In ART-2045: 3D Modeling for Games and Animation, we briefly went over the history of 3d animation with 2 examples: Computer Animated Hand (1972), and TRON (1982). During the demonstration, I did mention that there were computer animations before this going back to the 1960's and even earlier. So in this bonus month blog, I'm going to show some of the pioneering cgi that was done before and after Ed Catmull and Fred Parke created that fateful film in 72.
The Beginning (1950s)
Our journey begins with an animator named John Whitney, Sr. Whitney began his career in 1939, When he returned to America from Paris after studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz, and collaborated with his brother James on a series of abstract films called Five Film Exercises (1940–45). The films were awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949.
John Whitney, Sr
In the 1940s and 50s, he and James started to experiment with making films with a custom-built device based on old anti-aircraft analog computers connected by servos to control the motion of lights and lit objects – the first example of motion control photography.
John and James Whitney in their studio during the 1940s
Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials, Eventually ending up animating the design work of Saul Bass. If that name sounds familiar then you may remember from Moving Image Fundamentals that he was the graphic designer who worked on the title sequences for various Alfred Hitchcock films.
In fact, Hitchcock hired John Whitney to use his technique to make the opening sequence for Vertigo, which Bass designed. As a result, the opening sequence of Vertigo is technically the first computer animation in history! and I bet you never even knew it.
The opening sequence to Vertigo (1958)
Whitney made the animation by rigging up a WWII anti-aircraft targeting computer called "The M5 gun director" to a platform. weighing 850-lbs and with 11,000-components, It wasn't an electric computer, it was a mechanical computer that originally required 5 soldiers to operate, but it was still a computer. He then placed animation cels on the platform and used a pendulum to achieve the endless rotation.
The M5 gun director
He would later go on to found Motion Graphics Incorporated In 1960, which used the mechanical analog computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, called Catalog.
Catalog (1961)
(Fun Fact: Whitney, His Catalog demo reel, and the techniques he developed were what inspired Special FX artist Douglas Trumbull to use the slit scan technique in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey").
Whitney continued to used his analog animation computer until the 1970s, When had abandoned his analog computer in favor of faster, digital processes. Whitney continued to used his analog animation computer until the 1970s, When had abandoned his analog computer in favor of faster, digital processes. He went on to teach the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972 and continued to do motion graphics work and research for films until his death in 1995.
Of course, these were made with mechanical computers, not digital computers. Digital computers existed at the time, But they were huge and generally did not have a monitor. However, with the development of the Whirlwind and SAGE computer projects in the 1950s, brought the introduction of early computer displays.
These displayed were essentially crudely modified oscilloscope displays that could display low res images at 256x256 pixels. The first digital image on a computer was created by Russell Kirsch on the SEAC computer system in 1957.
Kirsch and his team created a drum scanner that worked by tracing variations of intensity over surfaces of photographs. To test their scanner, they used a photo Kirsch's three-month-old son Walden, then used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize types of characters and display the image on an oscilloscope screen, consisting of just 176×176 pixels
The first scanned image done by the SEAC of Walden Kirsch (1957)
Around the same time, other people were experimenting with oscilloscopes to make animations and graphics. Some examples of oscilloscope films include Around is Around by Norman McLaren (1951) Eneri by Hy Hirsch (1953), and Abstronic by Mary Ellen Bute (1954).
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Around is Around Norman McLaren (1951)
There was also William Higinbotham, an American physicist and member of the team that developed the first nuclear bomb, who used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to create Tennis for Two, One of the first examples of a video game in 1958.
Tennis for Two (1958)
While oscilloscope displays clearly couldn't display raster graphics well, There were a type of graphics that they could display well, Vector line graphics. Unlike raster graphics that display images in pixels, Vector graphics display images in lines and geometric shapes. It was that capability that lead to making the first 3D computer graphics possible, and the first people to take advantage of these capabilities would be groundbreaking.
The Vector Age (1960s)
The first 3d vector animation was created not in the United States, but rather Sweden. In 1953, The BESK computer (Officially known as the Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator or "Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator") was introduced by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Or the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery). It was the first electronic computer available in Sweden.
The BESK computer (1953)
The computer was used in a variety of fields from handling weather data for Carl-Gustaf Rossby and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, to gathering statistics for the telecommunications service provider Televerket, to cracking encryption of radio messages for the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment, to generating calculations for the Swedish nuclear energy industry.
One of the users of BESK was the Royal Swedish Road and Water Administration. During the 1950s, the volume of car traffic had risen substantially and as a result, the number of traffic accidents had increased substantially, which lead to the need for newer, safer roads. They realized that better road design was the key to improve the roads.
In 1954, The administration assigned its road designers and road project managers for a course in photogrammetry (a form of measurement in photographic images, especially aerial images) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm. Around the same time, BESK had been equipped with something they called a function printer, a specially designed digital oscilloscope with approximately 1 megapixel of resolution. In front of the oscilloscope, They mounted 35mm camera with an extended magazine on a custom-made stand. The camera was controlled by the computer automatically, by sending a signal to the camera for every new image fed onto the oscilloscope.
The consulting firm Nordisk ADB, which was a provider of software that calculated masses and launch data on BESK for the administration, realized that they could use the coordinates to draw perspective from the driver's seat. To test this, they planned out what the motorway towards Nacka outside Stockholm would look like, Then with the camera in front of the oscilloscope, they took a picture every twenty meters of the virtual road. The result was a 30-second fictitious journey on the virtual highway at a speed of 110 km/h. The film, (now referred to as Rendering of a planned highway), was transferred to 16 mm format and made in 100 copies, one of which was sent to be broadcast on prime time on TV on in the news program Aktuellt on November 9, 1961.
Rendering of a planned highway (1961)
The animation markes a couple of firsts. It was the first realistic computer animation, It was the first animation to be created entirely on a computer, It was the first animation to use 3d vector graphics, and was the first computer animation to be broadcasted on television!
Indeed it is Matthew Broderick from Godzilla!
But while the Swedes had worked out how to make computer animation with vectors, The next innovation in computer imagery brings us back to the US, With the creation of the Wireframe.
In 1963, Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT, had an idea. Inspired by the Memex from "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush, he created a program which could allow a user to mark points could on a monitor and then create lines or circles between the points. He called the program Sketchpad and programed it on the Lincoln TX-2 computer, a transistor-based computer that was built at the The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, In 1958.
Along with introducing 3D wireframe graphics, Sketchpad is considered to be the very first CAD (computer-aided drafting) program as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. In fact, It inspired Douglas Engelbart, The inventor of the computer mouse, to design and develop the oN-Line System, a precursor to the modern GUI interface, at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1968.
Computer Sketchpad (1963)
The TX-2 (1958)
(Fun Fact: One of the engineers who worked on the TX-2 project, Ken Olsen, went on to cofound Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC), in 1957, and the TX-2 as well as its predecessor, The TX-0 (1956), were the basis for their first computer, The PDP-1 (1959), which was famous for being used to create another early video game, Spacewar! (1962).
The next innovations in computer animation occurred from 1963 to 1965 at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Programer Edward Zajac, directed and produced a computer generated film which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the Earth as it orbited.
Simulation of a Two Gyro-Gravity Gradient Attitude Control System (1963)
The frames were programmed in FORTRAN and generated on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer, then a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 Microfilm Recorder presented and stored results.
The IBM 7090(1959)
The Stromberg-Carlson 4020 Microfilm Recorder
Another employee at Bell Labs, Michael Noll, Created his own films Hypercube (1965), the First stereoscopic 3D computer animation, and Computer Ballet (1965), The computer animation to show a human figure.
Hypercube (1965)
Computer Ballet (1965)
By the end of the decade, Bell labs and others experimented with computer animation. Boeing created Carrier Landing (1965) the first first-person CGI 3D simulation of aircraft, Charles Csuri and James Shaffer created Hummingbird (1967) the first digital morphing animation, Mark Gillenson created Sine Curve Man (1967) The First digital morphing of human face, and Lee Harrison created several shorts with his "Animac" system including The Stick Man (1967) The First motion capture, Beautiful Noise/The Dynne (1968) The First face motion capture, and Mr. Computer Image (1968) The First talking CGI character. But in the next decade, CG was about to break out of the labs and into screens big and small.
The Polygonal Age (1970s)
After The Apterix and the Easter Bunny (1970) The First color 2D computer animation, and Metadata (1971) First computer animation to use keyframes, Came the aforementioned Ed Catmull and Fred Parke. The two were Ph .D. students from the University of Utah, with Catmull came up with idea after revising his previous idea of becoming an animator, thinking that computers would help him to animate and Parke helping in production of the film.
Computer Animated Hand (1972)
Catmull started by using his left hand as the basis for the clip, first creating a model of it, then began making a plaster-of-paris mold of his hand. He then made a plaster model from the mold and drew 350 small triangles and polygons on the model in ink. Digital counterparts of these polygons would represent the surface of his hand in the computer. Catmull and Parke measured the coordinates of each of the corner points of the polygons and typed them into the computer running a 3-D animation program Catmull wrote on a Teletype. We did briefly see this during the video in class Here, let me bring up a screenshot from a remaster I found: (Don't worry Professor Renner, I'll provide links at the end!)
In case you're wondering, the teletype was basically what people used for inputting and outputting computer data at the time. They worked a bit like typewriters as it would display text by printing on on long sheets of paper like this:
Coincidentally, A similar method was used for the 3d modeling process used in Toy Story later.
With the 3-D animation program, they could reproduce the disembodied hand on a screen and make it move. they also created animations of an artificial heart valve, and human heads which were modeled on Fred Parke's wife.
Fred Parke's wife during production of the film
After the two took their film to a computer science conference in 1973, Sketchpad creator Ivan Sutherland, Now a professor at the University of Utah, Contacted Walt Disney to see if they were interested to use computer graphics in its production process for traditional animation. However, Disney turned down the idea and instead they invited Catmull to help the Disney Imagineering team use computers to design a new ride - specifically, Space Mountain, a roller-coaster ride planned for the new Walt Disney World complex in Orlando, Florida which also never came though.
(Fun Fact: While teaching at the university, Sutherland taught various students who went on to do big things in the computer industry such as, Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Gordon W. Romney (who went to work on computer and cybersecurity), and who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, John Warnock, The future co founder of Adobe Systems, and Jim Clark, the future founder of Silicon Graphics. (The latter of whom i'll get into later).
That same year, another individual would bring digital animation to the big screen. Novelist Michael Crichton (The future author of Jurassic Park), wrote and directed a low-budget science fiction western-thriller film called Westworld.
The plot is set in the then futuristic year 1983, Where a high-tech, adult amusement park called Delos features three themed "worlds": Western World, Medieval World, and Roman World. Each world are populated with lifelike androids that are practically indistinguishable from human beings and programmed in character for their respective environments. The film follows visitors Peter Martin (Played by Richard Benjamin) and his friend John Blane (Played by James Brolin) who are determined to unwind in Westword by hitting the saloons and shooting off their guns. But things end up taking a turn for the worst when the android control system malfunctions and with a gunslinger (Played by Yul Brynner) out to get them, they have to escape Delos with their lives.
Crichton originally went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but after learning that two minutes of animation would take nine months and cost $200,000, he contacted John Whitney Sr. (The animator for Vertigo and Catalog), who in turn recommended his son John Whitney Jr.
Westworld (1973)
The digitally processed motion picture photography to was made appear pixelized in order to portray the point of view of the gunslinger android evilton. The block portraiture was accomplished using the Technicolor Three-strip Process to color-separate each frame, then scanning them to convert into rectangular blocks according to its tone values, and finally outputting the result back to film. The 10 second sequences of the android's view with a total duration of 2,5 min, took 8 hours to compute.
The film was a critical and commercial success, even being nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Saturn awards. It also became a franchise with a sequel, Futureworld following in 1976 (Which actually contained footage from Computer Animated Hand), and the first gloss effect in CGI (primitive reflections) to less critical praise, a short-lived television series called Beyond Westworld in 1980, And of course, the 2016 HBO television series.
Futureworld (1976)
Michael Crichton went on to make one more contributing CG film called Looker (The first full human body realistic CGI), a full year before TRON in 1981, which was also a disappointment.
Looker (1981) (WARNING! contains nudity! (Or NSFW if you want to be hip)
However, Looker does bring us to the 1980s, another decade of innovation in CGI, that would bring it to a wider audience.
The Expansion Age (1980s)
The same year Futureworld was released, An animator named Steven Lisberger, looked at a sample reel from a computer firm called MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc.) and footage of Atari's Pong for the first time. He was immediately fascinated by early video games and wanted to do a film incorporating them.
Steve Lisberger
He started experimenting with this idea by creating an early version of the 'Tron' character for a 30 second long animation which was used to promote both Lisberger Studios and a series of various rock radio stations. It was a backlit cel animation that depicted Tron as a character who glowed yellow, was bearded, and resembled the Cylon Centurions from the 1978 TV series Battlestar Galactica. Also, Tron was armed with two "exploding discs", as Lisberger described them.
Lisberger Studios, Inc. promotional animation
He was also frustrated by the clique-like nature of computers and video games and wanted to create a film that would open the idea up to everyone. Lisberger and his business partner Donald Kushner moved to the West Coast in 1977 and set up an animation studio to develop Tron. They borrowed against the anticipated profits of their 90-minute animated television special Animalympics to develop storyboards for Tron with the notion of making an animated film. But after Variety mentioned the project briefly during its early phase, it caught the attention of computer scientist Alan Kay. He contacted Lisberger and convinced him to use him as an adviser on the movie, then persuaded him to use real CGI instead of just hand-animation.
Bonnie MacBird wrote the first drafts of Tron with extensive input from Lisberger, basing the original personality of Alan on Alan Kay. He gave her and Lisberger the same tour of Xerox PARC that inspired the Apple Macintosh, and their many conversations (and a class she took with Donald Knuth at Stanford) inspired her to include many computer science references. She also created Tron as a character (rather than a visual demo) and Flynn. Originally, MacBird envisioned Flynn more comedic, even suggesting Robin Williams for the role, But that idea, most of the scientific elements and the tone changed as time went on.
The film was eventually conceived as an animated film bracketed with live-action sequences. The rest involved a combination of computer-generated visuals and back-lit animation. Lisberger planned to finance the movie independently by approaching several computer companies, eventually reaching Information International Inc. He met with Richard Taylor, a representative, and they began talking about using live-action photography with back-lit animation in such a way that it could be integrated with computer graphics.
By then, there was a script, the film was storyboarded, and some computer animation tests completed. He had spent approximately $300,000 developing Tron and had also secured $4–5 million in private backing before reaching a standstill. Lisberger and Kushner took their storyboards and computer-generated film samples to Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Columbia Pictures But nobody was interested.
In 1980, they decided to pitch their idea to Walt Disney Productions, which was interested in producing more daring productions at the time. Tom Wilhite, Disney's vice president for creative development, watched Lisberger's test footage and convinced Ron Miller to give the movie a chance. However, Disney executives were uncertain about giving $10–12 million to a first-time producer and director using techniques which, in most cases, had never been attempted. The studio agreed to finance a test reel which involved a flying disc champion throwing a rough prototype of the discs used in the film. It was a chance to mix live-action footage with back-lit animation and computer-generated visuals. It impressed the executives at Disney and they agreed to back the film. MacBird and Lisberger's script was subsequently re-written and re-storyboarded with the studio's input. At the time, Disney rarely hired outsiders to make films for them, and Kushner found that he and his group were given a bad reception because of this.
As a result, they hired four computer graphics firms to produce the animation: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (The fastest PDP-10 computer ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York (The studio that inspired Lisberger in the first place); Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.
TRON (1982)
The plot is hard to describe, but the basic premise goes like this; The film follows Kevin Flynn (Played by Jeff Bridges), A former programmer for computer company ENCOM, who now runs a arcade (Because, hey its the 80s, and arcade games are popular) and has been trying to hack in ENCOM's mainframe system to locate evidence proving his former coworker Ed Dillinger (Played by David Warner) has been plagiarizing his games. With the help of programmer Alan Bradley (Played by Bruce Boxleitner) and his girlfriend, engineer Lora Baines (Played by Cindy Morgan), the three form break into ENCOM and plan to use unlock Alan's "Tron" program, a self-governing security measure designed to protect the system and counter the functions of ENCOM's Master Control Program (MCP). After the three split up, Flynn comes into direct conflict with the MCP, communicating with his terminal. Before Flynn can get the information he needs to reveal Dillinger's acts, the MCP uses an experimental laser to digitize and upload Flynn into the ENCOM mainframe cyberspace, where programs are living entities appearing in the likeness of the human "Users" (programmers) who created them. Aided by programs Tron and Yori, Flynn set of on an adventure to not only fight for the oppressed programs of the grid, but also get back to the real world and prove Dillinger's plagiarism.
It was first combination of 3D CGI and live action in a film, it had the first talking and moving CGI character (Bit), the first onscreen combination of CGI characters and live action characters, the first extensive use of fully computer generated polygonal animation in a film (15 minutes), and the first fully CGI backgrounds in a film.
The film was a moderate success at the box office, and received positive reviews from critics, who praised its groundbreaking visuals and acting but criticized its incoherent storyline. Tron received nominations for Best Costume Design and Best Sound at the 55th Academy Awards, but was not nominated in the Best Visual Effects category. Tron spawned multiple video games (including an arcade tie-in by Bally Midway released shortly after the film), comic books, a sequel titled Tron: Legacy released in 2010, an animated series titled Tron: Uprising, set between the two films, and its television debut was even part of the Disney Channel's first day of programming, on April 18, 1983.
It was also an influence to another animator who became the head of an animation studio that would also play an important role in the history of CGI, his name, John Lassetter.
John Lassetter
While working on Mickey's Christmas Carol, His friends invited him to come and see the first light cycle sequences while Tron was still in production, he was impressed and saw the potential of the technology in animation. Lasseter realized that computers could be used to make films with three-dimensional backgrounds where traditionally animated characters could interact to add a new level of visually stunning depth that had not been possible before.
After being fired from Disney in 1983, He joined Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull at Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group to work on their first computer animated short: The Adventures of André & Wally B., meant to prove it was possible to do character animation on a computer.
It was rendered on a Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer, ten VAX-11/750 superminicomputers from Project Athena and five VAX computers at Lucasfilm. These machines were often available only at night, and much of the movie was therefore made early in the morning. The Cray Computer Corporation allowed them to use their computer in hopes Lucasfilm would buy a machine.
The Adventures of André & Wally B. (1984)
The animation was the first to use motion blur in CG and complex 3D backgrounds, where the lighting styles and colors were inspired by Maxfield Parrish, made using particle systems. Lasseter also suggested for manipulatable shapes capable of the squash and stretch style, as opposed to earlier CG models had generally been restricted to rigid geometric shapes.
After the film proved successful, the company began to produce more animated shorts with CG, such as Luxo Jr. (1986), Red's Dream (1987), and Tin Toy (1988).
Luxo Jr. (1986)
Red's Dream (1987)
Tin Toy (1988)
They also started to sell their own computer, The Pixar Image Computer, a graphics computer aimed at commercial and scientific high-end visualization markets, such as medicine, geophysics and meteorology.
The Pixar Image Computer (1986)
But while it was advanced for its time, it sold poorly. However, managed to find a niche in CG animation both within the company and with it eventual parent company Disney. In 1986, the company was purchased by Apple cofounder Steve jobs and they changed the name to Pixar.
Meanwhile in the home computer market, 3D graphics were not as advanced. While 3D computer graphics software began appearing for home computers in the late 1970s, With early examples such as 3D Art Graphics, a set of 3D computer graphics effects, written by Kazumasa Mitazawa and released in June 1978 for the Apple II, and 3D plot, a simple program written in BASIC that plotted curves, as part of of the book BASIC Computer Games written by David H. Ahl in October 1978, creating 3D models, animations, or even games, just simply wasn't possible with these computers.
3D Art Graphics (Left) and 3D plot (Right) (1978)
There were two reasons for this, 1). most CPUs at the time were 8-bit CPUs, which couldn't accomplish as much as the super computers used to make 3D graphics. For comparison the popular Commodore 64 and it's 6502 based 6510 CPU ran at 1.023 MHz compared to the 105 to 117 MHz of the Cray X-MP.
Commodore 64 (Left) and Cray X-MP (Right) (1982)
And 2). Computers had the CPU do most of the work drawing graphics on the screen, while some did had video chips that could take some of the work off the CPU it still wasn't enough for smooth 3D animation.
Enter the GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer. This is the key to bringing 3D graphics to Personal computers, but its development starts with the Blitter chip. The first blitter chip available commercially was the μPD7220.
The μPD7220 (1982)
Created by the Nippon Electric Company, or more commonly known as NEC in 1982, this chip was capable of drawing shape primitives and could transfer rectangular bitmaps to display memory via direct memory access and could fill rectangular portions of the screen very quickly.
The chip was first used in the NEC N5200, A high end desktop computer made for businesses, later sold in the US as the Advanced Personal Computer or APC, and in later computers, such as the NEC PC-9801, APC III, the optional graphics module for the DEC Rainbow, the NCR Decision Mate V, the Tulip System-1, and the Epson QX-10.
Left to right: The NEC PC-9801, APC III, the DEC Rainbow, the NCR Decision Mate V, the Tulip System-1, and the Epson QX-10.
Hitachi would later produce a similar chip called the HD68A45SP, both chips would find their way into graphics cards for IBM compatibles that would become a popular option for CAD programs, with 3D CAD programs first appearing on IBM compatibles in 1984.
The next advance was The Mindset, an MS-DOS compatible Workstation for video production released in 1984, Designed by Roger Baderscher, A former employee of Atari.
The Mindset (1984).
It contained two custom VLSI chips to move rectangular sections of a bitmap. The hardware could handle transparency and eight modes for combining the source and destination data, allowing it to update the screen 50 times faster than IBM's CGA graphics.
Inside the Mindset with a view of the VLSI chips.
The problems with all of these machines were expensive, not IBM compatible, and failed in the marketplace. Around the same time, most computer companies were looking to build 16-bit systems to sell along side their 8-bit systems. These included the Atari ST, the Apple Macintosh and later the Apple IIgs, and the Commodore Amiga.
Left to right: The Atari ST, the Apple Macintosh and later the Apple IIgs, and the Commodore Amiga.
These machines not only used 16-Bit CPUs, but also were far less expensive and with some add-ons, IBM compatible.
The Atari ST used an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, which along with its other hardware, could display 3D graphics smoothly. The Amiga had two custom chips the Agnus and Denise. The Agnus was the video sync genereator, and contained a blitter, And the Denise was the main video chip using planar graphics. The Amiga could also display 3D graphics well, not as smoothly as the ST, but was impressive for a home computer.
A comparison of a 3D game Armour Geddon (1991) running on The Commodore Amiga an the Atari ST.
In 1989, Texas Instruments introduced the Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture, or TIGA, graphics interface standard. It was designed for high-end graphics and CAD work, based on the TMS34010 chip that TI had designed back in 1986, that became the basis for Windows Accelerator cards.
A TIGA Add On card (Left) and the TMS34010 chip (Right).
Around the same time 3D CAD programs started to appear on the PC, Mac, the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. The work on these CAD programs would lead to the development of consumer 3D modeling software in the following decade, This is leads us to the 1990s and the events that would finally bring 3D graphics into the mainstream.
The Standardazation Age (1990s)
The 1990s brought CGI into Blockbuster films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), and Toy Story (1995) each impressing audiences one after the other.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Toy Story (1995)
Real-time 3D graphics were also becoming increasingly common in arcade, computer, and game consoles. Titles like Hard Driving (1989) and Virtua Fighter (1993) dominated arcades, and titles like Starfox (1993) brought 3D graphics to the home console market in a way that was not possible before.
Left to right: Hard Drivin' (1989) Virtua Fighter (1993) and Starfox (1993).
By 1995 3D GPUs had started to appear such as the S3 ViRGE, ATI Rage, and the Matrox Mystique. However they weren't very popular either because they were extremely expensive, had little support for software, or both.
Left to right: The S3 ViRGE, the ATI Rage, and the Matrox Mystique.
Enter Silicon Graphics, Inc., or SGI, They were founded in 1981, and made powerful expensive workstation computers capable of producing impressive computer visuals and were used to generate graphics for a variety of mainstream movies like Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and The Abyss. They also worked with Nintendo and their third party licensees to provide their workstations to add pre-rendered 3D graphics to games like Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the seven stars, as well as develop the chipset for the Nintendo 64.
An SGI IRIS Crimson Workstation setup (1992)
While these Workstations sold well, they only catered to the high-end workstation market and were not available to consumers. SGI realized this, and decided to dive into 2D graphics card market by forming a spin-off called Pellucid in 1993.
But things didnt go as planned as Mediavision purchased Pellucid not long after it was founded, and since their focus was sound cards, made very few video cards. Mediavision went bankrupt in 1995, after a financial scandal, taking Pellucid along with it. So in 1994, Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers left the company to start their own computer graphics business which they called 3dfx Interactive.
After working on graphics hardware for JAMMA-based arcade systems used in games like ICE's Home Run Derby and Atari's San Francisco Rush, They got to work on their first computer graphics card technology which they called Voodoo Graphics.
The idea was that it could be an accelerator card that produced 3D by working alongside your 2D card to produce 3D visuals while keeping your existing setup intact.
A Voodoo Graphics card setup
3dfx sold the Voodoo graphics technology on a OEM basis to other companies like Diamond and STB to manufacture and sell the Voodoo cards at retail. The first Voodoo Graphics card shipped to stores in in October 1996, with those suporting the chipset becoming the first 3D graphics cards to have mass critical success and wide adoption, and its Glide API becoming first 3D graphics API to have mass critical success and wide adoption.
By the end of 1997, the Voodoo Graphics was by far the most widely adopted 3D accelerator among both consumers and software developers. 3dfx continued to dominate the market with Voodoo and Glide until 2002, when due to the rise of OpenGL and Direct3D that made the Glide API obsolete and the changing GPU market, 3dfx filled for bankruptcy and shut down with their Intellectual property rights being sold to Nvidia.
3D modeling software grew as well, starting with Cinema 4D's PC release in 1995, Autodesk 3Ds MAX was released in 1996, Blender as freeware in January 1998, following Maya one month later in February, and finally SketchUp in 2000.
All of these programs and their hardware would continue to evolve from the start of the new millennium to the present day, which finally brings us to the present day of 2022, where I wrap up our journey with some final words.
The Conclusion (2000s to the present)
Over the past 20 years we've seen more innovation in growth of 3D CGI in the industry. Films like Avatar (2009) and Tenet (2020) have won Academy Awards with their visuals that get better and better with technology improving, consoles like the PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X/S producing photorealistic environments, and graphics cards continuing to grow in power and capability. What started simply as an experiment with military anti-aircraft analog computers have evolved into industry that's continuing to impress us. What will the next 64 years bring us? Only time will tell, but until then, I hope you enjoyed my look back at the history of 3D CGI, and ill see you next time!
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