graphics group settled into several basic research
projects. The film IO project was headed by David
DiFransisco who designed a laser-based film scanner and
recorder as one unit. From the very beginning it was clear
that no one had ever solved the numerous challenges of
perfecting a laser based film recorder. There was some still
work being done, and military research, but even mighty Kodak
at the time was not sure it could be done. In 1980 the first
tests were done (on 5247 stock), and by 1983 the Pixar image
computer was integrated in the heart of the scanner/recording
system. Young Sherlock Holmes in 1984 was the first
production to use the new machine, completing for the very
first time ever, a complete digital composite of a CG
character onto live action imagery. The digital film printer
would go on to complete work on a dozen ILM film projects,
eventually being retired in 1991. David DiFransisco (Then and
still at Pixar) was able to get the machine back by trading
it for Pixar Image computer hardware. He then was able to
fulfill a wish to donate the historical hardware to the
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography¹s
Permanent Apparatus Collection.
Tom Duff, Sam Lefler, Bill Reeves and Eben Ostby worked
on the animation system architecture. Real time 2D line
drawing was accomplished with a PERQ vector system from 3-
Rivers (2 million vectors in a 30th of a second). The new Sun
(Stanford University Network) computers were a full 32 bit
system based on the Motorola 68000 chip. John Semans (sp?)
ported UNIX to the SUN, and the Graphics Group made a deal
which allowed SUN to use the port in exchange for receiving a
30% discount on their hardware in perpetuity.
When George Lucas decided in 1985 to sell off the
division and begin a new production oriented department,
Catmull called upon Doug Kay and George Joblove. Kay and
Joblove were running their own production company in LA, and
would be asked to come in and basically start from scratch
when every single employee left together to start Pixar.
[CLOSE CALL!] Ironically, when first offered the
opportunity from Dr. Catmull, Kay and Joblove turned him
down! Dr. Catmull quickly called Doug back on the phone and
politely told them: ³You¹re crazy! This is an opportunity of
a lifetime! Come back up here for another interview, we¹ll do
it all over again². The two partners agreed, returned and
promptly changed their minds.
Major projects:
€Young Sherlock Homes(Stained Glass Knight)
€Indiana Jones: Temple Of Doom(Donovan's destruction),
€Willow(morf)
€Abyss(Pseudopod)
€T2(T-1000)
€Jurassic Park(dinos)
€ Back To The Future II and III: digital compositing
intensive
€Scott Anderson¹s underwater particle effects for The
Hunt For Red October
€Ghost
€procedural spider swarms in Arachnophobia
In 1989 the first brand new KODAK scanner literally fell
off the truck!
Commercial work has got its digital start with projects
like Hummingbird, character animation of M&M Mars aliens ,
Heinz Ants. Morphing played a big part in Meryll Lynch Bear
to Bull, Diet Pepsi football ³puddle², and Toyota Lips.
In 1999, Cary Philips was awarded an Academy Technical
Achievement Award for the design and development of the
³Caricature² Animation System.
Continues to be the undisputed world leader in feature
film visual effects with 14 Academy Awards and 12 additional
Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards.
Information International Inc. (III or Triple-I)
The Foonly F1 Computer:
When Triple-I did not get the government contract,
management (Al Fenaughty and Terry Taugner) brought Whitney
and Demos over from Evans & Sutherland to form a ³movie
group² in an attempt to cut their losses by using all that
equipment for something else. John Whitney Jr. had been
initially introduced to Triple-I because his father (John
Sr.) knew Triple-I¹s founder Ed Fredkin.
The Motion Picture Project or Entertainment
Technology Group was formed at Triple-I in 1975 by Gary
Demos, John Whitney Jr., Tom McMahon, Karol Brandt and Art
Durinski, later joined by Craig Reynolds and many others.
The first project Whitney Jr. and Demos were charged
with was a series of tests for the film Close Encounters of
the Third Kind. The concept was for little glowing cubes to
fly around during the start of the film¹s finally. The film¹s
DP Vilmos Zigmund shot some plates with a crane, including
some small spheres whose position would be input to a 3D
tracking program to extrapolate the matchmove by which to
render the 3D elements ³into² the scene. (Malcom McMillan, a
UCLA mathematician and key Triple-I programmer wrote this
code)
Most of 1976 was spent producing broadcast logo packages
for foreign markets, as the domestic networks were not ready
to commit to the new idea of CG ³flying logos². NBC in
particular was one early client Triple-I approached with the
idea, only to be rejected in favor of a traditional spinning
practical model.
SOFTWARE
Both Frank Crow and Jim Blinn worked here briefly in
1977 developing algorithms later published in their thesis
work. The Actor/Scriptor Animation System (ASAS) was
developed by Craig Reynolds, Art Durinski and others; and the
modeling tools were written by Larry Malone(Nichiman) using
tools such as the Tektronix 4014 storage tube display
terminal running Tekshow.
LUCASFILM TESTS
Other 3D CG tests were done for Star Wars, The Black
Hole, and The Empire Strikes Back, but did not end up in
the finished films. One particular test for LucasFilm
involved Art Durinski building a beautiful 60k poly count X-
Wing fighter. Rendered at 4k by 6k resolution, Lucas was only
impressed after the ever-amazing Mal MacMillan wrote some
additional code to ³dirty² it up from it¹s original pristine
CG condition. It was eventually shown on the cover of
³Computer Magazine² in 1979.
A lower poly count version was created for an animation
test Gary Demos did of a five ship formation, complete with
anti-aliasing and motion-blur. Unfortunately the seven
thousand dollar per minute production cost required by Lucas
was much too low for Triple-I to consider real production.
Also in 1978 scanning and filmout tests were performed with
Richard Edlund at LucasFilm, but the nature of the CRT
technology and 5247 film stocks did not yield great results.
[IMAGES OF X_WING FROM ART]
1980 saw the production of seven minutes of digital
imagery for Looker; another Michael Chrichton film written
after the author¹s visits to Triple-I during Westword and
FutureWorld productions. Full body 3D scans where made of an
actress from software developed once again my Malcom
McMillan. The film was about a company that created computer
generated actresses from full body scansŠdéjà vu?
About this time it was becoming clear to both John
Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos that Triple-I was not going to
allow the expansion or spin off of the Motion Picture Group
as they had originally hoped. John and Gary were instrumental
in the pitching and pre-production of the next big CGI film,
Tron, but left in April of 1981 before its production to form
their own company: Digital Productions.
TRON
Triple-I created the Sark¹s Carrier, solor sailor and
the MCP scenes for the end of the film. (See the Milestones
chapter for more details.) Some key people on the work
included Art Durinski, Larry Malone, Craig Reynolds, Bill
Dungan and Jeremy Swartz.
After completing Tron and a 3D (steroscopic) project for
Kodak/Epcot called ³Magic Journeys², Triple-I ceased it¹s
computer graphics business. Some employees joined Digital
Production while others joined the new Symbolics Graphics
Division.
Japan Computer Graphics Lab (JCGL)
Kleiser Walczak Construction Company (KWCC)
In 1992 KWCC based itself in Lenox Massachusetts to
provide the 3D CG animation for Douglas Trumbull¹s LUXOR
trilogy of ridefilms. Frank Vitz again wrote custom code for
one of the films to transform the flat CG into a curved
torus-like screen.
Two important television series were also created in
conjunction with Santa Barbara Studios: ³Astronomers² with
12 minutes of cosmic simulation for PBS and ³500 Nations²,
where they built entire Native American cities.
Feature film work has included StarGate, Clear and
Present Danger, and Judge Dredd which featured some of the
earliest realistic digital stunt doubles in a feature film.
KWCC also recently created various creatures for Mortal
Kombat: Annihilation and effects for Carrie II. They have
just delivered 3 years of extensive work on the ³Spiderman²
Š(details)
Employees and collaborators have included Ed Kramer,
Eileen O¹Neil, Jeff Williams, Frank Vitz, Derry & Patsy
Frost, Randy Bauer.
Currently KWCC has offices in New York, LA, and the
Mass. MOCA center in Williamstown Massachsetts 413-664-7441
www.kwcc.com
Kroyer Films
Lamb & Company
Links
MAGI (Mathematics Application Group, Inc.)
[FIRST RAYTRACING] In fact, the very first raytraced
image was produced in 1963, output on special test equipment
(similar to an oscilloscope) developed at the University of
Maryland. An ³egg in a box² whose complex hidden surface
problems were easily handled by the new raytracing technique.
-MAGI/SynthaVision
[Fying Logo Factiod!] The first flying logo CGI ad is
attributed to MAGI - an ad for IBM in 1969.
Later, in 1981, Dr. Troubetskoy replaced this technique
with more efficient techniques that did these boolean
combinations over entire scan lines at once. This higher
efficiency was necessary to produce the very high vistavision
resolution images (2280x1200) needed for TRON.
Dr. Troubetzkoy (A nuclear physicist) was the director
of advanced projects at MAGI. He was previously a consulting
physicist for the United Nuclear Corporation and a senior
research associate in nuclear physics at Columbia University.
MAGI was a pioneer in putting high resolution computer
graphics directly out to film. It's CELCO film recorder (way
ahead of its time) was the second ever made. (The first being
used by the government for Landsat imagery.
[CELCO FACTOID] After a 1981 visit to MAGI, Benoit
Mandelbrot got a CELCO for IBM, and used it to output all
those fractal images for his classic book "The Fractal
Geometry of Nature".
Carl Ludwig (Director of Engineering) had begun his
involvement in computer animation while serving as a
consultant for Celco, where he developed a special film
recorder to output footage for the groundbreaking Disney film
Tron.
-TRON
[MEMORIES!] ³Shortly after Ken Perlin was hired I was
hired into the CAD/CAM division to help build an interactive
modeler for Synthavision's CSG (ray-traced boolean ops on
quadratic solids) It was to be used by the movie division and
sold toe the mechanical engineering market. This was an
ambitious task given that all of the rendering and animation
programs were still written in 80 column punched card format,
compiled and run as "batch jobs" on IBM mainfraims and later
on 32bit mini-computers and animation pencil tests were
output to film and looked at on a upright Movieola, there
weren't any frame buffer or color displays.² -Michael Ferraro
To relate an interesting perspective on the mind set of
the time, in New York for the premier of Tron were all the
computer graphics people who contributed to the film. From
MAGI, Triple-I, Abel and Digital Effects all sitting
around a table at Sardies. The topic of conversation soon
center on the fact that the ³entire CG business was sitting
right here² and ³had anyone heard about some company trying
to break in to the CG business in CaliforniaŠthey are going
to call it Pacific Data Images or something like that..²
³and how do they expect to get into such an established
business as ours? It¹ll never be successful.². Ah, but
history would play out very differently as we all know too
well!
-MAGI in LA
[QUOTE] ³In the meantime Tom Bisogno and I created what
became known as the "After Hours Movie Group" and produced a
short film shown at the SIGGRAPH film show in the early
eighties, It was titled "First Flight" and was the first
uses of procedural lighting/atmosphere effects that MAGI
later became known for. The "After Hours Movie Group" for the
most part included Tom, myself and for a while Jodi Slater.²
Michael Ferraro
In early 1984 MAGI opened an office in LA hoping to
capitalize on the success of TRON to get more feature film
work. Phil Mittelman recruited Richard Taylor (who
supervised the effects for Tron while at Triple-I) as
Director and Dan Fitzgerald as Executive Producer to head
this office. Jeremy Shwartz, Larry Malone (both later at
Symbolics) were also there. Jan Van Vliet (now President of
Available Light) and his wife Cathy used Christine Chang¹s
digital paint program for 2D animation. Their first (and
only) project was for the Disney film Something Wicked
This Way Comes in 1984. The ambitious goal was to use
computer graphics in order to create a magical circus that
would appear to set up all by itself. Unfortunately the
images that worked so well in TRON did not cut so
realistically with live action, and the project was dropped.
Executive management had oversold the still primitive
technology, and was unable to get any more film work. By
1985, MAGI/LA would close its doors.
-Where the Wild Things Are
[A MAJOR MILESTONE] This amazing project was the first
ever example of full feature film resolution CG digital
compositing.
Ken Perlin supervised and wrote code for the project.
(which also included the now well known Disney animator Glen
Keane). Jan Carlee and Chris Wedge modeled the environment
and animated the camera move. Christine Chang wrote the
digital ³ink and paint² software that was used to color the
Disney animators scanned in drawings complete with shadow and
highlight elements. (A technique used much later to great
effect at ILM in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.) Josh Pines
built the scanner MORE INFO FROM JOSH HERE!. Gene Miller and
Tom Bisogna in production?
Soon after that, John used this test as his calling card
to join Ed Catmull's graphics department at LucasFilm, which
subsequently was spun off (in 1986) to become PIXAR.
An interesting side story that happened about this time
concerned another Disney animation project. The Brave
Little Toaster was being story-boarded by Lasseter and Jo
Ramf(sp?), but when Ron Miller (then head of Feature
Animation) was ousted, so was the project. For those of you
who know the film (and if you have kids you should!) all the
characters were household appliances, including a lamp, a
radio, and a vacuum cleanerŠall of whom would have been
created in 3D CG by MAGI. However Tom Wilhite left Disney and
formed Hyperion Animation in order to independently produce
the film, and the MAGI work never was to be.
-FUN AND REWARDING TIMES
[Romantic Nerdlike Factoid]: Chris Wedge (or was it Jody
Slater? )introduced John Lassiter to his future wife Nancy
Taque(sp?).
The whole spirit at this time was of around the clock
creative energy. Each person egging one another on to
constantly push the barriers further beyond what was done the
day before. The night crew would often leave up on the screen
their most rewarding images in order for the day crew to see
them. This would produce no end of awe struck reactions like
³how did they DO that?². Of course not to be outdone the day
shift would repeat the process only to amaze the next night
crew and cause the cycle to be repeated. The group of co-
workers were referred to as the ³22 legged beast² for their
tight lunch going groupings remanicent of the Warner Brothers
cartoons with a single mass of characters atop animated legs.
In 1983-84 at MAGI Ken Perlin developed his now famous
³Perlin Noise and Turbulence² techniques of creating
solid and procedural textures that are now commonly used
everywhere in the CG industry. (It earned him an Academy
Award for Technical Achievement in 1997 too).
-THE BEGINNING OF THE END
[The FLY] Sythavision's work can be seen in David
Cronenberg's, The Fly, where the main character, Seth Brundel
plays a visual sequence on his computer that explains that
his DNA has been mixed with a housefly. The work is not
credited in the film.
The Synthavision division was sold off in 1984 to a
holding company in Toronto Canada run by Bob Robbins and Leo
Grey. The company¹s new president was David Boyd Brown(Blue
Sky).
The first main project for Synthavision after the by-out
was a laser video disk arcade game called Robot Rebellion
which required the player to pilot a small LV1 robot to the
core of a mining asteroid to overcome a mine full of crazed
robots and booby traps and regain control of the colony by
punching in a color code they learned along the way. Hazards
included CG fire created with KPL(Ken Perlin Language)
texture code.
[SCRUBBING BUBBLES CURSE?] ³The very last project that
Sythavision did was a commercial featuring DOW Chemical's
Scrubbing Bubbles in their first CG incarnation. These, I'm
told, are the same characters that Cranston/Csuri where
working on when they folded later. We all watched PDI with
interest when they took on Scrubbing Bubbles. Fortunately
they survived the curse.² Paul Griffin
Synthavision¹s parent company went out of business in
the fall of 1986. The CAD/CAM division of Magi had been sold
to Lockheed Aerospace in 1982/83, while MAGI Computer
Slides Corp. was purchased in 1986 from MAGI for $4million
and renamed MAGICorp.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Phil Mittelman formed the UCLA Lab
for Technology and the Arts; Blue Sky Productions was
then founded by David Brown (President), Jan Carlée
(Animation Director), Dr. Eugene Troubetzkoy, Mike Ferraro
(PossibleWorlds.com), Carl Ludwig (Director of engineering),
and Chris Wedge.
Josh Pines, Ken Perlin, Jan Carlee and Christine Chang
began the CG group at R/Greenberg associates. Ken Perlin
went on to NYU where he remains today. Josh Pines now heads
the digital scanning department at ILM, Christine eventually
went to Don Bluth, Jan Carlee eventually joined Blue Sky and
Mike Ferraro eventually left Blue Sky to form his own
production company. Tom Miller now is Head of CG at Fox
Animation Studios, Larry Elin went to ???.
MediaLab
Mental Images
MetroLight
[ FACTOID] Before MetroLight was chosen as the official
name, it was originally called North Light Studios (until
it was found that this name was already taken)
Other key people who soon joined them included Con
Pederson (Abel), Tom Hutchinson(ILM), Jim Hillen(Disney
Feature Animation), John McLaughlin (SonyPictures
ImageWorks), Gary Jackemuk, Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri(ILM),
Jeff Doud (Click 3X), Yung-Chen Sung, Rebecca Marie
(Hammerhead), Scott Bendis (Interplay), Billy Kent, Patrice
Dinhut, Kelley Ray (Sony), Mark Lasoff (Station X), Sean
Schur (ILM).
Initially new SGI 3130 computers were purchased for the
new company, running software from a relatively new company
called Wavefront. At this same time Robert Abel and
Associates had just gone out of business with that companies
landlord acquiring much of the production equipment upon its
closing. MetroLight then purchased this gear for itself
(which included Evans & Sutherland computers, Mitchel
cameras, motion control equipment, and other hardware.
MetroLight¹s first job was a intro for National
Geographic, Directed by Jeff Doud. The rendering was done at
1k at 1:1.33 aspect ratio for both film and television
markets. Jeff was soon after hired to work at MetroLight as
an Art Director, and is now at Click3x in Atlanta.
For their first attempt at feature film work, MetroLight
shared a Special Achievement Visual Effects Academy Award for
1989's Total Recall. The project required animating 3D CG
"skeletons" in a life size walk-through X-ray machine.
Initially an early optical motion capture system from Motion
Analysis was tested on Arnold (complete with sticking ping-
pong balls all over him!). Eventually though the problems
with the system necessitated a backup plan. The rear camera
used behind the X-ray in the motion capture set up was used
to capture footage that was rotoscoped for the key frames
used in the final character animation. Paul Verhoven, then
new to CG technology was very accommodating to the MetroLight
crew, although he vetoed the idea of putting muscles on the
X-ray skeletons. The hope was that this would help to
differentiate Arnolds large physique from the other ³normal²
sized human skeletons, but it was not to be.
[Credit fatoid] Although MetroLight was only
acknowledged by company name in the films credits, Verhoven
rewarded the company with allotments for additional personal
credits in the video release.
In May of 1988 MetroLight decided that it wanted a more
robust rendering software solution than was provided by
Wavefront at the time. Yung-Chen began work on the in-house
code only to loose all his data four months later in a series
of software backup failures. More for the better the second
time around, the code (finished in spring of Œ89) was fast,
and enough to carry them until about 1991/92 when they began
using Renderman. At this same time Alias was selling there
product modularly and MetroLight decided on their superior
modeling package rather than write their own code for this
task. Alias animation eventually replaced Wavefront Preview,
with Composer also being recently replaced with Chalice for
compositing. Maya is also being introduced as the all around
tool of choice in recent months. (Although Con Pederson was
still using Abel software up until very recently!)
From the very beginning, MetroLight had two separate
divisions, each ultimately with about 65 employees. The main
3D production division, and MetroCel the 2D ink and paint
division. Mits Kaneko actually directed the overall
development of the 2D software, Mark Steeves ran the division
and Charles Scalfani was the lead programmer. The ³annie²
software was ready for production work by about 1991 and was
used in such television shows as Ren & Stimpy.
[Ren & Stimpy Factoid] A little known fact is that
MetroLight also created 3D effects for several Ren & Stimpy
episodes. In one scene, George Liquor sees Ren through a pet
store window which was rendered in 3D with reflections and
refractions. Another 3D effects included a full blown
snowstorm effect.
In 1994 the MetroCel software ³annie² was sold to the
interactive company ³7th Level², who were going public with
the backing of a certain investment banker names Michael
Milken.
Over the years MetroLight has also contributed to a
number of large format films, including the Korean ³Star
Quest² (with DreamQuest providing practical effects) and an
Imax Intel show. Two such large format projects are currently
in production; one for a summer 1999 release in Universal¹s
new Florida theme park, and another in Orlando for Sigfreid
and Roy, produced by L Squared.
A large part of Jim Kristoff and MetroLight¹s vision for
the future of their company is character animation. To this
end, they are just finishing work on the sequel to
DragonHeart, due for a fall 1999 direct-to-video release.
The Moving Picture Company (MPC)
³The quality of the light was uneven, and the guy who
helped build it spent a lot of time trying to control light
intensity down fibre-optic cable. He was an Australian named
was Mike Boudry, the later founder of CFC.² Contributed by
Craig Zerouni
National Center For Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA)
New York Institute of Technology (NYIT)
Ohio State University
-Charles A. Csuri
In 1963 Charles Csuri joined OSU as a Professor in the
Department of Art. A former All-American football player and
painter, he soon became interested in the computer as an aid
in creating new forms of art and animation.
By 1967, with the assistance of a fellow faculty member
from the Department of Mathematics (and a mainframe computer)
Csuri created several interpolated line drawing sequences,
including one of a hummingbird in flight. Csuri produced over
14,000 frames, which exploded the bird, scattered it about,
and reconstructed it. These frames were output to 16mm film,
and the resulting film Hummingbird was purchased by the
Museum of Modern Art in 1968 for its permanent collection
as representative of one of the first computer animated
artworks.
-The CGRG
Beginning with a National Science Foundation grant
for $100,000 in 1969, The Computer Graphics Research
Group (CGRG) began working with a PDP 11/45 minicomputer and
Vector General Display. The CGRG was truly multi-disiplined,
included faculty and graduate students from Art, Industrial
Design, Photography and Cinema, Computer and Information
Science, and Mathematics. Additional grants from the Air
Force Office For Scientific Research and the Navy continued
the center until 1990, working in that time on two dozen
different research projects worth about eight million dollars
in research support. The CGRG projects specialized in
computer animation languages, geometric and terrain modeling,
motion control, and realtime playback systems.
-Animation Systems
Early animation language projects focused on a new concept of
³user friendly-ness² termed ³habitability² by Tom DeFanti. This was
promoted as an interface to the real-time systems consisting of
dials and joysticks.
GRASS (Graphics Symbiosis System) animation programming
language by Tom DeFanti in 1972.
ANIMA motion language by Manfred Knemeyer in 1973.
ANIMA II was developed with contributions from Ron
Hackathorn, Alan Myers, Richard Parent and Tim Van Hook.
TWIXT was designed by Julian Gomez as a ³track-based
keyframe animation system².
[MORPHING Factoid] Mark Gillenson (now at IBM) developed
a technique of blending images of facial drawings, one of the
earliest examples of the now familiar technology called
morphing.
-Other important developments
Procedural animation was also developed in the late
70s by Wayne Carlson, Bob Marshall and Rodger Wilson.
Frank Crow arrived from the University of Texas and
continued his work with shadows and antialiasing that were
started at the University of Utah. He later went to Xerox
PARC.
-Character Animation
A great many individuals at Ohio created award winning
character based short animations; including Tuber¹s Two
Step by Chris (Blue Sky) Wedge and Snoot and Muttly by
Susan Van Baerle and Doug Kingsbury.
-Cranston/Csuri Productions Inc.
In 1981, Chuck Csuri approached investor Robert Kanuth
of The Cranston Companies to form a production company based
on the great array of custom software written at the CGRG.
Mark Howard designed and built a frame buffer which was
used extensively for realtime animation testing at the CGRG
and Cranston/Csuri Productions until they went out of
business in 1987.
-The ACCAD
In 1987 Chuck Csuri and Tom Linehan (now President of
Ringling School of Design) converted the Computer Graphics
Research Group into The Advanced Computing Center for
the Arts and Design (ACCAD).
Also in the late 1980s, Scott Dyer(Windlight Co-founder,
now at Nelvana) and a group of ACCAD personnel connected with
The new Ohio Supercomputer Center for the purpose of
developing flexible software solutions in the burgeoning
field of scientific visualization.
-Alumni works
For a more complete listing of CGRG, Cranston/Csuri
and ACCAD alumni and their work, please visit these web
sites:
http://www.cgrg.ohio-
state.edu/accad/people/alumni.html
http://www.cgrg.ohio-state.edu/accad/research/
http://www.cgrg.ohio-state.edu/accad/gallery/films.html
Wayne Carlson has been Director of the ACCAD since
19??
Charles A. ³Chuck² Csuri is currently the Director
and Professor, Emeritus of the Departments of Art, Art
Education and Computer and Information Science at Ohio State
University.
-footnote: Excerpted with permission from ³A Short History of
ACCAD²: by Wayne Carlson.
Omnibus Computer Graphics Inc.
[Robert¹s NYIT story picking up the machine?]
TERRENCE: actually, they never picked up the machine,
but I had to return the original RK05 disk pack to prove that
we have wiped the software. No search was made for backups
(duh) but by that time the s/w was pretty much unusable
anyway.
Omnibus Computer Graphics Inc. began in early 1982
with W.Kelly Jarmain as Chairman and J.C.Pennie as President
and CEO. In 1983 they installed a VAX 11/750 and produced the
first CG commercial in Canada. In 1983 an IPO (which raised
$4.2 million) made Omnibus the first publically traded CG
company. The plan was to expand and operate three main
facilities: Toronto, New York and Los Angeles. The original
Toronto location was for computer operations and the Canadian
broadcast and agency work. Its Production group was run by
Dan Philips (now head of CG production at DreamWorks). The
New York facility, for video broadcast and recording, was on
57th street West under a lease from Unitel Video Inc. The Los
Angeles location was intended primarily for motion picture
film work; all linked by satellite by the end of 1984. (The
satellite link amounted to modems for many months, and
finally a WAN that was painfully slow and unreliable.) As
part of the initial expansion in mid 1984, several larger VAX
11/780 systems were installed at the Toronto facility.
[FACTOID] Kevin Tureski relates his first day on the job at
Omnibus in Toronto: ³I remember walking in past reception to
where the animators worked. There was Eric Ladd hunched over
a massive drafting table. He was digitizing, by hand, the x,y
and z coordinates of a horse. Someone had drawn about 5
sectional slices of a horse on 4 foot by 3 foot graph paper,
one slice per paper. Eric was calculating the x,y values from
the grid and writing down the coordinates down on a piece of
paper, later typing them in, manually creating several .ppt
files. There was no digitizing tablet to be found anywhere.
Later, on a tour of the edit suite, I saw Mike Johnson
feeding paper tape containing the boot program through the
ESS a still store capable of holding 30 seconds of video on
it¹s RK05 disks.²
Now majority owned by Santa Clara-based Ramtek,
Omnibus/LA hired David Sieg from Image West as VP of R&D and
a team of programmers from CalTech, working with Al Barr,
Brian Von Herzen, and many others. In addition to developing
their own software (called PRISMS), Omnibus obtained
³several exclusive software license agreements² with Robert
Abel & Associates and Triple-I. (The deal with Abel was
originally signed to last seven years, the Triple-I deal
until the year 2001.)
To start up the Omnibus/LA facility, they bought the F1
computer system and older film printers (called PFR's) from
Triple-I (Triple-I had just shut down their CG group.) and
started working out of the Triple-I offices in Culver City.
Omnibus/LA soon moved to the Paramount Studios Lot in
Hollywood, sharing facilities with Unitel Video. Art Durinski
was hired as Creative Director and staffed the initial dozen
employees, which included a number of student from UCLA where
he had been teaching.
Star Trek III
The first feature film contract Omnibus worked on was
for Paramount Pictures Star Trek III. Omnibus (one of three
companies to contribute) created a number of video graphic
displays seen on the bridge of the Enterprise and Klingon
starships. About 30 to 40 computer generated video clips
comprised almost an hours worth of imagery. Artists included
Technical Director Dan Krech and animator Dan Philips.
Jeff Kleiser came on board the LA office as Director of
the Motion Picture Special Effects division and directed
animation for Flight of the Navigator and the original
Captain Power pilot for Landmark.
[THE FIRST D.O.A. DOMINO TIPS] The Captain Power project
was meant to save Digital Productions from bankruptcy, but
when Jeff brought the project to Omnibus instead, DP was
forced to sell out. The rest, as they say, is history.
Flight of the Navigator showcased the first feature
film use of 3D morphing and animated texture mapping.
(Environmental film footage was transferred to video,
digitized and used to simulate the chrome surface of the
spaceship.)
Explorers would require a dream sequence illustrating a
fly-over of a city represented by a 3D CG circuit board.
Without the capability to render different colored vector
graphics, Art Durinski designed the effect to be output in
multiple black and white layers, each of which was filmed out
and optically colored ad composited at Industrial Light
and Magic. (ILM was the primary traditional effects house on
the movie.) Bob Hoffman coded and animated on both Navigator
and Explorers.
DOA
In June of 1986, Omnibus bought Digital Productions,
having been approached by their majority owner Control Data
who was desperate to get out from under the increasing debt
of DP. In September of that same year Omnibus also bought
Robert Abel and Associates for $7.3 million. Abel¹s
likewise was on the verge of bankruptcy, and was led to
believe Omnibus was a legitimate bid from a publicly held and
stable company. The management at Omnibus saw the purchases
as a way to consolidate all the best of everything, (and all
their customers) into a single monolithic parent company.
Unfortunately nothing was as it appeared, as everyone was
soon to find out.
Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr. had no choice but to
leave Digital Production when their contract agreement with
Control Data was violated by the sale to Omnibus. They both
left to form Whitney/Demos. Art Durinski was privy to the
financial state of the recent deals early on and decided to
leave the company and go to Toyo/Links in Japan.
[SIDEBAR QUOTE] ³The Omnibus management knew nothing
about computer animation, but kept muttering about "Economies
of Scale". The reality was: three separate sales forces,
three separate production crews, three separate facilities,
philosophies, software systems and hardware systems, none of
which were likely to ever work together. What is ironic is
that the next Star Trek movie was about to go into
production, and had tons of CGI work in it. We had good
contacts with the right people, and we did some amazing tests
(I have videotape!) of the Enterprise that blew the
modelmakers away. But they were too scared Omnibus would go
under to give us the contract that would have saved us.²
David Sieg dave@ns.zfx.com
Diana Walczak began working on human figure tests for
Marvel Comics, and Jeff Kleiser was in Vancouver Canada
scouting locations for the film Millennium when the end
came. In early 1987, with a debt of $30million, Omnibus
defaulted on investments and closed Abel, DP and Omnibus on
April 13th, 1987.
[QUOTE] ³Auctions were held for the remainder of the
equipment, including people's desks with papers still in
them. I bought an Ikonas framebuffer for $50 that had been
bought eighteen months earlier for $35,000. I still have it
today. It still works.² David Sieg
President John Pennie later headed The Virtual Reality
Company, until it went under in 1993.
Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic purchased the rights to
the PRISMS source code and started Side Effects
Productions, which later became Side Effects Software.
Kevin Tureski went to Alias and was Director of
Engineering for PowerAnimator from its inception, and is now
responsible for various bits and pieces of Maya.
There was also an Omnibus Japan that still exists today,
and uses the 3-D Omnibus orb logo.
OptoMystic
Pacific Data Images (PDI)
[PDI SHORTS] PDI has a always went beyond pure
commercialism with its support of short animated films for
their own sake. Some of the earliest memorable SIGGRAPH clips
featured the ³Happy Drinking Birds², Chromosaurs, Opera
Industrial, Cosmic Zoom, Burning Love, Max¹s Place,
Locomotion, Gas Planet. Recent shorts are no exception in
Gabola the Great and Sleepy Guy. Their next short Fat Cat
is due out soon.
Other fun projects have included the long running Bud
Bowl half time series and The Simpsons 3D episode.
In 1998 Richard Chung, Glenn Entis and Carl Rosenthal
werer awarded a Scientific and Technical Achievement
Award for the concept and architecture of the PDI Animation
System.
Employees included Thad Bier(Hammerhead), Scott Anderson
(ILM, Sony). Carl and Richard are still with PDI, while Glenn
Entis left PDI to become President of Dreamworks Interactive.
www.pdi.com
Pixar
Protozoa
RezN8
Rhythm and Hues
Robert Abel and Associates
Talk about CG history with anyone who¹s been in the biz
for at least 10 years, and one name will inevitably come up
very early in the conversation. In fact, Bob Abel¹s name
itself is virtually synonymous with the pioneering early days
of computer graphics. Talk to him yourself and you will
quickly realize that this is a man to whom the tool is much
less important than the creative result.
Abel¹s introduction to new technology came at an early
age, even in fact as a pre-teen in the 1950s. His uncle Earl
Kanter, a World War II draftee and ³high IQ² Harvard student,
began experimenting with electronics and early computers.
This ³high-tech² childhood would set a foundation for things
to soon come.
In 1957 a young Abel was doing paste up work for the
legendary Saul Bass. It was a trip that Abel made to one
man¹s garage that would soon change his life. Saul was
working on the opening titles to Hitchcock¹s ³Vertigo² with a
man by the name of John Whitney. Whitney was using analog
computers and homemade motion control rigs to create artwork
of various kinds, and Abel got on very well with the older
artist. So much so that Abel was hired as a graphics design
consultant on one print job for Foodmaker, the parent company
of Jack-In-The-Box.
Abel would remain busy doing a great variety of things
that would run the gamut from the realistic to the surreal.
Abel would shoot an award winning documentary for David
Wolper, spend a tour on Vietnam as a combat photographer, and
contribute to multi-screen music festivals and rock concerts.
All this would solidify in 1971 when that icon of
advertising, Harry Marks, would provide Abel and his old
friend Con Pederson with the opportunity to create a new look
for ABC television. From 1971 to 1973, in 6000 square feet of
vacant space behind and accountants office, the fledgling
Robert Abel and Associates would begin to take shape.
There was no phone, no sign on the building, no advertising
and no secretary; just Abel, Con, an optical guy named Dick
Alexander and a camera mannamed Dave Stuart.
Major projects included:
€ 7up ³see the light² campaign
€ The ³Gold Series² for Benson and Hedges
€ Amazing Stories opening
€ The Randy Roberts designed "Brilliance" commercial for
the Canned Food Council ( The "Sexy Robot" )
Larry Cuba joined RAA for a short time at the start of
1976, hoping to program the new motion control computers, But
left just four months later to create the famous DeathStar
graphics for George Lucas¹ Star Wars film.
Abel assembled a computer graphics team to work on Star
Trek: The Motion Picture, but the work which was
eventually discontinued to be completed by Doug Trumbull and
others with traditional effects techniques.
€Disney¹s ³The Black Hole² Disney had awarded the job
to an independent company ³Neo Plastics² run by C.D. Taylor
and Mick Hagerty. They in turn hired John Hughes to create a
vector graphics grid/black hole simulation. John rented
Abel¹s E&S system and shot the images off the screen,
optically compositing the CG with artwork and additional
traditional animation. Unfortunately once he had the job, but
also realized that he had to deliver it in a mere 14 days.
Not only did John actually finish the job in just 9 days, but
Disney like it so much they would have them repeat the effect
for the film¹s opening sequence and one-sheet poster.
€TRON! Kenny Merman and Frank Vitz headed the team that
produced the opening titles and ³Flynn¹s Ride² sequences.
(BOB: what¹s the story about an Australian
³con artist² trying to buy RAA?)
At its peak, RAA occupied some 45,000 square feet and
employed 240 people. With the best of intentions, Robert Abel
& Associates was sold in September of 1986 to John Pennie of
Omnibus Computer Graphics of Canada for $8.5 million. The
hope was to gain much needed capital investment from an
established, publicly traded company. As soon as January of
1987, just a few months later, it was clear that all was not
right with the new parent company. Sure enough, that April
the 12th all the Omnibus people left en mass in the evening.
The next day, April 13th, 1987, with word that Omnibus had
defaulted on mountains of dept, all of Abel¹s had one last
party before packing up for good.
Hundreds of talented people passed through Abel¹s, many
of whom are leaders of the CG field today. Clark Anderson,
Richard "Dr." Baily (Image Savant), John Grower(Santa Barbara
Studios/Wavefront), Charles Gibson(R&H), Keith Goldfarb,
Steve Grey, Rich Hoover, John Hughes(Rhythm & Hues), Pauline
T¹So (R&H), Bill Kovacs(Alias|Wavefront), Sherry McKenna, Tim
McGovern(MetroLight, Sony ImageWorks), Kenny Mirman, John
Nelson, Con Pederson(MetroLight), Randy Roberts, Richard
Taylor, Michael Wahrman.
Robert Greenberg and Associates
Santa Barbara Studios (SBS)
Side Effects Incorporated
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
-FACTOID: Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics
went on to found Netscape Communications Corporation. The
web¹s most popular graphical browser, which was acquired by
AOL in November 1998 for $4.1 billion (Yes that¹s billion
with a ³b²)
SGI produced it¹s first computer, the IRIS 1000 in 1983,
and went public in 1986. Acquired both Alias and Wavefront
in 1995 and Cray Supercomputers in 1996.
Announced in 1997 was a new joint effort with Microsoft
and Intel to develop a next generation processor line for its
graphics workstations, a new SGI Intel/NT. Just introduced in
spring of 1999, the SGI 320 and 540 workstations are Windows
NT based and cost between $3,400 and $5,995 US. The 540
supports up to 4 PentiumII Xeon 450MHz processors, and up to
2GB or graphics memory.
FAMILY TREE OF HARDWARE
1983/84 SGI's first 1000 series workstations were really
terminals, as they required a VAX host.
IRIS 2400
3030
3130
PI-35 (Personal Iris)
Crimson
Challenge Server
Indy
Indigo2
O2
Octane
[FACTOID] The IRIS Model 3030 in 1986 came with the
following specs:
-2 MB of RAM expandable to a whopping 16 megs!
-A 16 Mhz 68020
-A 40MB hard drive
-All in a 29"x18" 200lb chassis.
Revenues for fiscal 1998 were $3.1 billion US. 800-800-
7441 www.sgi.com
Softimage Inc.
Sogitec Audiovisuel
Stanford
Symbolics Graphics Division (SGD)
[SYMBOLICS FIRSTS] Symbolics produced the first
workstation which could genlock, the first to have real time
video I/O, the first to support digital video I/O and the
first to do HDTV.
In-house tools included S-Geometry for modelling and S-
Dynamics for animation. S-Paint was a LISP based 32bit paint
system designed by Craig Reynolds, Tom McMahon, Bob Coyne and
Eric Weaver.
[SIDEBAR] Stanley and Stella: Breaking The Ice
As many as 50 people worked on the project and shared
responsibility. Some key people included , Phillipe
Bergeron(hero animation), Joseph Goldstone, Kevin Hunter,
Larry Malone, Craig Reynolds(flocking and schooling code),
Jim Ryan, and Michael Wahrman(Producer). Richard ³Dr.² Baily
was hired by Michael Wahrman to model the two main characters
based on sketches. He also composed and recorded the original
soundtrack, which was later replaced by another one.
Around 1990, Symbolics started to fail and began to lay
off people. Even though the SGD had a successful ongoing
business with a good customer base, it still relied on their
parent company for workstation and operating system
technology, as well as other corporate infrastructure like
HR, finance, customer service etc.
Tom McMahon relates the following events: ³Eventually,
SGD was the target of a takeover and transition to Japanese
management. SGD's Japanese distributor (Nichimen) had a
thriving business based on the SGD product line of
videographics hardware and the animation & rendering
software. They couldn't afford to see us get blown away less
the be left without a source of supply. SO they started
buying up an insurance policy. They made Symbolics some
offers it couldn't refuse given its poor financial health.
In a sequence of financial transactions, Nichimen bought
rights to certain hardware technologies. They also started
picking up the payroll for SGD employees in exchange for
certain worldwide distribution rights. In the end we had the
people but Nichimen ended up owning most of our hard-earned
technology.
We had already begun looking at how to port these tools
off of Symbolics workstation platforms.SGI became the porting
target. By 1991 we were well into the re-write and port.
But Symbolics needed to pull the plug on us.
I worked out a pretty amazing salvage deal with our old
friends at III. I negotiated a contract where I could take
ALL of SGD's key employees back to the employ of III, but
under a funding arrangement with Nichimen. Nichimen got
their security blanket and the employees kept their jobs. (A
blanket layoff and the entire extermination of SGD was the
alternative at the time.)
At III we proceeded to port all of the SGD products to
SGI machines. But things started going sour there too.
We spun out of Triple-I and started yet another new company
(with Nichimen seed funding) called Del Rey Graphics (co-
founded by Al Fenaughty (President and CEO of Triple-I),
along with Jack Holloway, one of the Foonly designers at
Triple-I). But that didn't work due to a hostile takeover by
Nichimen. My partners and I ended up selling the whole thing
to Nichimen and what is left of this very long thread is now
called Nichimen Graphics.²
Symbolics declared chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995, and
was bought back by it¹s original founder Russell Noftsker.
Synthavision
Systems Simulation Ltd.
[BIO] ³John Lansdown was Emeritus Professor of Computer
Aided Art and Design and formerly Head of the Centre for
Electronic Arts (formerly called the Centre for Advanced
Studies in Computer Aided Art and Design) from September 1988
until July 1995 when he retired from full-time employment.
In 1968 he was one of the founders of the Computer Arts
Society and was its honorary secretary for more than 25
years. He was engaged in using computers for creative
activities (such as architecture, art and choreography) since
1960 and wrote over 300 publications on computer uses in art
and design.² excerpt by permission of Huw Jones
( A true pioneer of computer graphics in the UK, John
Lansdown died of lukemia on February 17th, 1999.)
Thompson Digital Images (TDI)
University of Bath (UK)
Special display architectures
References
Improvements in display apparatus for controlling
raster scan displays. R L Grimsdale, A A Hadjiaslanis, P J
Willis. UK Patent Specification 1-532-275, November 15th
1978.
Zone management processor: a module for generating
surfaces in raster scan colour displays. R L Grimsdale, A A
Hadjiaslanis, P J Willis. IEE Computer and Digital Techniques
2, 1, February 1979, pp 21-25.
Quad encoded display. D J Milford and P J Willis. IEE
Proceedings Part E: Computer and Digital Techniques, 131, 3,
May 1984, pp 70-75.
Ultra-resolution pictures.
References: 1) Manipulating large pictures on the Perq.
P J Willis and J B Hanson. Displays, July 1984, pp 170-173.
2) UltraPaint: a new approach to a painting system.
P J Willis and G W Watters. Computer Graphics Forum, 6, 2,
May 1987, pp 125-132.3) Scan converting extruded lines at
ultra high definition. G W Watters and P J Willis.
Computer Graphics Forum, 6, 2, May 1987, pp 133-140.
University of Illinois Chicago (This history is reproduced with permission from the EVL
online database here:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/EVL/EVLLAB/history.shtml )
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) is a
graduate research laboratory specializing in virtual reality
and real-time interactive computer graphics; it is a joint
effort of UIC's College of Engineering and School of Art and
Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration
between engineering and art in the country offering graduate
degrees to those specializing in visualization.
University of Utah
[Utah Image processing] Tom Stockham was a brilliant
teacher at Utah who brought together the disciplines of image
processing and computer graphics. His extraordinary
contributions in his related work in audio processing were
honored in February of 1999 by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement Award.
How to light things? Henry Gouraud had been working for
some time on linear interpolated shading, when he visited
Martin Newell and his brother in England who were working on
similar research. A stumbling block with the early
implementation was mach-banding artifacts, which also
hindered the Newell¹s, allowing Gouraud to travel to Utah to
finish his ³Continuous Shading of Curved Surfaces² in 1971.
Other important individuals at Utah over the years
included Frank Crow in the image processing group who
developed the concept of anti aliasing; Jim Blinn develops
bump mapping and environment mapping while a graduate
student; Jim Clark, Lance Williams, Garland Stern, Ron Resch,
Alan Kay, John Warnock, Fred Parke, Patrick Baudelaire, Jim
Kajiya, Christy Barton, Gary Watkins and man of others.
For a good online source of U.Utah Computer Science
history, try here: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~riloff/cs-
history.html
Vertigo Software Corporation
VIFX
Wavefront
A Brief History of Wavefront by Mark Sylvester,
Ambassador: Alias|Wavefront
Overview:
Larry Barels, Bill Kovacs and Mark Sylvester
founded Wavefront Technologies in 1984. The company created
its first product, an animation software application called
PreView and shipped it to Universal Studios for use on the
television series Knight Rider, and to Lamb and Company for
use in previsualizing and controlling a motion control camera
rig. During the next several years the product line was
expanded to include modeling, rendering, compositing, and
material editing capabilities. The company enjoyed early
relationships with key partners that shaped the direction of
the products and the marketplace. Those early partners
included Disney (The Great Mouse Detective), NASA (The
Shuttle accident recreation), NBC (1986 Olympics) and Failure
Analysis (Legal animations, including the World Airways crash
at Logan Airport).
The company's first real competition came in
1987 with the advent of Robert Abel and Associates software
division, AIR (Abel Image Research). This company, originally
founded on a codebase developed by Bill Kovacs, was started
to capitalize on the momentum that Wavefront was enjoying in
the marketplace. This software was incomplete, undocumented,
and very expensive, however AIR had the best marketing
materials in the industry with an award winning animation
reel done by Robert Abel. Unable to compete against this
body of work a deal was struck in 1988, which had Wavefront
purchasing the assets of AIR. The AIR software was never
incorporated into the Wavefront codebases, even though urban
myths have contrary opinions.
The company was originally financed by the
founders for the first year, then went through several rounds
of venture funding, culminating in an IPO ten years later in
1995. Initial revenues were in the several hundred thousand
per year range, and ended in 1994 with annual revenues around
26$M.
The company went from 3 founders and 4
employees, to 12, then 28, then 50, then 90, and then 160 at
its highest point in the late 80¹s. Expansion into Europe
happened in 1987 with the creation of Wavefront Europe,
located in Belgium. It was at that time that the Belgian
government also became an investor. The next year,
concurrent with the AIR acquisition, Wavefront moved into
Japan, and then throughout the rest of Asia.
In the early 90¹s a round of funding with CSK, a
major Japanese computer company resulted in the founding of
Wavefront Japan, a wholly owned subsidiary. CSK at one time
owned 14% of Wavefront.
How the Company Got Started
Originally designed as a production company to
create visual effects for commercials and feature films, the
initial fundraising efforts were ineffectual until the
business model was changed to that of a software company that
could sell the same software that the production company
would create to produce the commercials. During the first
year the company¹s production department, headed by John
Grower, now president of Santa Barbara Studios (Star
Trek: Insurrection, American Werewolf in Paris) created
opening graphics for ShowTime, BRAVO, and the National
Geographic Explorer television show. These projects allowed
the new software to be tuned to meet the needs of the
animators and provided the company with early marketing
materials.
In March of 1985 the company attended its first
tradeshow, NCGA, and (with Alias) participated in Silicon
Graphics¹ booth. At this show the first systems were sold,
to NBC (New York), Electronic Arts (London), Video PaintBrush
(Australia), Failure Analysis (Mtn. View) and NASA (Houston).
This put the company in two markets, Broadcast and
Engineering Visualization, and on multiple continents,
forcing management to deal with multiple opportunities across
diverse geographies.
In 1993 Wavefront entered into discussions to
acquire another of the pioneering computer graphics
companies, Thomson Digital Images (TDI). TDI had developed a
similar set of technologies, in modeling, animation and
rendering, and had innovated in the area of NURB modeling and
Interactive Rendering. Those technologies coupled with
extensive distribution in Europe and Asia made for an ideal
fit with Wavefront. The acquisition was treated more as a
merger, however, more than half of the employees of TDI left
immediately. It took nearly two years to blend the
distribution channels in Europe and Asia, as Wavefront had a
toehold in those areas already, and fierce competition
between the channels was clearly in play.
What Markets Did Wavefront Serve?
Wavefront started with the intent of working
with the film and high-end commercial market. However, as a
result of its first major tradeshow, it was accepted into the
Visualization, Engineering, Broadcast and Post-Production
marketplaces as well. The fact that the system was designed
to be open-architecture allowed for this market expansion.
The majority of the software as designed served both markets
well, with some modification for data import, and numerical
accuracy to satisfy the military (NASA) and forensic
animation (Failure Analysis) requirements. Because of the
open architecture of the system, originally crafted by Roy
Hall, who went on to receive an Academy Award, and Bill
Kovacs, for the system design, third party developers were
able to create ancillary applications and market them through
a program called Ripples. This open approach was a hallmark
of Wavefront, and tended to draw users that were more
technical, and interested in customizing the application.
The original business plan talked about
military, educational, medical, electronic game, simulation,
film/entertainment, engineering and product visualization
marketplaces. The only one that never materialized was the
simulation market. The company expanded into the scientific
market in the late 80¹s with a product called The Data
Visualizer. This product, aimed at non-polygonal databases
was a success until Silicon Graphics and IBM developed
competing products offered for free in bundles to sell high
end server hardware into the scientific marketplace. The
Data Visualizer built upon Wavefront¹s reputation for open
systems, and fast graphics interaction.
The company made one foray into the Œdesktop¹
marketplace with a project co-developed with Silicon
Graphics, called The Personal Visualizer. This product was
created to give CAD users a point and click interface to
highend photorealistic rendering. Initially targeted to SGI
hardware, the product was eventually ported to Sun, IBM, HP,
Tektronix, DEC, and SONY. The strategy was to bundle the
software on every system sold, then follow on with module
sales into the installed base.
The company had its best success in the post-
production marketplace with sales into the major networks, as
the software was extremely fast, productive and reliable. It
was able to keep up with that industries incessant demand for
more speed. The other major success for the company was in
Engineering Visualization. Based upon the idea that the
software would be a compliment to CAD, the Wavefront system
specialized in file translation, with native translators for
every major CAD package. At one Autofact tradeshow,
Wavefront was in the booths of 22 vendors, showing
interactive visualization of parts, mechanisms, and
assemblies created with a plethora of CAD packages. This,
coupled with the systems open architecture for reading any
type of ASCII data, allowed it to also serve in the post-
simulation visualization space, which included NASA, and
virtually any company that wanted to view results derived
from supercomputers and proprietary software. In 1995,
nearly half of the company¹s installed base was in this
marketplace.
In 1993 the company entered the Electronic Game
market with a repackaging of its core application, The
Advanced Visualizer, into a tailored offering called
GameWare. This bundle focused the marketplace on Wavefront
for game development and was very successful. This effort
lasted for one year until the merger (of Alias and Wavefront)
when the program was canceled so that PowerAnimator could be
sold to game developers instead.
Major Customers
In the film market, Disney was the premier
customer, with Warner Digital, BOSS Film (both now defunct),
Industrial Light and Magic, Film Magic (Hong Kong), TRIX
(Belgium), and Electronic Arts (London). In video
production, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN (Turner Broadcasting) were
the premiere partners. In engineering visualization there
was Harvard, NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research),
NASA (6 locations), Alcoa, National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA). The military visualization marketplace
included the CIA, FBI, Naval Surface Warfare Center, US Air
Force and the National Security Agency. At the high point
there were nearly 8000 Advanced Visualizer users.
Market Dynamics
For the first few years the company enjoyed
rapid growth in the film, video and engineering marketplaces.
As most customers were doing mostly the same types of things
the company was not stressed with specific product requests
that were not generally applicable to all types of users.
The visualization market was mostly in place to create
marketing videos and presentations, so the tools to Œcreate
pretty pictures¹ were most desirable. It was after the
effort of The Personal Visualizer, and the growing demand for
CAD Visualization that the company had to began custom
engineering to develop CAD translators.
These efforts at CAD visualization were
significant because Wavefront was the first to take on this
arena, but the efforts of porting to every platform that
carried CAD applications, and the fact that it took nearly
one year per port, AND the fact that most facilities
eventually would run CAD on Sun, HP, or IBM, and then use
Silicon Graphics for Visualization really took the
competitive wind out of the sails of the company. Because so
much effort was spent on CAD compatibility, and trying to
negotiate porting deals with hardware manufactures, the focus
on film and video application advancement was lost.
This loss of focus allowed Alias to make inroads
into the entertainment market, and also created a vacuum in
the entertainment space, especially in animation, that
Softimage filled. Softimage was originally billed as a blend
of the best of Alias and Wavefront software. Designed by
artists, for artists, it languished and was not taken very
seriously until they released the product Actor, which was
the first Inverse Kinematics package that allowed animators
to do real character animation easily. (Actor was recognized
this year with a Technical Achievement Award by the Academy).
This propelled them into the spotlight of the entertainment
marketplace. Remnants of this period still exist in the
entertainment market today, with Alias used for modeling
(Alias also received a Technical Achievement Award for the
modeling component of Power Animator, the recognized industry
standard), Wavefront (Dynamation) used for simulation
animation, Softimage for character animation, and Renderman
for rendering.
For Wavefront, this meant a retrenching into
Engineering Visualization, with a renewed focus on CAD
translation, and less on porting, as porting efforts started
to dwindle post-1992, with the demise of the Personal
Visualizer. The reliance on revenue from the visualization
market allowed for the development of the Data Visualizer,
and continued emphasis on motion data import into The
Advanced Visualizer. The efforts to continue to work with
the Engineering Visualization market were terminated post-
merger as the Alias sales force had no expertise, nor
management acumen in this marketplace.
In 1994, the activities that lead to the release
of GameWare invigorated the company¹s marketing efforts and
returned to them the spotlight, and increased the competition
between Alias and Wavefront. The company teamed up with
Corypheus Software to produce a real-time simulation
environment for use on Onyx systems, giving greater control
to game developers. (Called Activation, this product was
terminated as it conflicted with Alias¹s efforts in the game
business, post-merger). Several Wavefront executives and
technical personnel went to Corypheus post-merger.
In early 1995, another effort was undertaken to
capture the architectural market. ArcVision was designed to
take existing CAD translation software and bundle it with
preset color and environment controls, using IPR (Explore¹s
renderer front-end) to offer a low cost solution to small
firms that wanted to experiment with different color and
lighting schemes, using existing CAD architectural databases.
This project was terminated post-merger as the Alias
management had bad experiences in this market with their
Sonata purchase, and did not believe that the market was
viable. It never really got off the ground, as it was
scheduled to be launched at Siggraph, 1995.
In June of 1995 the merger of Alias Research,
Wavefront and Silicon Graphics was culminated.
In 1998, a Scientific and Technical Achievement
Award to Jim Keating, Michael Wahrman and Richard Hollander
for their contributions that led to the Wavefront Advanced
Visualizer computer graphics system.
Also in 1998, A Scientific and Engineering Award was
presented to Bill Kovacs for his creative leadership and Roy
Hall for his principal engineering efforts that led to the
Wavefront Advanced Visualizer computer graphics program.
Whitney/Demos Productions
Xaos
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)
They said they were from Omnibus Computer Graphics, the
world's first publicly listed computer animation company, and
they were looking to franchise their software around the
world. They wanted to start with England because they could
speak the language and because it was arguably the next most
advanced market after North America.
After a lot of talking and thinking and listening to
total lies ("we have a million dollar inventory of already
built objects at Omnibus" - in other words, instead of
writing off the cost of building a 3D football as the cost of
doing a job, they were capitalizing it as an asset) we
decided ok, we'll buy the stuff. Terms were arranged (I think
the number was in the region of $CAN100,000), and a reel of
software (just like you seen in those 50s science fiction
films) arrived. We installed it. As franchisees, we were
entitled to the source code, so that's what we got. We
installed it and got to understanding it.
Meanwhile, Omnibus, belching after having eaten Robert
Able and Digital Productions back-to-back, fell over. Kaput.
Out of business. The world's first shareholders in computer
animation found out what a great business this is. But we had
never paid for the software we had, which we were now happily
using in production.
Eventually, the receivers called us up and demanded
payment. We refused, on the grounds that,without support, it
wasn't worth nearly as much. Eventually, we settled for about
$CAN20,000 I believe. But we still had source.
Greg surfaced from under the wreckage of Omnibus, with
his partner Kim Davidson, and called us up, offering to
support PRISMS, which is what the software had been called at
Omnibus. We agreed.
So not only was CFX the world's first customer for Side
Effects Software, but we had source for a few years, until
we agreed to give up getting updates (we were always fair and
reasonable!). And we used the source - I once ported the
command line and channel manipulation portion of PRISMS to
an Atari Amiga, which we used to control our own motion
control rig.² - Craig Zerouni
(1981 to 1992)
The commercial production company set up by the NYIT
Computer Graphics Lab. The reason it was created was
because NYIT would have jeopardized its non-taxable status if
its computer graphics lab (as distinguished from CGL Inc.)
had engaged in major commercial projects.
Commercials included many ³glitzy² sports promos for
CBS, spots for Volkswagon, Chevrolette and the ³Live From
Lincoln Center² open (which is still showing today.) . Many
³technical directors². researchers and animators worked here
including Pat Hanrahan and Ken Wesley(ILM). Two young
animators, Glenn McQueen and Rex Grignon, are now animation
supervisors at Pixar and PDI respectively.
Based in Denver, CIC was the brainchild of Lee Harrison
, and was in the business of making "analog computer
graphics" in the early 1970s. These unique machines included
Animac, CAESAR and Scanimate. Lee received the first ever
Emmy for "Technical Achievement" in 1973 for his work. (See
the article on Scanimate by Ed Kramer for more details about
all this.) Lee Harrison passed away in 1998.
(1981 To 1987)
Cranston-Csuri was founded in August of 1981 by Charles
Csuri or Ohio State and investor Robert Kanuth of The
Cranston Companies. Jim Kristoff (also a past Treasurer of
Ohio State) came with Kanuth and served as president, while
Wayne Carlson of Ohio State was VP and head of R&D. Michael
Collery was Director of Animation, Don Stredney developed the
medical imaging market and Dr. Tom Linehan devloped the
educational market. Along with Shawn Ho (rendering), Paul
Sidlo (Creative Director) and Bob Marshal, the first
employees numbered about ten total.
[FACTOID] Cranston/Csuri was originally to be called
Animatrix, but the name was already being used by another
company.
Hardware included PDP 11-780 and 750's, a Megatek vector
display and an IMI Pyramid (3 or 4 mips) and VAX 780 (1
mip!). One of the first production ethernet networks
connected everyone. Rendering at that time was done to
memory, not to hard a disc, and was output to a Celco 2000
film recorder. Also used was a rare but extremely cool
digital disk recorder called an Ampex ESS. (Way ahead of it's
time in 1983, the Abekas was not released until about 1987.)
The primary rendering pipeline was originally developed
by Frank Crow, with his scn_assembler. Shawn Ho made
significant advances to the this by adding new features such
as reflection mapping and he worked out a way of simulation
refractions. (It was however limited to rendering scenes with
less then 10000 polygons.) Wayne Carlson wrote most of the
modeling code, and Bob Marshal did lots of systems type stuff
and misc. production software. Michael Collery wrote
compositing software and other misc. stuff, while Julian
Gomez came along and wrote Twixt on the E&S Picture System.
The animation software was used on the "IMI" (vector based
graphical display device), and the modeling software ran on
the MEGATEK. Mark Howard (head of engineering) designed and
built the ³Mark² series of frame buffers from scratch.(!)
The first work done at CCP was for ABC News in New York,
and later for ABC Sports. The relationship between CCP and
ABC Sports President Roger Goodman lasted for many years. It
did not end until 1984 when they reluctantly had to turn down
the work for that year¹s winter Olympics. Because CCP was
already booked with work, Jim Kristoff suggested that ABC use
a new company on the west coast who were building an
excellent reputation: Pacific Data Images.
Also in 1984 Cranston-Csuri acquired $3 million of
additional investor capital from several organizations.
Although owning only a minority share in the company, the new
investors controlled the board, and did not agree with
President Jim Kristoff¹s plans for its future. Chief among
the disagreements were the idea of licensing CCP software,
and the idea of opening a production office in Los Angeles.
During its existence, CCP produced almost 800
animation projects for over 400 clients world-wide, including
all the networks, cable channels, educational and medical
animation.
[QUOTE] ³Paul Sidlo was really a great broadcast
designer and developed a large and loyal client base which he
took with him to RezN8. I think we did the first cgi tv
commercial (non vector) in the USA which was a spot for the
USFL football team called the LA Express. There had been
earlier cgi commercials produced for foreign clients by
Digital Effects, but we where the first in the US. We did
the first CGI (non vector) network fall compaign for NBC, the
first cgi superbowl open, the first news open. We did two
really cools spots for TRW back in the days of the big budget
high art/ low content tv commercials. (ABEL did some really
nice TRW spots using vector graphic and motion control). We
did the second Dow scrubbing bubbles (the first was done at
Magi). We won a lots of awards and had a great deal of
success in television.² -Michael Collery
In 1985 the in-house software was finally licensed to
the Japan Computer Graphics Laboratory (JCGL) for use in
the Japanese market. After years of a stalemate over the LA
office issue, Kristoff suggested that the board of investors
sell out to him and a new group of investors, who could then
do as they pleased. The idea was given initial approval and
Kristoff secured financial support from Mitz Kaneko (with the
Japan Computer Graphics Laboratory in Tokyo) and other
investors led by a friend of Mr. Kaneko¹s. At this point a
number of promising new employees were hired and began
training, conditionally to staff the soon to be opened LA
office of Cranston-Csuri. When Mr. Kaneko¹s friend
unfortunately passed away soon after, the new investors
balked, the CCP board changed their mind, and the deal was
promptly canceled.
Jim Kristoff then resigned, with Wayne Carlson replacing
him as President. In the final months of 1987, the software
was ultimately purchased by Lamb and Company in Minneapolis
when Cranston Csuri Production went out of business.
(1988 to 19??)
Formed as a partnership in October of 1987 and
incorporated in 1988 by Brad deGraf and Michael Wahrman.
(**UNDER CONSTRUCTION**)
(1988 to present)
Research and technology company formed by Gary Demos
after leaving the Whitney/Demos bankruptcy. Began with
contract work for various projects, including setting up the
original Triple-I Digital Film Printer (DFP) at Pacific Title
in 91, connecting it via HPPI to an SGI network. The DFP had
been literally just sitting in a warehouse when Digital
Productions (who had leased it from Triple-I) went out of
business in 1987.
DemoGraFX presently specializes in High Definition
television technology. http://home.earthlink.net/~demografx
(1978-1986)
Founded by Judson Rosebush and Jeff Kleiser (Kleiser was
Animation Director and President), along with Don Leitch,
David Cox, Moses Weitzman, Jann Printz and Bob Hoffman (who
was later at Omnibus and RGA).
The first CG house in Manhattan.
[QUOTE] ³Our original setup was a 1200 baud modem
connection to an Amdahl V6 running APL in Bethesda Maryland
using a Tekronix dispay to preview wireframe (polygons
refreshed at one per second, that¹s one polygon per second!).
The perspective data was written onto 9 track tape and
mounted on an IBM 370/158 to do scan conversion. Another tape
was written as hi con images onto 9 track and shipped to LA
for film recording on a Stromberg Carlson 4020 film recorder.
Processed film was sent to NYC where I deinterlaced it onto
hicon film and made a print to separate out the colors and
have matte rolls that I could mount on an optical printer to
do multiple passes with color filters onto color negative,
which was then processed and printed at Technicolor
downstairs. Total time to see a color image: 1 week tops.²
Jeff Kleiser
(1980 to 19??)
Digital Pictures was co-founded by Chris Briscoe and
Paul Brown in 1980 as the UK's first specialist computer
animation company. Liam Scanlan was the first employee, and
Peter Florence and Steve Lowe soon joined as co-directors.
[QUOTE] ³Digital pictures was eventually sold to a
company called Molinaire, which was itself owned by WH Smith.
Moli was a TV post house, so buying DP made sense. WH Smith
was (and is) a chain of bookstores, and what they were doing
buying TV companies is not clear, nor was it then.² Craig
Zerouni
[QUOTE] ³When I first started, we were working on Data
General Eclipse 3300s, two of them. Each machine was
about 7 feet high, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep, had 32 Kb
main memory and a 300Mb disk drive which was about twice the
size of a domestic washing machine. I'd say they were maybe 4
or 5 times more powerfull than an Amiga 500. We rendered
tests direct to a frame buffer, usually 1-2 days for a 5-10
second test and rendered directly to a Matrix film plotter -
there was no disk space to store rendered images as files.
Each frame would take 30-90 minutes to render and 10 minutes
to plot. Color consistency isn't guaranteed across film baths
so if we missed or gashed a frame, we started over after we'd
got the film back from the labs. Our renderer, which was a
fine one, was written in house, did no ray tracing or texture
mapping, had no reflection maps but did have shadows as long
as we didn't use re-entrant polygons in our models.
Intersecting surfaces were a no-no. We modeled and animated
by writing Fortran 5 code. The last job done on the Eclipses
was at a stage when they were so knackered that I was
entirely losing disk data about 3 times a day and was
archiving my code every 20 minutes or so I could recover it
after I'd reformatted the disk every time it went down. One
of the disk drives bust so I was booting one machine,
starting a render, removing the drive and plugging it back
into the other machine so I could start a render on that one.
My 8 second sting took a week to render. The air conditioner
was being overworked so much it would freeze up every couple
of hours, melt and dump gallons of water into the machine
room. We had buckets all over the disk drives and mainframes.
I didn't get to go home for 10 days.² -Kim Aldis
Paul Brown is now Professor of Communication Design at
Queensland University of Technology, and Steve Lowe is a
successful commercials director in London. Liam Scanlan is
the Head Of Technical Directors at ILM in Marin Co. CA.
(1981-1987)
Digital Productions was formed in 1981 by Gary Demos
and John Whitney Jr., having just left Triple-I right before
the Tron work began production there. Elsa Granville was
employee number three and the Director of Human Resources,
Brad deGraf (Head of Production) and Larry Yaeger
(Director/VP of Software) were hired very soon thereafter.
Producers included Sherry McKenna and Nancy St.John. Jim
Rapley and Art Durinski joined DP after having worked on Tron
at Triple-I. Producer B.J. Rack later went on to work with
James Cameron on the original Terminator film, the renderer
was based on Movie-BYU originally.
So why the famous Cray? Knowing precisely what kind of
performance they would require to start a production company,
Demos initially called Ivan Sutherland and discussed just
what the cost would be to build a big mainframe. (Remember
SGI did not yet exist and there would be no ³workstations² as
we know it for almost another ten years!) The only reasonable
option it seems was the next generation Cray, the XMP.
The plan was to lease the as-yet-to-be-released Cray
XMP, but they took on an older Cray-1S initially to get a
head start with writing code. Capital funding was by Control
Data Corporation (CDC) and Ramtek, which went toward renting
the Triple-I DFP (Digital Film Printer) and the Cray 1S. (CDC
was a big mainframe manufacturer originally founded by
Seymour Cray)
(1983 to 1998)
Paul Docherty left his position as Head of Graphics at
London¹s leading post house Molinare and set up Electric
Image in 1983. The company was funded by private
shareholders, a number of which were previously Pauls
clients.
Paul and his then Technical Director Stewart McEwan (who
Paul had hired out of Molinare) spent two years producing
real time video based animation for the television market on
Dubner equipment. They then bought the first two SGI
terminals (at that stage SGI only made terminals) sold out of
the US and used them as a front end to a DEC VAX 11-780. The
disk drives were two removable platter ³washing machines²
which stood about 3 feet high and held a massive 450megs of
data.
[QUOTE] ³We were told that only a month before a
shipment marked ³Tractor Parts² had been intercepted on its
way to West Germany and found to contain a VAX computer, so
the extremely jumpy American customs people grabbed our SGI
terminals. We had to hire a lawyer in the states in order to
get them released, two weeks after we were due to start on
British Telecom International¹s new corporate identity using
this gear.² Paul Docherty
At the time the only other people doing raster animation
in the UK were Digital Pictures (with their own code) and
Electronic Arts (using various movie-byu bits).
Paul did a source code co-development deal with Abel
Image Research (Robert Abel¹s software division), where
Electric helped with some the PAL video issues and worked
closely with the Abel team to debug the code. The development
team at Abel at the time included Roy Hall, Hank Weghorst,
Kim Shelley a number of other Cornell luminaries.
EI began using the Abel system for television work and
eventually added an Oxberry Matrix 35mm camera for film work.
Like most companies of this early era, the EI team had to
work pretty much from scratch creating custom renders, color
look up tables, modeling utilities etc., and without the
benefit of the academic superstructure that already existed
in the US.
[QUOTE] ³The working hours were ridiculous and the
processing ungodly slow but everyone at EI seemed to get
caught up in the buzz of it all.² Paul Docherty
EI created commercials, television ids, program inserts,
small bits for European features in fact, pretty much
anything anyone asked for. The animation team included Ian
Bird (who now runs London animation house Eye), Mike Milne
(who heads up facility house The Frame Store¹s animation
section), and Ian MacFadyen and Stephen Coren (who run Drum,
a small London animation house). The technical side included
Stewart McEwan (who now runs the multimedia software section
of Dorland Kindersley) and David Benson (now at ILM).
[QUOTE] ³The various shareholders felt that we should
have a gimmicky name for the VAX/SGI/AbelGraphix combination,
so at a late night pub session Colin Reynolds drunkenly
suggested ³Doris². After a few more pints we decided that
DORIS stood for ³Digital Optical Raster Imaging System² and
that¹s what we told the press it was called.² Paul Docherty
The company was responsible for many European ³firsts²
first to use C and Unix for commercial graphics production
(most everyone else was using VMS and Pascal), the first bit
of serious raytracing on UK television (an ident for
Yorkshire Television), the first real time display SGI
graphics terminals, first UK dynamics animation package
(written by David Benson). A heavy use of clever compositing
and geometric projection tricks (picked up from the Abel
initially) gave the company¹s work a distinctive look and
built up a reputation for quality
With the collapse of Omnibus/Abel/Digital Productions
(or ³Omnivore² as the guys at Abel dubbed it) in 1987, EI was
now on its own as far as software development. The company
continued to develop the Abel system, and were joined by Paul
Newell from Abel (now at Rhythm and Hues) who helped keep the
code developing, adding a new animation system called (for no
apparent reason) DREK.
In 1991 the company began to shift towards commercial
software, using TDI Explore, augmented by Wavefront¹s
Dynamation and Kinemation.
Shortly thereafter Simon Maddocks (now ILM) joined and
eventually became Head of Animation. David Benson developed a
clever ray tracer for the AT&T Pixel Machine, one of the
early parallel processing systems. EI became the first UK
company to be able to render depth of field, motion blur, and
other realistic effects without going bust in the process.
Joakim Arnesson was a Technical Director there briefly, as
was current fellow ILMer Ben Snow.
About this time EI became one of the founding
shareholders in The Frame Store, along with director Steve
Barron (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Merlin, etc.). The new
company had the first Quantel Harry and has since grown in to
one of Europe¹s largest digital post houses.
In 1996 EI produced all the digital effects for Space
Truckers (120 shots, about 15 minutes in all) which although
modest by current standards, was a substantial project at
that time, especially in European terms.
In an effort to try and find some stability in the
³feast or famine² effects market in London, EI hired Bob
Auger and started Electric Switch, one of the first MPEG
compression facilities in Europe and currently the European
market leader in DVD authoring. Using Switch¹s compression
hardware the company pioneered the transfer of MPEG1 video
clips of rushes to locations around the world.
In 1997-98 EI produced about 80 shots for Lost in
Space, and produced a 4-minute ride film for the new GM
pavilion at Disneyland. Unfortunately, various legal and
technical problems caused shareholders in November 98 to pull
the plug on EI and concentrate on the new DVD company.
The company¹s 16 year life span made it one of the
longest lasting computer animation houses in European
history.
(1968 to present)
Incorporated in 1968 by Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland,
E&S was the first computer graphics company ever formed.
Based in Salt Lake City Utah, E&S produced vector graphics
workstations initially for military flight simulator use, but
later for many commercial companies as well such as Robert
Abel¹s and Cranston/Csuri. E&S first products were the LDS-
1, LDS-2 then Picture System-2 vector systems; all used with
another host system such as the VAX-11/780 (Abel used a PS2
with the Gould 6031)
Current products include the MindSet Virtual Studio,
Accel|Galaxy 3D and FuseBox 3.0 for NT. E&S sold a minority
share of (non-voting) stock to Intel in 1998. 801-588-1000
www.es.com
(1989 to present)
Ex Machina was created in 1989 with the merger of two
French CG production companies: Sogitec and the production
division of Thomson Digital Image (TDI). With the born of
Ex Machina, TDI itself then continued only involved in
developing the Explore Software.
Ex Machina has been involved in many different areas of
CG production, both commercials and films including all
formats ( Imax, 70/35mm, stereo, HVISION, etc.). Clients were
mainly from Europe and Japan, with most of the large format
films, such as IMAX, being produced for North American
clients.
TDI's Explore software has been used at Ex Machina since
its inception. It¹s R&D department even wrote some of the
tools shipped with that commercial package, such as the
particle system and the script-based modeler ³build².
Like other major production companies, Ex Machina has
also relied on developing it¹s own custom software. Its in-
house character animation system ³Appia² was developed in
1991/92 and first used during the production of "World of
Materials" directed by Jerzy Kukar. This was a 10 minutes
70mm stereo movie for a Korean International Festival. (Ex
Machina was also involved in the training of CG artists for a
Korean CG company who did one part of the film.)
Later Softimage was introduced for animation (Explore
been still used for modeling and rendering, and Appia for
secondary animation), and more recently NT workstations with
3DS Max were brought into production.
The VFX department was created in 1991 for "Simeon"
directed by Euzhan Palcy for which Ex Machina bought a
scanner from RFX. The compositing software ³depict² was
developed and extensively used in conjunction with scanning
(RFX) and shooting (MGI|Solitaire) hardware to create some
ghost appearances. At this time Christian Guillon was at the
head of the department. Matador was also chosen as the
primary 2D tool, supplemented more recently by After Effect
running on Macintosh platforms.
(Author¹s note: Major contributions for Ex Machina,
Sogitec and TDI are from Frédéric SCHMIDT, Christian Foucher
and Nicolas Popravka)
(1983-1992)
Jim Lindner and Suazanne Gavril, former marketing
executives at Xerox, broke with Computer Creations, and
formed Fantastic Animation Machine in Manhattan, making
animations chiefly with a 32-bit Ridge microcomputer, on
proprietary software (C & UNIX).
Animation company formed by Peter and Coco Conn.
(1972?-1985)
Image West was based around analog video animation
equipment such as the Scanimate, which manipulated video
imagery and captured artwork. Cliff Brown was president and
David Sieg was Chief Engineer. Animators included Peter
Koczera, Ed Kramer, Russ Maehl and Roy Weinstock. Image West
Art Directors were Sonny King, Henry Kline II and Gary
McKinnon
Its only feature film CG project was for the original
Star Wars film in 1977. The Yavin planet count down imagery
was done by John Wash and Jay Teitzell. A great deal more
imagery for Star Wars was traditional animation, analog
effects and other non-CG techniques.
Image West was bought from Computer Image's bank at a
bargain in 197?. They were in the midst of splitting from a
Canadian parent company, called Omnibus Group. (See Omnibus)
The Computer Graphics Division was originally formed in
1979 when Ed Catmull was selected by George Lucas to start an
in-house research group. Richard Edlund (at the time an ILM
Visual Effects Supervisor) flew to meet with Ed at NYIT for a
secret meeting to discuss the offer. Ed and Alvy Ray Smith
went to great lengths to keep the offer a secret from their
patron Dr. Alexander Shure, even going so far as to rent a
manual type-writer to draft a proposal letter to Lucas. (For
fear of the otherwise un-secure email system at NYIT.)
At the time, LucasFilm headquarters was in a building
called the ³Egg Company² in LA, across from Universal
Studios. (Star Wars has been created at the original
headquarters in VanEyes(sp?).) Ed then flew out to meet with
George, and was hired soon after. Because The Empire
Strikes Back was still in production (up in Marin Co.), its
financial success was anything but certain and Lucas was
cautious about committing to a large scale research effort
right away. The offer that was made was thus only for Catmull
himself, even though a great many of his group at NYIT wanted
to come with him to California too.
Things did develop quickly however and Alvy Ray Smith
soon joined Ed to move into their first official space; a
converted laundromat in San Enselmo, California. At the
start, there were actually three distinct group efforts; the
graphics group itself was headed by Alvy, a video editing
group was headed by Ralph Guggenhiem (sp?), and a digital
audio group headed by Alan Moore (from Stanford). Malcolm
Blanchard and David DiFransisco also joined the group soon
after.
(1962-1982)
The company was originally founded to create image
processing equipment and digital image scanners. Triple-I
developed one of the first and best digital film printer and
scanner systems, and began developing the "tranew" software
that ran on the legendary and unique Foonley F1 computer.
³The F1 was originally built by Triple-I in hopes of
getting a large contract with the Government for an Optical
Character Recognition system. Its design became the DEC KL-
10, but was built on five wire-wrap pages, that were machine
wrapped. This meant that it was a one-of-a-kind system, a
prototype that never went anywhere. It required a DEC KA-10
(5 tons of stuff that barely could do 1 MIP!), which ran a
hacked up version of the TOPS10 operating system, just to
boot it. When it was up, it probably ran at something like 6
MIPS. The Disk systems were old DEC washing-machine style
drives that barely held 50Mb, and they crashed at least every
month! TRANEW rendering software was written by Gary Demos,
Bill Dungan, Rich Schroeppel, Jim Blinn, and a host of others
while Triple-I had the machine. Triple-I had married the F1
to a modified PFR-80 film recorder, one of the first in the
motion picture industry. Omnibus bought the F1 system because
it had produced the majority of the CGI in the film "TRON",
and it seemed like a good way to jump-start feature film
production. We did scenes from "Explorers", and "Flight of
the Navigator" on it, but it was painful.²
David Sieg dave@ns.zfx.com
(1980-1987)
In 1978, Mits Kaneko of MK Company obtained from MGM
Studios the animation rights to Marjorie Keenan Rollings'
Pulitzer awarded "The Yearling". Mits Kaneko decided to use
computer animation on the 52 episodes of 30 minute television
series because of rapidly rising cost of animation artists
and film recording process. After two year's development and
artist training, in April of 1980, JCGL was established with
Mits Kaneko, Toho Company(a movie distribution company),
Kodansha(a book publishing company), Toppan(a printing
company) and Telework (a television production company).
JCGL started production in June 1980 with 38 artists, 4
programmers and 3 hardware maintenance persons. JCGL's system
for television animation production consisted of a huge
custom designed optical printer to print extra frames of the
same image for reducing rendering time, 2 Dicomed 48-S film
recorders, 2 Vax 780 super mini computers , 4 PDP 44s, 8 PDP
11s for ink and paint stations, two DeAnza scanners for
scanning animation papers, 18 Genisco frame buffers for image
buffering and one PS 300 for vector drawing. The software
"MK-1" was based upon NYIT's Tween and Tweep software for
vector animation generation and scanned image inking and
coloring capabilities with help of Tokyo Institute of
Technology Image Lab lead by Prof.Takeshi Agui.
The production of "The Yearling", however, failed with
only one completed episode, which was actually No.2. of the
series. Because of various creative challenges, the
production schedule became almost double of what had been
estimated. This episode No. 2 was broadcast in April 1982 and
became world's first television animated program completely
processed with a computer. The rest of the 51 episode
production was switched to the conventional hand drawn, hand
painted method.
Mits Kaneko decided to move to 3D computer graphics
production for commercial films and special effects on
feature films. Jim Kristoff of Cranston Csuri Production
(CCP) helped integrate 3D production software with the
existing hardware, and the transition went well. The JCGL
went on to win prizes including Nicograph, NCGA and INA gran-
prixs. JCGL lead Japan's CG production for 7 years but came
to its dissolution in 1987 when its VAX based system could
not compete any longer with cheaper more modern systems.
(1987 to present)
One of the first Wavefront based production companies,
KWCC was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak.
Jeff Kleiser went to Colgate University as a CG major
using VISIONS, an early fortran code from Syracuse. He made
several experimental films and a few commercials by
outputting to a DEC Graphics display terminal and shooting
35mm film off the screen. He then moved from Dolphin
Productions (1976-77) as a Scanimate operator, Digital
Effects (1978-1986) as Animation Director and President,
then to Omnibus as Director of the Motion Picture Special
Effects Division in LA.
Diana Walczak was a sculptor and CG enthusiast from
Boston University who met Jeff while at SIGGRAPH 1985, and
joined him at Omnibus for a Marvel Comics character test in
1986. Diana¹s sculptures would be digitized into the computer
a section at a time in order to have separate animatable
pieces.
Jeff (still working for Omnibus) was in Canada scouting
locations for MILLENIUM when Digital/Omnibus/Abel (DOA) went
down. He and Diana formed KWCC to take a one week job that
would pay for their down payment on a new house in Hollywood.
(What better reason to start company?)
[QUOTE] ³Diana and I formed KWCC to build databases
using her sculptures and a 3D digitizer by Polhemus. Soon we
were approached by Viewpoint who wanted to market our data
along with theirs, and we were more interested in developing
Synthespians than database service market.² -Jeff Kleiser
Their first Synthespian, created for SIGGRAPH/88, was
³Sextone for President². The 30 second piece demonstrated
facial animation based on interpolating Diana¹s digitized
sculptures with software written by Larry Weinberg. The TALK
program could mix any percentage of any facial shape at any
frame, even with arbitrary polygon ordering. This technique
of phoneme interpolation is today a standard way of producing
3D facial animation. The narration made heavy use of irony as
the character lobbied for SAG (Synthetic Actors Guild)
rights.
In 1989, Hewlett Packard supported KWCC¹s next character
Dozo in the ambitious ³Don't Touch Me². The 3 minute
animation utilized early optical motion capture from Motion
Analysis. Frank Vitz joined the team to wrangle the always
late and always buggy motion capture data. After more than
five months, only about 20% of the motion capture data was
delivered, forcing KWCC to make very creative use of piecing
together and repeating many short fragments of motion. The
rendering was done all over the country, anywhere there was
Wavefront rendering code. All the final imagery was output to
big 9-track data discs and stacked 6 feet high, output to
film and delivered to NY airport, picked up by an HP employee
and handed into the SIGGRAPH office one minute before the
midnight deadline for the Electronic Theatre submissions.
Bill Kroyer was a traditional animator at Disney from
1977 to 1979, later returning to Disney as an Animation
Director on Tron in 1981. He later worked at Digital
Productions, animating on the ³Hard Woman² video and created
the realistic CG owl for the opening credits of the feature
film Labyrinth.
Kroyer Films was founded by Bill and Sue Kroyer in 1986,
just before DOA went out of business. The company specialized
in the use of 3D computer graphics, plotted out on paper as
hidden surface line art to be colored and used along with
traditionally created cel animation. Output was on an HP
plotter, hooked up to an SGI 3130. (A machine with only 4
megs of ram that cost $42,000 US!)
The unique hybrid 3D/cel technique was used for the
first time with futuristic motorcycles in the short-lived TV
series UltraCross. (The show was canceled when the toy deal
fell through.)
With the method proven, and the time to spare, Kroyer
and his team next produced the short film Technological
Threat in 1988. The film realized the conflict and
resolution of a traditionally animated character with that of
a computer generated one. Great story telling, design and
execution added up for an Academy Award-nomination for the
film that year.
[IMAGE OF TECH THREAT?]
Next up was the full length animated feature film
FernGully: The Last Rainforest, completed on February
10th, 1990. Besides being a very enjoyable film for both kids
and adults, the project was notable for several reasons.
Backed by the Australian team that had made ³Crocodile
Dundee², the entire production was accomplished in just two
years from storyboards to premier. Kroyer ramped up from 15
to 200 people and in addition created 40,000 computer plotted
cel frames to augment the bulk of the traditional animation.
[FACTOID] One Ferngully scene in fact was done with
digital-in-and-paint technology at Sidly-Rite(sp?) in
Hollywood. The ³singing bat inside a tree² scene was a
feature film first to use this technique. (Disney¹s ³Rescuers
Down Under² would come out the same year.)
As successful as Ferngully was, Hollywood studios were
not ready to go up against Disney and commit to an animated
feature film. Kroyer then found a unique niche in creating
elaborately animated title sequences for such films as Honey
I Shrunk the Kids, Troop Beverly Hills, and National
Lampoon¹s Christmas Vacation.
Finally in 1994, studios began jumping on the feature
animation bandwagon, but Kroyer by now had downsized
considerably. Bill and Sue both decided to shut down their
company and join the fledgling Feature Animation department
at Warner Brothers for ³Quest For Camelot². While that
partnership would not last because of creative differences,
the Kroyers were able to freelance and develop their own film
project.
Bill is presently on the staff of Rhythm & Hues as a
Director, having come on board in 1998.
(1980 to present)
Founders/principles: Larry Lamb
Major projects: "The Incredible Crash Dummies" (Fox)
Originally used software purchased from Cranston/Csuri
Productions. First Wavefront licence?, First Discrete Logic
Flame licence? Also includes a sister company, Lambsoft Inc.,
for commercial software production tools. MORE INFO
(1982 To present)
Founded in 1982 as Toyo Links, and known since 1987 as
simply Links, an Imagica Company. A short film called ³Bio-
Sensor² (created in 1984) was notable for it¹s use of
innovative story telling. Art Durinski with his wife and
Producing partner Mitchinko joined the company from Omnibus
in 1986, staying for about a year and a half. Much of the
work Links did was for Sony Corporation, including their
international logo that served as inspiration for many later
large companies. (Art and Mitchinko would leave in 1988 to
form their own consulting firm, the ³Durinski Design Group²
in LA where they continue to work today.)
The Links 1 computer animation system was developed here
by Koichi Omura. http://www.links.imagica.co.jp
(1966 to 1987)
Founded by three fellow scientists: Phil Mittelman
(RPI), Leon Malin and ??? ????? in 1966 as a spin off of
United Nuclear Corporation. The original purpose of the
companies was to carry out nuclear radiation penetration
studies, in order to calculate shielding requirements and
other such top secret government things. (The name MAGI was
also a joking reference to the fact that it was founded by
"three wise men".)
HOW THE LARGEST ³JUNK MAIL² COMPANY IN WESTCHESTER
CREATED TRON! In it¹s early days, MAGI¹s largest business was
creating ³junk mail² databases for direct mail and marketing
uses. Three other divisions included: A CAD/CAM group which
was very busy in manufacturing and defense contracts,
Computer Slides Corp., which handled the presentation
business projects; and the smallest of them all:
Synthavision
Begun in 1972 by Robert Goldstein and Bo Gehring,
SynthaVision was the software division of MAGI that was
marketed commercially for a short time under the company name
of Computer Visuals Inc. The original software (Fortran2 and
Fortran4 running on an IBM 360/65) used by the MAGI
scientists for tracing particle radiation needed to be only
slightly modified to trace light rays instead and make Š ta
da!: computer graphics. (Well maybe not quite that easily.)
For another idea of the current technology, a box of tab
cards (fully a cubic foot worth) were necessary for only a
few seconds of simple animation.
The software techniques were unique in their use of
solid modeling techniques. Unlike all other systems,
Synthavision used not polygons or patches but
"combinatorial geometry" (boolean union, difference and
intersection) of mathematically defined solid shapes such as
cubes, cones and spheres. For example, a simple flying saucer
would be modeled as the intersection of two perfect spheres,
and a sphere would never suffer from low resolution straight
edged profiles because it is defined mathematically perfect.
The raytracing technique, originally developed by Bob
Goldstein in the late 1960s, evaluated these boolean
combinations once per ray. (the key paper was published in
"Simulation" in 1968, and is referenced in Turner Whitteds
1981 SIGGRAPH paper which introduced raytracing to a much
broader audience). The core math and physics developers at
this stage included Herb Steinberg and Dr. Eugene Troubetskoy
while Marty Cohen and Larry Elin (a non-scientist and Phil
Mittleman¹s son-in-law too) served in Executive Producer type
roles.
MAGI showed some of their military simulation work a
SIGGRAPH conferences in the late 70s, including a diving
submarine, tanks, a mines shaftŠ
CG UFOs for CE3K!
In 1975/76 Bo Gehring and others traveled to Hollywood
to produce CG tests for Steven Speilberg film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. A film recorder was built
by Carl Machover, one of the earliest of it¹s kind, it used a
9² CRT to expose the imagery onto 35mm film at 4000x2500
lines of resolution. Doug Trumbull also arranged to use a
facility in Minniapolis to output to 65mm film. The intent
was to realize the spaceships in the end landing sequence
entirely with CG. In the end, Trumbull favored the
traditional approach, and the CG tests were no longer
pursued.
Steven Listburger(sp?), the creator of Tron, had just
finished the television film Animalimpics when he saw a CG
demonstration by Larry Elin. MAGI created the memorable Light
Cycles and Recognizer sequences in Tron. Nearly 15 minutes
of finished computer graphics were created by a small core
team of people including: Chris Wedge(animation), Nancy
Campy(sp?) (production coordinator), Tom Bisogna (artist),
Ken Perlin (software), and Tom Miller (night shift). Of
MAGI¹s approximately 150 total employees Synthavision only
ever totaled about a dozen people.
Beautiful as the imagery was, Synthavision software did
not render frames with antialiasing. The solution was to
render at a higher resolution and then scale/filter down to a
lower resolution to soften the edges. Even simple things like
blurring were non-existant so if you wanted to do a blur, you
would run your frames a second time through the CELCO film
recorder with tissue paper over the CRT to fuzz the element
you wanted to blur.
As Tron finished up, the second wave of people came on
board, hired largely by Ken Perlin. Josh Pines would play a
key role in programming for film-scanning and recording, but
also brought an important film/movie making sense to the
otherwise technical group. Christine Chang was primarily an
artist, Tom Miller graduated to the day shift and Mike
Ferraro began a self imposed, if ³un-official², transition
from the CAD/CAM division. The main New York office was busy
pursuing commercial work, but Hollywood was calling!
John Lasseter (Then a traditional animator at Disney)
got his first exposure to computer graphics by working as the
official Disney-Magi liason for a joint 1983 post-TRON test
for "Where the Wild Things Are². Based on the popular
childrens book by Maurice Sendak, the (60sec?) short had a
young boy in his pajamas running with his dog up a flight of
stairs. The characters were traditional cell animation and
the environment was all 3D CG. Disney footed the bill for
production, while MAGI paid for the substantial R&D needed to
create the hardware and software.
The finished project had was shopped around to gaming
companies like Bally and Atari, but unfortunately occurred
as the downturn in arcade gaming began. Like many other
computer graphic production companies of the 1980's,
Sythavision collapsed under the heavy overhead costs and
enormous capital debt of the purchase of the technology.
³There is also a fun story of the last MAGI/Synthavision
job that was modeld and rendered by a roving band of the
remaining production crew (includeing Tom Barham (director),
Dick Walsh (who went to PDI) Carl, and myself on the computer
network at Carnegie Mellon (where I was teaching at the time)
using a Raster Tech frame buffer that we carried all over
campus.² Michael Ferraro
NEED INFO!
(Hollywood and Paris)
(1985? to present)
Used Wavefront software as well as proprietary code
that eventually became Mental Ray. Work for BMW and German
television programming such as ARD and Bremen Television.
Employees included John Berton (86-88) and Stefen
Fangmeyer (88-90) both currently Visual Effects Supervisors
at ILM.
(1987 To present)
Ron Saks (formerly of Abel¹s) was hired by Cranston
Csuri (CCI) in anticipation of opening an LA office. Richard
³Dr.² Baily was hired in LA first, followed by Paul Sidlo and
a few more people. All the new hires went out to Ohio in the
summer of 1986 to learn the custom CCI code. A bunch of
people soon went back to LA to an office in the back of
Abel¹s old building. These included Tim McGovern (Abel), Jon
Townley, Steve Martino, Mark Steeves, Richard ³Dr.² Baily,
Neil Eskuri(Disney) and Al Dinoble(Cinesite), Larry Elin
(Magi/Abel) and Steve Klevatt.
When CCI folded, Ron Saks remained in Ohio and took up a
teaching job there. Jim Kristoff, Dobbie Schiff (Jim and
Dobbie are married), several of their family members, and
Mits Kaneko all contributed the original funding to then
start MetroLight.
(198? To present)
³Then (and arguably still) the UK's leading video post
house, MPC had a reputation as technology junkies. They had
recently built a motion control rig under the direction
Andrew Berend, a London Film School graduate. The computer
that controlled the rig was built by Interactive Motion
Control (IMC) (one of the partners at IMC was Bud Elam, who
later won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for
motion control technology (his co-winner was Ray Feeney,
who started RFX)
In 1981 they had also just installed a computer
animation system, which consisted of a Hewlett Packard
desktop machine, programmed in Basic, which drove a plotter.
The plotter had no pens - instead, it had a fibre-optic light
source where the pen went - this was pointed at the camera
film plane. The lens would open, a colored gel would rotate
in front of the lens, and the plotter would draw a wire-frame
layer directly onto the film emulsion. Then the color would
change, and more lines would be drawn. Of course, this all
took place in a black box. This multi-layered approach could
take minutes to do a single frame. There was no way of
knowing what you had until you unloaded it, took it to the
labs, waited overnight, went back to the labs, brought it
back, laced it up and viewed it on the Movieola.
(1985 to present)
Founded in 1985 by Nancy St,John & Craig Upston (Co-
Managers). Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. Pioneering Scientific Visualization software
projects that created tools that scientists themselves could
use. Stefen Fangmeier (ILM) was a TD from 19?? To ??.
In 1974 Dr. Alexander Schure, a wealthy entrepreneur,
began to assemble the Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL)
at the New York Institute of Technology. His vision was to
create a feature length animated film, with the aid of the
days most sophisticated computer graphics techniques. NYIT
itself was founded by Dr. Schure, had grounds encompassing
numerous estates situated in the beautiful wooded hillsides
of Old Westbury New York. Some of these estates were owned by
members of the Rockafeller family, who also happened to have
a seat on the board of Evans & Sutherland. Because of the
close association of E&S with the University of Utah, Dave
Evans recommended to Alex to seek out Edwin Catmull to head
the new CGL.
Ed Catmull had just finished his Ph.D. at Utah and taken
a job at a CAD/CAM company called Applicon. It was not a hard
sell to get Ed to leave Applicon for NYIT however, so he and
fellow Utah graduate Malcolm Blanchard packed their bags for
New York. Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco (both fresh
from Xerox PARC) joined the team a few months later in what
was called the ³Gerry Mansion². Alvy and David had heard of
Dr. Schure¹s plans from Martin Newell at Utah (whom Alex had
just hired briefly as a consultant). Dr. Schure had recently
come through Utah and literally ordered ³one of everything²
to jump start his NYIT project. Some of this equipment
included a DEC PDP-11, a new E&S LDS-1 and the first random
access frame buffer also from E&S. Later, the CGL group would
also receive the very first commercial VAX.
[SIDEBAR] VAX ALMOST SMASHED! In fact, the VAX almost
never made it inside the building, if not for Alvy Ray
Smith¹s quick actions. It seems that when the computer was
just lowered off the back of the delivery truck, another
truck parked behind and uphill had it¹s brakes slip, which
started it rolling towards the brand new machine. Alvy
quickly jumped in the driver-less truck and stopped it just
before it could smash the VAX back into the very truck it was
just unloaded from.
The CGL quickly attracted other technology experts and
artists, including Christy Barton(from E&S), Tom Duff, Lance
Williams, Fred Parke, Garland Stern, Ralph Guggenheim, Ed
Emshwiller, and many others.
Throughout the 1970s, the people of the CGL thrived in a
pioneering spirit, creating milestones in many areas of
graphic software. Many of the ³firsts² that happened at NYIT
were based on the development of the first RGB full color
(24bit) raster graphics.
A few of the more notable ³firsts²:
€First RGB anything (because they had the first RGB
framebuffers in the world).
€First RGB paint program (Paint by Alvy Ray Smith).
€First soft-edged fill (Alvy Ray again).
€First computer-controlled video editing. First TV
commercial with raster graphics (Lance, I think, or maybe
it was Ephraim Cohen).
€First pixel dissolve.
€First networked computer system (Christy rolled our own
for us).
€The alpha channel is invented by Ed Catmull and Alvy
Ray Smith.
€First hidden surface algorithm within a pixel (Ed).
€Lance Williams invented mipmapping (texture mapping is
still done this way today).
€Garland Stern implemented the first scan and paint
system (this is how the Disney/Pixar CAPS system now makes 2D
animation - different system but same idea).
The atmosphere at the CGL was also very open, with many
invited tours coming through the lab all year-round. Other
universities like Cornell, and companies such as Quantel
were among those to visit and take notes about what was being
developed. The personnel structure was virtually non-
existent, with never any heavy handed management from Dr.
Catmull. People did what they were best at and helped each
other out whenever needed.
[Strangest Job Title ever!] Alvy Ray Smith would later
accidently come across an organization chart for the lab put
together by Dr. Shure. Ed Catmull was running the lab of
course but there where people listed above and below him that
no one had even heard of. Alvy was particularly amused to
find that his official title was ³Information Quanta². A
term very much in keeping with Dr. Shure¹s somewht unique,
and non-standard form of communicating.
Ed Catmull¹s Tween, Alvy Ray Smith¹s Paint program, and
the 2D animation program SoftCel, all were in keeping with
the original charter of the CGL, which was 2D CG. There were
also many breakthroughs in image techniques involving
fractals, morphing, image compositing, and Mip-Map texture
mapping and many others. Key to this pioneering effort was
the seemingly unlimited financing evidenced by Alex Schure.
One such example took place when Alvy Ray Smith spoke with
Alex about how good it might be to have not just the one, but
three frame buffers. This way, Alvy explained, the three 8bit
buffers could be combined to create the first RGB color frame
buffer ever! Sometime later Alex not only delivered the two
additional frame buffers, but an additional 3, which gave the
CGL team a grand total of 6. (³Enough for two of those RGB
things² said Alex.) At $60,000 each (plus the $80,000 for the
first) what this meant in today¹s dollars was that on a
simple request, Alex had just delivered about $2million worth
of equipment.
More Utah people joined the CGL, including Garland Stern
who would write the vector animation system BBOP. David
DiFrancesco would also begin what would be turn out to be a
long association with film recording at this time. Jim Blinn
even worked at the CGL as a summer intern in 1976.
[SIDEBAR] TUBY THE TUBA! At this same time as the CGL
was up and running, Alex had about 100 traditional animators
working on a film called ³Tuby The Tuba². Unfortunately,
after two years when the film finally screened, everyone¹s
worst fears were realizedŠit was worse than awful.
Several different department also existed at NYIT by
now, in different neighboring mansions; an audio group, a
video/post production lab, and a computer science department
as well. One project that was successfully completed, was a
half hour video (2² with a single frame recorder) called
³Measure for Measure², which combined conventional cel
animation with TWEEN imagery.
In 1979 when Ed Catmull left to start the Computer
Graphics Division at Lucasfilm, many wanted to come with him.
In fact, Alvy, Tom Duff, and David DiFrancesco all left and
went elsewhere while waiting to join Ed in California when
the time was right. Ralph had promised to stay at NYIT a full
year, and he honored that commitment, even turning down an
offer from Alex Schure to head the CGL group so that he would
be free to leave one that year was up.
A New York City commercial office was also established
to market and sell the technology developed in Old Westbury.
Known as CGL Inc. CGL Inc. also produced numerous commercial
graphics jobs for the broadcast market.
The WORKS
(The remaining historical text for NTIT/CGL was
contributed by Paul Heckbert)
Shortly after Catmull left NYIT, Alex's son, Louis
Schure, became lab director. At about the same time, the NYIT
lab began preparing to make the first three-dimensional
computer animated movie, to be called "The Works". Its
science fiction screenplay was written by Lance Williams. A
number of people were hired to work on the project. The
principal robot designers and modelers were Lance, Bill
Maher, Dick Lundin (designer of the famous robot ant), Ned
Greene, and Carter Burwell. Some of the animators were
Rebecca Allen and Amber Denker.
[THE WORKS!] A great deal of effort at NYIT went into
the development of the film "The Works", which was written
by Lance Williams and worked on from about 1979 to 1986. For
many reasons, including a lack of film-making expertise, it
was never completed. Sequences from the work in progress
still stand as some of the most astounding animated imagery
of the time.
Software development during the early 80's was guided by
Lance Williams, Paul Heckbert, Fred Parke, and Pat Hanrahan.
A number of excellent graphics software developers did
pioneering work there during those years:
Jim Blinn and Tom Duff (MAT: yacc-based modeling
language), Jim Clark (E&S Picture system library from the
70's; Jim later went on to found Silicon Graphics and
Netscape), Lance Williams (z-buffer and texture mapping
techniques), Tom Duff (SOID: z-buffered quadric surface
rendering with texture mapping, bump mapping), Garland Stern
(BBOP: interactive keyframe animation system), Dick Lundin
(dynamics simulation and robot modeling and animation tools),
Ephraim Cohen (ZOOM: filtered image resampling and EPT: paint
program), Thad Beier (SSOID: CSG on quadric surfaces), Mike
Chou (SOID's environment mapping), Frank Crow, Andrew
Glassner, and Tom Shermer (antialiased line drawing), Robert
McDermott (geometric modeling tools), John Schlag (image
processing software), Paul Heckbert (POLY: z-buffered polygon
renderer with texture mapping), Paul Heckbert and Pat
Hanrahan (beam tracing), Paul Heckbert (early splatting, a
form of volume rendering), Lance Williams and Ned Greene
(mesh modeling tools), Lance Williams, Fred Parke, and Paul
Heckbert (face modeling and animation), John Lewis and Peter
Oppenheimer (fractal modeling), Ned Greene and Paul Heckbert
(z-buffer rendering for fisheye projection), Ned Greene (sky
modeling from photographs), Jules Bloomenthal and Lance
Williams (DEKINK: antialiasing, recording tools), Jules
Bloomenthal (realistic tree modeling), Kevin Hunter (early
marching cubes), Pat Hanrahan (EM: interactive modeling
system), Pat Hanrahan (winged edge library), David Sturman
(animation database and tools), Lance Williams and Paul
Heckbert (Coons image warp), Tom Brigham (image morphing),
Tracy Petersen, Mike Kowalski, and Carter Burwell (audio
synthesis), and many other amazing graphics hackers and
graphics hacks.
The workhorse hardware during the early 80's was six DEC
VAX 11/780's as main computers, about three E&S Picture
System II's for animation preview, about eight E&S and
Genisco frame buffers for 512x486x24-bit raster graphics,
about six programmable Ikonas graphics processors, the
largest with 12 megabytes of image memory (an ungodly amount
in that day: 2048x2048x24-bits), viewed with rare thousand
line color monitors, several IVC 2000 2" videotape recorders,
and a Dicomed film recorder.
Although The Works was never completed (the group was
ahead of its time; it wasn't until 1995 that the first 3-D
computer animated movie -- Toy Story -- came out), some major
milestones of computer animation came out of the effort,
including:
The Works Trailer - hit of the SIGGRAPH '82 film show,
3DV, Inside a Quark, and segments for the 1984 Omnimax movie
"The Magic Egg". The lab's animation demonstrated the first
extensive use of texture mapping and environment mapping in
animation, and some of the first 3-D character animation.
Some pictures from the early 80's are available at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit
After this peak, the party began to wind down in the mid
and late 80's: Bloomenthal left for Xerox PARC in 1985,
Heckbert left for PDI and Pixar in 1985, Hanrahan left for
Wisconsin, DEC, and Pixar in 1985, and Williams left for
Apple in 1986. The dispersal of its lab members helped spread
NYIT's ideas to many other sites.
[FACTOID] Many people regarded the NYIT Computer
Graphics Lab of the late 70's and early 80's as the top
computer graphics research and development group in the
world.
(1982-1987)
The Omnibus Group Inc. began as a Canadian group of
companies in marketing and communication founded in London,
Ontario in 1972. It expanded with affiliated and shareholding
offices in Toronto (Omnibus Video Inc.), Los Angeles (Image
West Limited & Downstream-Keyer Inc.), and Sydney Australia
(The Picture Company). John C. Pennie joined in 1974 as
President.
Image West was developed by Omnibus beginning in 1975
located in Hollywood, CA. (see below for the Image West
company entry for more details.)
Omnibus Video Inc. began in 1981 and was headed by
President Jack Porter (Who for 14 years was president of
Sheridan College in Toronto.), located in the Yonge-Eglinton
area of Toronto, Canada. The NYIT TWEEN system was acquired
and used by animator Robert Marinac (Now a CG Supervisor at
ILM), one of nine employees at the time.
(1988 to 19??)
Formed by John Whitney Jr. after Whitney/Demos
declared bankruptcy in 1988. It used one of the first
Connection Machines, and did some work with Karl Simms and
Jerry Weil around the era of "PanSpermia".
(1980 to present)
Incorporated on August 11th 1980 by Carl Rosendahl,
originally in a small office in Los Altos. Carl grew up in
LA, and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering
from Stanford in 1979. Wanting to combine entertainment with
his technical experience, computer graphics seemed a natural
solution. Times begin what they were (so early in the CG
evolution), Carl formed his own company rather than seeking
employment at one of a very few established companies.
Richard Chuang and Glenn Entiss made it a company of
three in 1982. Later, after moving to one Sunnyvale
industrial complex until 1984, PDI moved into another larger
building owned by Carl¹s father. They remained their until
moving to their present location in Palo Alto in 1997. PDI
has grown from employing less than 20 people in about 1984,
to over 300 total today.
The first PDP-11/44 was used for much of the original
proprietary code written by Richard and Glenn (and Carl too.)
Richard concentrated on the renderer, and later on lighting
tools. A DeAnza frame buffer also was used early on. The very
first jobs were doing broadcast graphics for Jose Diaz of
Brazilian Globo Television. Globo actually lent a more
powerful VAX computer to PDI for a year, and in return
licensed a sub-set of the PDI code for their own production.
Many early commercial jobs that kept the company busy
were also from the Harry Marks creative agency.
By the late 1980s PDI was using RIDGE Unix workstations
(similar to Solarity) and controlled about 60% of the high-
end commercial broadcast market. Clients included virtually
every network and cable channel along with hundreds of
affiliate local stations. From the very beginning it was
clear that PDI (and Carl in particular) had a uniquely keen
business savy that enabled the company to thrive through a
time when CG company bankruptcies were otherwise the norm. At
least two key strategies were instrumental to PDIs continued
financial success. Firstly, unlike most companies that were
going heavily into debt to finance ³glamorous² feature film
work, PDI concentrated through the 1980s on the lucrative
commercial market. It was an easy transition to build on
their early reputation in broadcast graphics work. The second
important factor in keeping the books in the black was the
wise decision to purchase and use ³last years² models of
computer equipment, and to depreciate it in just a few short
years.
It was also at this time (1989/90) that Carl and Tim
Johnson began to visit the Hollywood Studios to try and begin
a dialog about creative content partnerships. It was a
proactive decision to what they saw was a future trend of CG
as a commodity, possibly limiting the uniqueness of what PDI
might have to offer in the future. As would be expected, the
studios were much less forward thinking and no deals came to
pass.
In 1990 PDI did however open a feature film production
office in LA for work on their first film project; the
Japanese funded ³Solar Crisis². New equipment included a
film scanner built by non-other than Les Dittert, and a
Management Graphics film recorder. (The effects work was
optically composited.) Soon after that PDI got a big break
with some lesser known but still important work on
Terminator2: Judgement Day. PDI did a number of different
³invisible² effects such as wire removal and digital plate
reconstruction. Work continued on many other features,
including the several Batman films. In 1994 PDI closed the LA
office, with several key employees (including Jamie Dixon and
Thad Bier) staying to form HammerHead.
Meanwhile back at home base in Sunnyvale, PDI was
continuing to set new standard in broadcast commercial CG
techniques. In 1991/92 the technique of ³morfing² was used
with great success on numerous projects. The first was a
Plymouth Voyager commercial, followed soon by the Exxon
tiger, and the famous Michael Jackson video ³Black or
White². A perfect subject, perfectly executed, the Black and
White video only served to increase the demand for this new
technology in broadcast work.
Along with the strong 2D effects work being produced,
PDI also began very early to experiment and create 3D
character animation. Waldo, the first ever 3D CG realtime
animated ³muppet², was created for the Jim Henson Hour in
1988. (See the Milestones Chapter for more details.) Crest
Toothpaste ³Singers² (88) and Scrubbing bubbles (89) were
followed by the Last Halloween television special in 1991.
(Based in the M&M Mars candy commercial campaign started by
ILM). In 1994 PDI broke a long standing stop motion tradition
by introducing a 3D CG Pillsbury DoughBoy with the ³Mambo²
spot. The doughboy would in fact continue to be created by
PDI for another four years. Gradually more subtle
enhancements crept into the spots, including motion blur,
which was originally intentionally left out to more closely
resemble the look of stop motion animation.
1995 saw Carl knocking on Hollywood Studio doors again,
this time (in March, 1996) resulting in PDI signing a co-
production deal with DreamWorks to create original, computer-
animated feature films. Antz, of course, was the first of the
films to be produced under this deal. Shrek is in production
now for a late 2000 release, to be followed by Tusker,
probably in 2002.
(1986-present)
Pixar was formed in 1986 when Steven Jobs (of Apple and
NeXT computer fame) purchased the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics
Division from George Lucas. George had decided about a year
before that he did not wish to continue a hardware
development effort in-house, and also did not at that time
want to pursue computer generated animation (as did the
employees). He therefore agreed to allow Edwin Catmull, Alvy
Ray Smith and the rest of the employees of the Graphics Group
to seek out investors so that they could spin off into their
own company. Many different options were explored over the
course of that year, and in the end the negotiations went
down to the very last minute with the outcome not always
certain. The deal that was finally made called for $5 million
dollars to purchase the division with an additional $5
million for immediate capital investment.
Founding members included (in alphabetical order): Tony
Apodaca, Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull, Rob Cook, David
DeFrancesco, Tom Duff, Craig Good, Ralph Guggenheim, Pat
Hanrahan, Sam Lefler, Darwyn Peachey, Tom Porter, Eben Ostby,
Bill Reeves, Alvy Ray Smith, Rodney Stock.
[SIDEBAR STORY] The story of how Pixar got its name: It
was 1981 and the Computer Graphics Group at Lucasfilm was
developing the hardware and software for a digital imaging
³scanning/manipulating/filming computer-machine². David
DiFrancesco was hardware, Loren Carpenter was software and
Alvy Ray Smith managed the project. When it came time to
write up a formal proposal about the new device, it seemed
appropriate to come up with a catchy name for the middle
componant of the system, the computer that did the image
processing between the scanning and the filming.
One night over dinner (at ³Franks Country Garden²
restaurant in Bel Marin Keys, CA) four men got around to
discussing the topic of a name. Present were Rodney Stock (a
hardware consultant), Jim Blinn (who worked at LucasFilm for
a short time), Loren Carpenter and Alvy Ray Smith. Since the
hope was for this clever device to actually ³make pictures²,
the name ³Picture Maker² was suggested. This was quickly
rejected in favor of Alvy¹s suggested contraction of ³Pixer².
Loren then made the suggestion to change it to ³Pixar² (it
had a nicer ring to it) and the rest is history.
Loren relates that there are occasionally some attempts
to put a greater meaning to the word after the fact (such as
³Programmed Image transformation(X) And Render²) but
hereinabove the true story is now told.
Suddenly, the new company Pixar was no longer part of a
larger profitable effects studio but rather a business all of
its own. In the first few years the Pixar Image Computer sold
well to a few (very different) client markets. Philips bought
over 20 systems to use in the medical image processing
market, while Disney made a significant partnership with
Pixar to develop the graphics end of what would eventually
become the CAPS system. Roy Disney himself wanted to get his
company back into feature animation in the right way, and
this was seen (wisely) as an investment in the future
technology of 2D animation production.
Ed Catmull and Pixar soon realized however that the 2D
image processing power of the Image Computer was not a money
maker, and indeed its days were numbered because of the ever
increasing power and low cost of new general purpose PCs. Ed
chose however not to drop the hardware development business
right away, mainly because the CAPS deal with Disney was
entirely based on the Pixar Image Computer and he did not
want to leave them ³high and dry². Ed also know it was only a
matter of a short time before they could port the CAPS
development to the new SGI platform, it was just a matter of
waiting it out while they continued to loose money. Just
then, Ed received a call from one of their chief competitors
in the image processing market, a company called Vicom. Vicom
was taking the position that in order to make that market
more successful, all the competitors should join forces with
one product. ³Would Pixar be willing to SELL their hardware
outright to Vicom?² Ed: ³Let me think about that and get back
to you on thatŠ² (Ed smiles to himself). Edwin happily sold
the Pixar Imaging Computer hardware business to Vicom for $2
million, hoping that they could keep it as a viable product
just long enough for the Disney CAPS system to transition
over to SGI; which is exactly what happened.
Pixar was still a struggling company, with small profit
margins and occasional layoffs during particular hard times.
It is a testament to the belief of the key partners and
employees of Pixar that they hung on during the hard times
without giving up their hope to make CG animated movies. John
Lasseter himself turned down several offers from Disney to
come back and direct a film for them.
About this same time, 1990 or so, the commercial
division was started to cut some teeth on real production
experience. The Listerene, Life Savers and Tropicana spots
immediately stood out as being in a creative class by
themselves. Produced in conjunction with Colossal Pictures,
they blended what was (and continues to be) Pixar¹s trademark
realistic rendering ³look² with outstanding character
animation and humor. It was at this time that Andrew Stanton
and Pete Doctor joined the company as animators. The hope was
to get the hang of commercial production and then step up to
make a half our television short film based on Tinny from the
Tin Toy short film. Then in 1991 Ed Catmull made the 3
picture deal with Disney to create fully CG animated films.
Disney¹s point of view was that if Pixar was ready to commit
to a half hour show, than doing an 85 minute feature film
really shouldn¹t be that much of a stretch. (Yeh Š.sure!).
The first film, to be called Toy Story was given a budget of
only $17 million. While the final cost was considerably more
than that, it was still however considerably LESS than the
cost of a traditionally animated Disney feature film.
[SIDEBAR TRIVIA] Toy Story was rendered with a render
farm consisting of some 300 Sun computers, each roughly the
processing power of one original Cray 1 Supercomputer (XX?
MIPS). A Bugs Life used 1400 Sun computers, each with a
processor upgrade that was 3 to 4 times faster than the ones
used on Toy Story!
Today, Pixar is overhauling the very foundations of
their production environment: the Marionette animation
software, Renderman, and their film recording. The software
tool sets will be rebuilt from the ground-up into the next
generation of animation and rendering software. David
DiFransisco has culminated his twenty years of pioneering
film recording technology knowledge into ³Pixar Vision². The
new laser based recording system is meant to be the finest
and fastest in the world, operating with 35mm, 65mm and Vista
Vision film stocks at between 4 and 8 seconds a frame. The
system was tested on Bugs, but should see full use on Pixar¹s
next film, Toy Story II, due out in the fall of 1999. (Early
problems with the ³Pixar Vision² laser film recorder were
eventually tracked down to the air-conditioning system that
keeps Pixar¹s vast render farm cool. The AC system was so
large, that the vibrations caused the whole building to
vibrate just enough to throw the delicate film recorder¹s
quality off!)
In 1998 Eben Ostby, Bill Reeves, Sam Leffler and Tom
Duff were awarded a Scientific and Engineering Academy
Award for the development of the Marionette Three-
Dimensional Computer Animation System.
Pixar is looking to relocate their company south a dozen
miles to ?????? sometime around 2001.
Point Richmond, CA. www.pixar.com
(198? To present)
Protozoa is a pioneering "performance animation" company
that provides complete systems, production, and Web based
animation content.
Founder Brad deGraf (along with then partner Michael
Wharman of Degraf/Wharman) created the first real-time
character performance, Mike the Talking Head, at Siggraph
1988. Brad was also part of the team that Jim Henson
contracted at Digital Productions in 1988 to digitize
Kermit the Frog as the first attempt at . Protozoa and its
founders have been leaders in the medium ever since.
Moxy, the first ever live 3D character for television,
was created and originally produced by Protozoa¹s founders
while at Colossal Pictures in 1993 (and later by Turner
Productions). Turner also licensed ALIVE, for the Cartoon
Network.
Ziff-Davis Television bought ALIVE and Dev Null (recent
Emmy) from Protozoa to co-host The Site on MSNBC. They
produced more than 20 minutes a week for a year, viewed by 55
million homes worldwide, making Dev easily the most widely
seen virtual character in the world.
Protozoa also created Floops, the first live 3D
episodic cartoon, published twice weekly on the Web for over
six months using VRML 2.0 (Virtual Reality Modeling
Language). Floops won Best of Show at the 1997 VRML
Excellence Awards.
Others successful projects include:
· Dilbert in 3D - 47 episodes in VRML, sponsored by
Intel for their Mediadome website.
· The BBC is has licensed ALIVE for production of a
series in CQ2¹98.
· MTV premiered Virtual Bill, the digital President,
during the State of the Union address 1998
· Sinbad performs Soulman, his digital alter ego, live
on his late night talk show, VIBE.
· The Blue Man Group commissioned Protozoa to create
Virtual Blue Man for live shows.
· The Disney Channel commissioned a pilot, designed by
Protozoa, for a series for 1998.
The company has numerous international licensees
(Germany (2), Spain (site license) Italy (site license),
South Africa (2), Britain (2), a growing
reseller/representative network, and a full sales pipeline.
Protozoa is located in SanFransisco, CA.
www.protozoa.com
(1987 To present)
Founded by Paul Sidlo and Evan Ricks.
Paul Sidlo was Creative Director for Cranston/Csuri
Productions from 1982 to 1987.
(1987 to present)
While working at Robert Abel¹s company, Randy Roberts
suggested to John Hughes that they spin off a new company.
Once the venture got going (as six people in John¹s living
room with one SGI) Randy actually ended up Directing
independently for a few years, ultimately joining R&H in
1993.
Founded in a former dental office in Santa Monica by
John Hughes, Charles Gibson, Pauline T¹So and Keith
Goldfarb.(from Bob Abel¹s) along with Larry Wienberg and wife
Cathy White from Omnibus.
Other early employees included Frank Wuts, Cliff Boule
and Peter Farson (from Digital Productions)
Their very first job (on April 23rd, 1987) was a film
project, to realize the MGM/UA logo for that studio. This was
especially unusual at a time when virtually all the work was
for broadcast television. The following years were spent
creating many different commercial and logo projects,
starting with their second job for a New Zealand station.
1990 saw some incredible breakthrough work for the
feature film ³Flight of the Intruder². Remember at the
time, the Abyss had just come out a year before and T2 was
still a year away (1991). R&H created over 30 shots of photo-
realistic aircraft, cluster bombs, and smoke in full daylight
..all with proprietary software. This was truly breakthrough
work that unfortunately was not as recognized as it should
have been when the film itself did poorly. With four out of
the six original employees code writers, the in-house
software effort had began from day one. Eventually four main
components would be written: animation, modeling, rendering
and compositing. Before all the code was production ready
however, Wavefront software was used, based on an agreement
John had made earlier with the company started by his former
co-worker Bill Kovaks. While working at Bob Abel¹s on and off
from 1976 to 1987, John had his own company called ³Motion
Control Systems² (MCS) with partner Jim Keating. Jim at that
time wrote the ³model² component of the Wavefront code, and
in exchange for sole rights to that software Wavefront gave a
number of licences to John¹s new company R&H. Bill Kovacs
actually wrote his ³preview² code while consulting for John¹s
earlier MCS company, but retained sole ownership of that
software for himself.
Rhythm and Hues¹ work on ³Babe² won an Academy Award
best Visual Effects in 199? (VFX Supervised by Scott Anderson
and VFX Produced by Nancy St.John.)
In March of 1999 R&H bought the visual effects CG
company VIFX (which was located just two blocks away in
Hollywood). Richard Hollander¹s new position is as head of
the film effects group, bringing some 80 of VIFX¹s employees
with the purchase. Bill Kroyer has also recently joined the
company as a Director, and Richard Taylor is there still
today also. R&H in total now employs over 300 people.
(1971-1987)
Among Abel¹s early associates were Richard Hollander,
John Hughes, Richard Taylor and Wayne Kimall. By 1979 Abel¹s
was a full service effects company with a miniature shop and
6 different motion control rigs to augment live action
footage. A real breakthrough came when they wanted to have a
way to preview motion control moves. To this end, Bill Kovacs
was hired to modify an E&S realtime vector PS-2 flight
simulation computer. A deal was made to acquire the source
code for the $100k machine in exchange for promising to E&S
that they would not go into the flight simulator business.
Eventually, with new employee Ray Feeney¹s help, the
resulting ³Abel/Kovaks box² would drive six axes of movement
in both the camera and the motion controlled object for
virtually unlimited range of motion combinations.
RAA sold it¹s own software under the division Abel
Image Research. Bill Kovacs went away to found Wavefront
and Frank Vitz took over his job as head of R&D. (Frank ended
up as VP of Production while they produced the Gold Series
for Benson and Hedges and the "Brilliance" commercial for the
Canned Food Council or "Sexy Robot" as it was called.
Robert Abel himself went on to explore other varied
independent projects in various interactive multimedia. He
continues to work actively today, speaking frequently at many
CG and visual effects related conferences.
(1981 To present)
Chris Woods set up a computer graphics department in
1981. Early on some folks from Hanna Barbara did some
research, but not until 1985 did the CG department really get
off the ground. The initial crew were all from
MAGI/Synthavision: Josh Pines and Ken Perlin wrote the RGA
rendering code, Jan Carlee and Christine Chang were also
joined later by Tom Miller.
[FACTOID] The first film project (of many) that Ken
Perlins noise function code was applied to was the film Weird
Science in 1985. (Now there¹s an obscure factoid for you!).
Integral to RGA up to that point was a world class
optical and motion control effects department headed by Joel
Hynek and Stuart Robertson.
The Los Angeles production office, run by George Joblove
(Technology/ILM) and Ellen Summers (Producer/Boss Film) and
RG/LA operated from 19?? To 199?.
(1990 to present)
Santa Barbara Studios was founded in 1990 by John
Grower, and began specializing in procedural natural
phenomenon effects using Wavefront Technologies Dynamation
software. Employees included Bill Kovacs, Will Rivera, Eric
Guagliani, Bruce Jones, Phil Brock, Eric DeJong, Mark,
Wendell, Diane Holland and Matt Rhodes. Programmer named
Axel?
Large format work has included the the 70mm 3D film
Shooting Star and IMAX space films Destiny In Space and
Cosmic Voyage.
Television series contributions included Other Worlds:
A Tour of the Solar System and two collaborations with the
Kleiser-Walczak Company on The Astronomers and 500
Nations (which depicted beautifully realistic re-
constructions of Native American cultures.)
Recent feature film work has included An American
Werewolf in Paris, Spawn, Star Trek: Generations, and
Star Trek: Insurrection.
(1987 to present)
Makers of the procedurally based 3D systems PRISMS and
its modern version Houdini. Founded by Kim Davidson and
partner Greg Hermanovic after the demise of Omnibus Toronto.
Greg was Director of Research at Omnibus and Kim programmed
and was the Director of Animation.
When Omnibus went under in 1987, Greg and Kim bought the
rights to the PRISMS software they had developed from the
Royal Bank of Canada (the majority dept holder of Omnibus at
the time of it¹s collapse). They started up a production
house called Side Effects that later split into two: Side
Effects Production and Side Effects Software. (The
production side eventually was renamed ³Spin Productions² to
reduce confusion.
Greg Hermanovic, Kim Davidson, Mark Elendt and Paul
Breslin were presented with a 1998 Academy Scientific and
Technical Achievement Award for the development of
procedural modeling and animation componants of the Prisms
software package. Prisms has been used in dozens of major
feature films such as Apollo 13, Titanic, Contact,
Independence Day, Fifth Element and Ghost in the Shell.
Side Effects is thriving today, having renamed PRISMS in
September of 1996 as their new updated Houdini software.
Houdini also has recently been made available for the Windows
NT platform, and has been ported to Linex. Side Effects
presently has offices in Santa Monica, CA and Toronto,
Canada. 416-504-9876 www.sidefx.com
(1982 to present)
Founded in 1982 by Dr. Jim Clark (Ph.D. University of
Utah 1974). Manufacturer of RISC processor based IRIS
graphics workstations. SGI IRIS (Integrated Raster Imaging
System) Jim Clark, while at Stanford University, invented the
"Graphics Engine" the first VLSI (Very Large Scale
Integration) graphics chip.
(1986 to present)
Formed by Daniel Langlois in 1986 and based in Montreal.
Its first interactive 3D software product ³Creative
Environment 1.0² debut at the 1988 Siggraph in Atlanta.
SoftImage led the way in advanced IK character animation
tools for high end 3D users with the Actor module. The work
on Actor started late 1990 and was first shown in public at
Siggraph 1991 in LasVegas, and first released in version 2.51
of the Softimage Creative Environment in early 1992.
Dominique Boisvert, Rejean Gagne, Daniel Langlois, and
Richard Laperriere were awarded a Scientific and
Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences in 1998 for the development of the "Actor"
animation component of the SoftImage computer animation
system.
The company did well by being promoted at a time when
industry leader Alias was floundering due to management and
marketing troubles. SoftImage was acquired by Microsoft in
1994, and sold to Avid in June of 1998 for $285 million.
Current products include ³Toonz² 2D cell animation production
software, and Softimage|DS which runs on SGI, NT and
Integraph platforms. Proposed next generation products
include Sumatra for 3D animation and Twister for rendering.
3510 St. Laurent Blvd., Ste.400. Montreal, Quebec H2X
2V2 Canada. 800-576-3846 or 514-840-0324 www.softimage.com
The Ministere de la Culture, managed by Jack Lang, gave
some funds to start new CG technologies in France. Sogitec is
a big industrial group that act mainly in the military field
as part of Dassault Electronic. The Sogitec CG department was
created in 1982/83 By Xavier Nicolas with Daniel Poiroux and
Alain Grach to try to create images using a customized
version of a flight simulator software. The first short
animated film they created was called "Maison Vole".
Early employees included Veronique Damian, and David
Salesin. Sogitec became a subsidiary of Dassault Aviation in
France, and is now involved in simulation, but not in CGI
directly.
Nicolas joined with TDI¹s production unit in 1989 to
form Ex Machina.
The Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory can be found
online at http://www-graphics.stanford.edu
(1981 To 1992)
In 1980, Symbolics, Inc. was formed, headed by Russell
Noftsker and his right hand man & CTO Jack Holloway (both
from Triple-I). Hardware architecture was based upon work by
researchers at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
and the Lisp Machine project in 1974 (Thanks to the close
proximity of the Symbolics Cambridge Research Center).
The Symbolics LM-2 was introduced in 1981, the 3600 in
1982, followed by the Symbolics 3640 and 3670 (1984), and the
3675 and 3645 systems (1985). At its peak in 1985 Symbolics
had over 650 employees and 35 sales offices in North America,
Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. Symbolics had over 1500
systems installed around the world. Color graphics system
hardware included 8-bit or 24-bit high-resolution frame
buffers, 32-bit broadcast resolution frame buffer, CAD
buffer, Digitizing frame grabber, Genlock option (for
synchronization to video), Color monitors (standard, premium,
NTSC-resolution, and CAD buffer monitors), Graphics tablet,
NTSC encoders and decoders.
The Symbolics Graphics Division (SGB) was created by
former members of Triple-I when that company ceased computer
graphics production work in about 1981. Founded initially by
Tom McMahon (General Manager from Triple-I), he was soon
joined by Craig Reynolds, Dave Dyer, Larry Malone, Jeremy
Schwartz, Larry Stein(hardware) and Bob Coyne(software). Matt
Elson, Jay Sloat and Ken Brain were artists, TD¹s and
trainers.. Tom first worked out of the small Woodland hills
office, commuting often to the Massachusetts research center.
Chatsworth was home for a short while before finally locating
to Westwood, CA. In 1983.
SGD¹s first general Manager was Howard Cannon from the
Cambridge office; followed by Sheila Madsen, John Kulp and
then Tom McMahon. Tom went on to design most of the hardware
and video systems for the company, including all of the
framegrabbing, genlock and High Definition Capabilities that
SGD pioneered with Sony and others.
-See MAGI
(1977 To 1988)
John Lansdown founded System Simulation in London with
his colleague George Mallen and others from the Computer
Arts Society. Through it, he developed major innovations in
computer animation, such as special effects for
advertisements and television titles, the feature films Alien
(1979), Saturn III and Heavy Metal and the realization of
the original animated Channel 4 logo. John created what was
then the world's largest computer generated mural. (Reviewed
in 'Building Design' as a 'waste of electricity', although
few today would question the bright power of his creative
output.
John Lansdown chaired the company until 1988. For a full
biography of John Lansdown by Huw Jones, please see online
here:
http://www.cea.mdx.ac.uk/CEA/External/Staff96/John/obit.html
(1984 to 1993)
The INA ( Institut national de l'audiovisuel ) was
interested in computer graphics, and associated themselves
with the French defense contractor Thompson CSF to create the
Paris based Thomson Digital Image. Managed by Pascal Bap and
Jean Charles Hourcade, TDI developed the 3D animation
software Explore and also did production work.
Known particularly for their Explore IPR (Interactive
Photo-realistic Renderer) interface, TDI even opened a sales
branch called "Rainbow Images" in San Jose. The production
division merged in 1989 with Sogitec to form Ex Machina.
TDI (the software company) was also at one time half owned by
IBM.
TDI released in 1990 the first versions of their
Software for the PC. The software division was then bought by
Wavefront in 1993. Wavefront in turn was bought by SGI and
merged with Alias.
-submitted by Phil Willis. Eurographics Professional Board
chair and current Department Head of Mathematical Sciences at
the University of Bath. http://www.maths.bath.ac.uk
In the mid 1970s, we developed the ZMP parallel
processor for real-time display (25 frames per second) of
colour scenes for aircraft flight simulation. This
architecture was patented.
In the early 1980s, we developed the colour Quad-encoded
display, for instantaneous pan and detail-revealing zoom into
images of 4k by 4k resolution, displayed on a 512 line
monitor. Overviews correctly showed sub-pixel data as anti-
aliased averages. The same system could also be used to
reveal different symbology at different levels of zoom. As
far as we ar aware, it was the first display system to
achieve either of these. The hardware required to do this was
carefully chosen and designed but quite modest.
We have a long history of working with pictures of very
high resolution. In 1983 we completed a paint program for the
binary Perq display, which offered a roamable drawing area of
approximately 7000 by 7000, displaying a 640 by 640 subset.
We moved on to use the HLH Orion Unix workstation's new
colour display (the design of which was in part influenced by
us: we later took delivery of the pre-production prototype).
With our own software, we produced what we believe to be the
first colour picture with a resolution of a billion pixels
(32k by 32k)in about 1986.
The EVL started its life in 1973 as Circle Graphics
Habitat, part of the effort by then Vice Chancellor, Joe
Lipson, to utilize interactive computer graphics and low cost
video (which had just become available) to make an impact on
undergraduate education. This reflected a commitment to using
technology in education, and a belief in its transformative
power, which have again become important in the 90s. The
Lab's earliest home was in the Chemistry department, which
already boasted the most advanced computer graphics available
for state-of-the -art chemical modeling - a Vector General
Calligraphic Display (PDP 11/45). The earliest goal was to
develop computer-based introductory material for the
chemistry curriculum, with the basic premise that this would
constitute a self-paced learning environment specifically
designed for the varying entry levels of students at an urban
university.
Circle Graphics Habitat brought together Tom DeFanti and
Dan Sandin. The media development system they designed used
DeFanti's Graphics Symbiosis System and the Sandin Image
Processor. The Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) was a
computer graphics language that DeFanti had developed for his
PhD thesis. The Sandin Image Processor was a patch-
programmable analog video synthesizer. A combination of the
two systems was the basis of a video production facility for
the generation of educational materials. Sandin was a faculty
member of the sculpture department where he taught video and
was involved with the making of electronically-based,
interactive, kinetic sculpture. Circle Graphics therefore
also brought together chemists, engineers and artists. An
equally important early goal for the Lab was to use the
systems created to make art. The GRASS and Image Processor
systems were used to make real-time animations that were
distributed on the experimental video circuit. The Lab also
organized a series of Real Time Interactive Installations and
Performances - performance in the music tradition rather
than in the newer sense of performance art.
Electronic Visualization Events 1-3 The first EVE
(1973) event was actually an IEVE - Interactive Electronic
Visualization Event. The performers were faculty and students
of Chicago Circle (UIC) and of the School of the Art
Institute. The performances took place in the rotunda of the
Science and Engineering South building. In the evenings
images, manipulated using the GRASS system and analogue
processor, were projected onto large video screens and shown
on monitors to the accompaniment of live music.
"Real time", with respect to these performances,
meant that the images changed instantaneously as the controls
were manipulated. In effect, the performers "played" both
musical instruments and visuals. The performances were
improvisational, in a a variety of musical styles.
Preparation involved not only technical and programming
issues, but extensive jamming. The interactivity of
Interactive Electronic Visualization Event was supplied
during the day when the audience could come and play with the
equipment. Subsequently the "I" was dropped, EVE2 and EVE3
continued as performances, which were interactive for the
performers but not for the audience.
EVE1 was the prototype, establishing the possibility
of such an event. EVE2 (1975) involved a lot more planning
and quality control of content but was also held in the
rotunda with live musical accompaniment. EVE3, in 1977, still
emphasised the Real Time possibilities of this medium.
However, the performers felt that the logistics of organizing
a complicated live performance and a large-scale physical
event, were beginning to interfere with aesthetic goals.
Therefore, the performances were recorded in front of a small
studio audience and edited on a 3/4" deck. The finished show
took place in the auditorium of the First National Bank, the
computer graphics and sound were played back on a light-valve
projector. By the end of the '70s calligraphic systems were
being replaced by raster graphics systems with frame
buffering. Except in the video games industry, computer
graphics became very static. The possibility of interacting
in real-time with graphics is only becoming a possibility in
the 90s.
In 1976, Larry Cuba came to the lab to create his wireframe
Death Star Simulation for George Lucas¹ Star Wars film.
(Please see the Milestones chapter for all the details.)
The EVL is current actively working on new projects,
information about which can be found online here:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/EVL/index.html . Tom Defanti¹s home
page is http://www.eecs.uic.edu/eecspeople/defanti.htm
Dr. David Evans founds the Computer Science Department
at the University of Utah in 1968, started in part by Bob
Taylors ARPA funding a $5 million grant.
The number one problem of the day (according to Ed
Catmull at least) was hidden surfaces. Many continually
evolving algorithms, such as Watkin¹s algorithm (which
subdivided the picture) were never actually implemented but
served as inspiration for more practical solutions, such as
Catmull¹s more expensive techniques that actually subdivided
surfaces. (This work was presented in his thesis work
³Characteristics of 10 hidden surface Algorythms.² in 1974).
At the time Ivan Sutherland did not like Catmull¹s
³brute-force² approach, but the advent of much cheaper memory
and storage made it an extremely effective, and increasingly
practical. Indeed it is just such a technique that is used as
the basis for most all CG systems today. Catmull, as part of
his interest in solving curved surface problems, had briefly
attempted techniques of bending polygons before making his
discovering of how to very efficiently and quickly subdivide
cubic patches.
Employees included Rod Paul(Omnibus NY, R&H,
Dreamworks), Floyd Gillis, Dave Gordon, Carl Frederick
(OMNIBUS NY, then ILM), Matt Arrott, Nancy St John.
Vertigo: a brief history written by Rick Stringfellow
Starting Up
Vertigo started developing in the early 80¹s in
Vancouver BC, Canada. Its exact starting date and who had the
original idea is not known. The team that started the product
gained funding from the Canadian government. The system was
designed largely by animators for animators seemingly looking
to solve the problem of creating the best animation system
without much too much regard for the final cost.
Cubicomps Vertigo system
In the later part of the 80¹s when Vertigo International
had sold few systems, Cubicomp stepped in and purchased the
whole venture. Cubicomp¹s reason for purchasing was
speculated to be that it¹s own workstation development was
falling behind and it need to acquire Vertigo to keep up with
the success of other workstation products such as Wavefront
and TDI. The acquisition saw Cubicomp take the Vertigo
development to the next phase.
In 1990 Cubicomp collapsed, leaving Vertigo in
Vancouver. At this point the system was just poised to really
take some leaps forward; however without the marketing
support of Cubicomp, Vertigo seemed doomed.
Vertigo Technology Inc.
In 1990, out of the ashes of Cubicomp a couple of ex-
vertigo employees and a group of investors purchased the
code. With little money and little experience this team
managed to finish the next release of code, which sold well.
Existing Vertigo users, fearing that this would be the last
cut bought up the software. Surprised by success the team
then continued to expand and rebuilt the company. For a
number of years the successes continued, as did the releases
of versions. New features were added and the team grew back
to the size that it was in the early days. In 1993 the
decision was taken to ditch the old renderer in favor of
supporting the industry standard RenderMan. The team
undertook to do this directly creating a seamless link to
RenderMan. An interface was created to allow easy interactive
editing of shaders and renders to RenderMan without writing
out RIBs.
Finally this allowed Vertigo to break into the film
market. Disney BVVE took the system, along with a great deal
of support from Vertigo. This relationship grew into Vertigo
eventually producing shots for Disney movies in Vancouver.
Even with this success and turning into a public company
Vertigo again began to run short of cash and its lost its
ability to compete with teams such as Softimage and
Alias/Wavefront. In a final attempt to get out of the way of
these bigger competitors the team started to move the entire
development to the Mac using Apple Quickdraw3D. At the same
time spinning off smaller components into 2D applications
such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
Vertigo still exists and still functions on the SGI.
(see the Animation chapter for more details.)
Rick Stringfellow was Head of Animation, Product Manager
and Designer of versions 9.4, 9.5, 9.6 and the Mac port. Rick
can be reached at Radical Entertainment (604 602 2664 /
rstringfellow@radical.ca )
(1985 to 1999)
Co-founded by partners Richard Hollander, Greg McMurry,
Rhonda Gunner and John Wash.
The companies first job was to produce video display
graphics for the feature film 2010:Odysee Two. Virtually
all the 3D CG in the early years was produced using Cubicomp
equipment. Richard was inspired by a NASA/Kodak article about
CCD technology and promptly designed and built a 1k by 1k
input scanner for production use. The first digital
composites it was used for were on the feature film ³Bill and
Ted¹s Excellent Adventure² in 199?.
In about 1990, the company began creating more ambitious
motion picture visual effects and was then known by
VIFX/Video Image. Feature film visual effects work for
Twentieth Century Fox production as well as other studios,
was wide ranging and extensive. The work included Batman
Returns, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Down Periscope,
Volcano, Face Off, X-Files, Relic, Star Trek Insurrection,
Blade, and Pushing Tin.
VIFX was sold to Twentieth Century Fox in 1996, and
partners Greg McMurry and Rhonda Gunner left the company.
In 1998 the Fox animation production Planet Ice was
changed from an all 3D CG feature to being traditional cell
animation, leaving VIFX with an opportunity to sell
themselves yet again to Rhythm & Hues in the spring of 1999.
About 80 people, including Richard Hollander, transferred to
the new company following the merger.
John Wash is no longer with the company but does
continue to consult. Richard Hollander currently is President
of the film effects division of Rhythm & Hues. He also co-
chairs the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences¹ Digital
Imaging Technology Subcommittee with Ray Feeney.
(1986 to 1988)
Founded by John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos after their
company Digital Productions was taken over by Omnibus.
Funding assistance included Tom McMahon from the Symbolics
Graphics Division and other private investors.
Initial production was based upon the Thinking Machine¹s
Connection Machine II fronted by a Symbolics workstation,
along with other computer systems. Their first project was to
team up with fellow ex-Triple-I employees from the Symbolics
Graphics Division to produce the film Stanley and Stella:
Breaking The Ice. Unfortunately before they could collect
the remainder of an initail $5million loan, the majority of
the CG production industry collapsed (thanks to the Omnibus
fiasco), and the investors balked.
THE NAME GAME
After declaring bankruptcy in June of 1988, Gary Demos
went on to form his own research company DemoGraFX while
John Whitney Jr. elected to stay and take the company through
the bankruptcy proceedings himself. John continued the
company under various names, initially starting fresh as
Optomystic. When another company¹s name was found to be
similar to that of Optomystic, he changed the name to
Digital Animation Laboratories, later selling the assets
of the company to US Animation Labs. In December of 1996,
that company split in two, keeping the production side as
Virtual Magic and selling the company name and software
side to Toom Boom Technologies. Today John runs his
remaining original assets of Digital Animation Laboratories
under the name Digital Editions Inc. (There will be a quiz
on this later so I hope you paid attention to all that.
Tman)
(1988 to present)
Founded in early 1988 by Arthur Shwartzberg and
Michael Tolson. Arthur's strength and experience was in
Marketing while Michael was the creative visionary.
Xaos was originally called Eidolon when they both left a
studio in SF called Synthetic Video, where Arthur was
Director of Marketing and Michael was a co-founder. Xaos
began at the time of collapse for so much of the CG
community, and made the decision to go with 100% proprietary
tools as the basis for their work. As a small shop (10 or 11
people) there was a conscious decision to not pursue the
standard fare of "flying logos" which was the backbone of the
industry at the time. Their unique design esthetic won
instant acclaim at places like the NCGA, BDA and SIGGRAPH.
Arthur and Michael left the company in 1991 to form
Xaos Tools, in a hope to capitalize on the very unique
software tools that Xaos had created. Taking over in their
absence was Marc Malmberg who kept the company going at its
then current state. Significant at the time was a decision to
make a 100% change over to an NT based production pipeline, a
situation that is still the case today.
Arthur left Xaos Tools in 1996, with Michael following
in late 1998. Xaos Tools has gone threw bankruptsy but should
continue in some form at least for a while. Arthur then
returned to Xaos in 1998, and preceded to implement
significant changes to it's whole business strategy and long
term plans. Marc Malmberg left Xaos in 1998.
Today, Xaos is in the midst of a re-birth of sorts,
planning to roughly double in size from 25 to 50 employees in
the next year. It is this "boutique" sensibility that is the
intended format to carry them into the next era of creative
content markets. Key to this plan is strengthening the
already strong presence in the large format film market, and
expanding their commercial presence.
Early employees included Chitra Shriram(Creative
Director), Roberta Brandao, Henry Preston(ILM), Amelia
Chenoweth and Hayden Landis(ILM), Eric Texier(ILM), Ken
Pearce(PDI), Tony Lupidi(Electronic Arts).
http://www.xaos.com
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opened on
July 1st, 1970 in Palo Alto, California; just outside the
Stanford University campus.
[FACTIOD] PARC initially followed the pure research model of
such facilities as IBM's Yorktown Heights research Center,
AT&T Bell labs, MIT Lincoln Labs, and The Stanford Research
Instutute "Augmentation Research Center" (Where Douglas C.
Engelbart created the mouse.) PARC also spawned the follow up
DEC Systems Research Center, founded later by Bob Taylor just
across the Stanford campus from PARC.
Jacob Goldman, chief Scientist and founder of PARC
initially divided the facility into three separate units:
1) The Computer Science Lab (SuperPaint!) 2) Systems Science
Lab 3) General Science lab. While computer graphics was never
a goal of PARC per se, Bob Taylor himself was very familiar
with this new area of computer science research. He had
overseen the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA
(The Defense Departments Advanced Research Project Agency)
which funded many early university grauduate programs,
including Dave Evans' graduate program at Utah back in 1965.
The person who did bring CG research to PARC under
Taylor was Dr. Richard Shoup of Carnegie Mellon University.
Shoup had been at the short lived BCC (Berkeley Computer
Company) from 1968 to 1970, and was given a full year upon
starting at PARC to explore what it was he wanted to do. What
he ended up doing was developing Superpaint. Along with
artist Alvy Ray Smith, Shoup experimented designed and built
the first digital paint system with a non-random access, 8-
bit frame buffer.
[FACOID] SuperPaint records and stores it's first image
(a picture of Dick Shoup holding a sign saying "It works,
sort of") With assistance from Flegal, Curry and Patrick
Beaudelaire on April 10th 1973. 486 x 640 res.
Shoup left to form Aurora Systems and was Awarded a
Technical Emmy Award in 1983.
[QUOTE] ³My big technical contribution (I was really
there as an artist) at Xerox PARC, to Shoup's Superpaint, was
invention and implementation of the RGB to HSV transform for
artistic selection of colors. Other than this contribution,
all other programming of Superpaint was Dick's.² Alvy Ray
Smith
Other CG related breakthroughs at PARC included:
-February 1975, the first GUI is demonstrated, with
multiple windows and pop-up menus that would be incorporated
later as a standard in both Mac (and later Windows) operating
desktop systems.
-The first Alto was powered up in 1973 (displaying an
image of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster.) It¹s bitmap display
was a vertical format 8x11 inch screen with a resolution of
606x808 pixels. With a maximum of 128k of main memory and 2.5
meg disc over 2000 were manufactured by 1978 at a cost of
about $12,000 each. Upgraded as the AltoII in 1975, and the
AltoIII in 1976 it was actually the first PC installed in the
White house (in 1978). Some irony perhaps as the world first
WYSIWYG computer being used in the heart of Washington
politics?
-The Smalltalk object oriented language by Alan Kay
(1974) developed the WIMP (Window manager, Icons, Mice and
Pop-up) interface concept.
PARC is still an active research center today.
http://www.parc.xerox.com/parc-go.html
Email me with comments, contributions or corrections
please!
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