[Graphics_History]
ADVANCES OF THE 1980s
Excepted from the book, "Becoming a Computer Animator"
by Michael Morrison
Introduction
Pixar | Disney | Toy Story | Beauty and the Beast
Ed Catmull | Ralph Guggenheim | John Lasseter | William Reeves | Renderman
Advances of the 1960s | Advances of the 1970s |Advances of the 1990s
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During the early 1980's SIGGRAPH was starting to really take off. Catmull
explains, "SIGGRAPH was a very good organization. It was fortuitous to have
the right people doing the right things at the right time. It became one of
the very best organizations where there is a lot of sharing and a lot of
openness. Over the years it generated a tremendous amount of excitement and
it was a way of getting a whole group of people to work together and share
information, and it is still that way today."
At the 1980 SIGGRAPH conference a stunning film entitled "Vol Libre" was
shown. It was a computer generated high-speed flight through rugged fractal
mountains. A programmer by the name of Loren Carpenter from The Boeing
Company in Seattle, Washington had studied the research of Mandelbrot and
then modified it to simulate realistic fractal mountains.
Carpenter had been working in the Boeing Computer Services department since
1966 and was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. Starting
around 1972 he started using the University's engineering library to follow
the technical papers being published about computer graphics. He eventually
worked his way into a group at Boeing that was working on a computer aided
drawing system. This finally got him access to computer graphics equipment.
Working there with other employees, he developed various rendering
algorithms and published papers on them.
In the late 70s Carpenter was creating 3D rendered models of aircraft
designs and he wanted some scenery to go with his airplanes. So he read
Mandelbrot's book and was immediately disappointed when he found that the
formulas were not practical for what he had in mind. Around this time "Star
Wars" had been released and being a big fan of the imagination Carpenter
dreamed of creating some type of alien landscape. This drove him to actually
do it; by 1979 he had an idea about how to create fractal terrain in
animation.
While on a business trip to Ohio State in 1979, Carpenter ran into a person
who knew quite a few people in the computer graphics field including
individuals like Ed Catmull. He explained how Catmull had just been hired by
George Lucas to set up a lab at Lucasfilm. Carpenter was immediately
interested but didn't want to send in his resume yet, because he was still
working on his fractal mountain movie. "At the time they were getting enough
resumes to kill a horse" explains Carpenter.
Carpenter continues, "I wanted to demonstrate that these (fractal) pictures
would not only look good, but would animate well too. After solving the
technical difficulties, I made the movie, wrote a paper to describe it and
made a bunch of still images. I happened to be on the A/V crew of SIGGRAPH
1980, so one of my pictures ended up on an A/V T-shirt. I had this campaign
to become as visible as possible because I wanted to work at Lucasfilm and
when I showed my film, the people from Lucasfilm were there in the audience.
Afterward they spoke to me and said, 'You're in, we want you.'" Later, in
1981 Carpenter wrote the first renderer for Lucasfilm, called REYES (Renders
Everything You Ever Saw). REYES would eventually turn into the Renderman
rendering engine and today, Carpenter is still with Pixar.
Turner Whitted published a paper in 1980 about a new rendering method for
simulating highly reflective surfaces. Known today as Ray Tracing, it makes
the computer trace every ray of light, starting from the viewer's
perspective back into the 3D scene to the objects. If an object happens to
be reflective, the computer follows that ray of light as it bounces off the
object until it hits something else. This process continues until the ray of
light hits an opaque non-reflective surface or it goes shooting off away
from the scene. As you can imagine, ray tracing is extremely computational
intensive. So much so that some 3D animation programmers (such as the Yost
Group who created 3D Studio) refuse to put ray tracing into their software.
On the other hand, the realism that can be achieved with ray tracing is
spectacular.
Around 1980 two individuals, Steven Lisberger, a traditional animator, and
Donald Kushner, a lawyer-turned-movie distributor decided to do a film about
a fantasy world inside a video game. After putting together a presentation,
Lisberger and Kushner sought backing from the major film companies around
Los Angeles. To their surprise, it was Tom Wilhite, a new production chief
at Disney, that took them up on the idea. After many other presentations to
Disney executives, they were given the 'OK' from Disney to proceed.
The movie, called "Tron," was to be a fantasy about a man's journey inside
of a computer. It called for nearly 30 minutes of film quality computer
graphics, and was a daunting task for computer graphics studios at the time.
The solution lay in splitting up various sequences and farming them out to
different computer graphics studios. The two major studios were Triple I and
MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group Inc.). Also involved were NYIT,
Digital Effects of New York and Robert Abel & Associates.
The computer generated imagery for "Tron" was very good but unfortunately
the movie as a whole was very bad. Disney had sunk about $20 million into
the picture and it bombed at the box office. This, if anything, had a
negative influence on Hollywood toward computer graphics. Triple I had
created computer graphics for other movies such as Looker in 1980, but after
"Tron," they sold off their computer graphics operation. Demos and Whitney
left to form a new computer graphics company called Digital Productions in
1981.
Digital Productions had just got started then they landed their first major
film contract. It was to create the special effects for a Sci-Fi movie
called "The Last Starfighter." In Starfighter, however, everyone made sure
that the story was somewhat good before generating any computer graphics.
Digital Productions invested in a Cray X-MP supercomputer to help process
the computer graphics frames. The effects themselves were very impressive
and photorealistic but the movie cost $14 million to make and only grossed
about $21 million - enough to classify as a "B" grade movie by Hollywood
standards - it still didn't make Hollywood sit up and take notice of
computer graphics.
Carl Rosendahl launched a computer graphics studio in Sunnyvale, California
in 1980 called Pacific Data Images (PDI). Rosendahl had just graduated from
Stanford University with a degree in electrical engineering and for him,
computer graphics was the perfect solution for his career interest,
television production and computers. A year later Richard Chuang, one of the
partners, wrote some anti-aliasing rendering code, and the resulting images
allowed PDI's client base to increase. While other computer graphics studios
were focusing on film, PDI focused solely on television network ID's, such
as the openings for movie-of-the-week programs. This allowed them to carve a
niche for themselves. Chris Woods set up a computer graphics department in
1981 at R/Greenberg Associates in New York. In August of 1981 IBM introduced
their first personal computer, the IBM PC. The IBM PC, while not the most
technologically advanced personal computer, seemed to break PCs into the
business community in a serious way. It used the Intel 16-bit 8088
microprocessor and offered ten times the memory of other personal computer
systems. From then on, personal computers became serious tools that business
needed. With this new attitude toward PCs came tremendous sales as PCs
spread across the country into practically every business.
Another major milestone in the 1980's for computer graphics was the founding
of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) by Jim Clark in 1982. SGI focused its
resources on creating the highest performance graphics computers available.
These systems offered built-in 3D graphics capabilities, high speed RISC
(Reduced Instruction Set Chip) processors and symmetrical (multiple
processor) architectures. The following year in 1983, SGI rolled out its
first system, the IRIS 1000 graphics terminal.
In 1982, Lucasfilm signed up with Atari for a first-of-its-kind venture
between a film studio and video game company. They planned to create a home
video game based on the hit movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They also made
plans to develop arcade games and computer software together. Some of
Lucasfilm's games included PHM Pegasus, Koronis Rift, Labyrinth, Ballblazer,
Rescue on Fractalus and Strike Fleet. They also developed a networked game
called Habitat that is still very popular in Japan. Today the LucasArts
division of Lucasfilm creates the video games and is a strong user of 3D
computer graphics.
In 1982, John Walker and Dan Drake along with eleven other programmers
established Autodesk Inc. They released AutoCAD version 1 for S-100 and Z-80
based computers at COMDEX (Computer Dealers Exposition) that year. Autodesk
shipped AutoCAD for the IBM PC and Victor 9000 personal computers the
following year. Starting from 1983, their yearly sales would rise from
15,000 dollars to 353.2 million dollars in 1993 as they helped move computer
graphics to the world of personal computers.
At Lucasfilm, special effects for film were handled by The Industrial Light
and Magic (ILM) division, yet early on they didn't want much to do with
computer graphics. Catmull explains, "They considered what we were doing as
too low of a resolution for film. They felt it didn't have the quality, and
they weren't really believers in it. There wasn't an antagonistic
relationship between us, we got along well, it was just that they didn't see
computer graphics as being up to their standards. However, as we developed
the technology we did do a couple pieces such as the Death Star projection
for 'Return of the Jedi.' It was only a single special effect yet it came
out looking great." For "Return of Jedi" in 1983, Lucasfilm created a
wireframe "hologram" of the Death Star under construction protected by a
force field for one scene.
The computer graphics division of Lucasfilm was next offered a special
effects shot for the movie "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn." There was an
effect that could have been done either traditionally or with CGI. The
original screenplay called for the actors to go into a room containing a
coffin shaped case in which could be seen a lifeless rock. The "Genesis"
machine would then shoot this rock and make it look green and lifelike. ILM,
however, didn't think of that as very impressive, so they went to the
computer graphics division and asked if they could generate the effect of
the rock turning life-like. Then Alvy Ray Smith came back and said, "Instead
of having this rock in front of this glass box why don't we do what's meant
to be a computer simulation and a program showing how it works for the whole
planet." Thus Smith came up with the original idea and ILM decided to go for
it. And so they generated a one minute long sequence. It was largely
successful because it was meant to be a computer generated image in the
movie, so it didn't need to have the final touches of realism added to it.
The effect was rendered on Carpenter's new rendering engine, REYES. It
turned out to be a very, very successful piece. As Smith would later say, "I
call it 'the effect that never dies' It appeared in three successive Star
Trek movies, Reebok and other commercials, the Sci-Fi channel, you see it
everywhere." Following the "Genesis" effect, Lucasfilm used computer
graphics for the movie "Young Sherlock Holmes" in 1985. In this movie, a
stained glass window comes to life to terrorize a priest.
Tom Brigham, a programmer and animator at NYIT, astounded the audience at
the 1982 SIGGRAPH conference. Tom Brigham had created a video sequence
showing a woman distort and transform herself into the shape of a lynx. Thus
was born a new technique called "Morphing". It was destined to become a
required tool for anyone producing computer graphics or special effects in
the film or television industry. However, despite its impressive response by
viewers at the conference, no one seemed to pay the technique much attention
until a number of years later in 1987 when LucasFilm used the technique for
the movie "Willow" in which a sorceress was transformed through a series of
animals into her final shape as a human.
Scott Fischer, Brenda Laurel, Jaron Lanier along with Thomas Zimmerman
worked at the Atari Research Center (ARC) during the early eighties. Jaron
Lanier, working for Atari as a programmer in 1983, developed the DataGlove.
A glove for your hand wired with switches to detect and transmit to the
computer any movements you make. The computer interprets the data and allows
you to manipulate objects in 3D space within a computer simulation. He left
later that year and teamed up with Jean-Jacques Grimaud; together they
founded a company 2 years later in 1985 called VPL Research, which would
develop and market some of the first commercial virtual reality products.
Zimmerman, an MIT graduate who had developed the "Air Guitar" software and a
DataGlove that allowed you to play a virtual guitar, also joined VPL
Research. Zimmerman left in 1989 while Lanier stayed with VPL Research until
November of 1992.
AT&T formed the Electronic Photography and Imaging Center (EPIC) in 1984 to
create PC-based videographic products. In the following year they released
the TARGA video adapter for personal computers. This allowed PC users for
the first time to display and work with 32-bit color images on the screen.
EPIC also published the TGA Targa file format for storing these true color
images.
Early animation companies such as Triple-I, Digital Productions, Lucasfilm,
etc. had to write their own software for creating computer graphics, however
this began to change in 1984. In Santa Barbara, California a new company was
formed called Wavefront. Wavefront produced the very first commercially
available 3D animation system to run on off-the-shelf hardware. Prior to
Wavefront, all computer graphics studios had to write their own programs for
generating 3D animation. Wavefront started a revolution that would shape the
future of all computer graphics studios. Also in that same year, Thomson
Digital Image (TDI) was founded by three engineers working for Thomson CSF,
a large defense contractor. TDI released its 3D animation software in 1986.
Up until this point, all of the image synthesis methods in use were based on
incidental light, where a light source was shining directly on a surface.
However, most of the light we see in the real world is diffused or light
reflected from surfaces. In your home, you may have halogen lamps that shine
incidental light on the ceiling, but then the ceiling reflects diffuse light
to the rest of the room. If you were going to create a 3D computer version
of the room, you might place a light source in the lamp shining up on the
ceiling. However, the rest of the room would appear dark, because the
software is based on direct light, incidental light and it would not reflect
off the ceiling to the rest of the room. To solve this problem, a new
rendering method was needed and in 1984 Cindy Goral, Don Greenberg and
others at Cornell University published a paper called, "Modeling the
Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces." The paper described a new
method called Radiosity that uses the same formulas that simulate the way
heat is dispersed throughout a room to determine how light reflects between
surfaces. By determining the exchange of radiant energy between 3D surfaces
very realistic results are possible.
In January of 1984, Apple Computer released the first Macintosh computer. It
was the first personal computer to use a graphical interface. The Mac was
based on the Motorola microprocessor and used a single floppy drive, 128K of
memory, a 9" high resolution screen and a mouse. It would become the largest
non IBM-compatible personal computer series ever introduced.
Around 1985, multimedia started to make its big entrance. The International
Standards Organization (ISO) created the first standard for Compact Discs
with Read Only Memory (CD-ROM). This new standard was called High Sierra,
after the area near Lake Tahoe, where ISO created the standard. This
standard later changed into the ISO 9660 standard. Today multimedia is a
major marketplace for personal computer 3D animation. In that same year,
Commodore launched the new Amiga personal computer line. The Amiga offers
many advanced features, including a hardware level compatibility with the
IBM personal computer line. The Amiga uses Motorola's 68000 microprocessor
and has its own proprietary operating system. The base unit's retail price
is $1,295.
Daniel Langlois in Montreal, Canada founded a company called Softimage in
1986. Then in early 1987 he hired some engineers to help create his vision
for a commercial 3D computer graphics program. The Softimage software was
released at the 1988 SIGGRAPH show and it became the animation standard in
Europe with over 1,000 installations world-wide by 1993.
During this time, Jim Henson of Muppets fame approached Brad DeGraf at
Digital Productions with the idea of creating a digital puppet. Henson had
brought with him a Waldo unit that he had previously used to control one of
his puppets remotely. The device had gotten its name from NASA engineers
years earlier. They in turn had taken the name from a 1940's Sci-Fi book
written by Robert A. Heinlein about a disabled scientist who built a robot
to amplify his limited abilities. The scientist's name was Waldo. Thus when
NASA (and later Henson) built their own version of the unit, they dubbed it
Waldo.
The programmers at Digital Productions managed to hook up the Waldo and
create animation with it, but that animation was never used for a commercial
project. Still, the idea of Motion Capture was born. Today motion capture
continues to be a major player in creating computer graphics. As for Digital
Productions, at the time things were going great. They had purchased a Cray
X-MP supercomputer because it was the fastest computer that money could buy.
They were interfacing film recording and scanning equipment and they had
about 75 to 100 employees. They had just finished their fist big movie
project, "The Last Starfighter" and they did some special effects scenes for
the movie 2010 (the swirling surface of Jupiter). They also worked on
"Labyrinth" in 1986. Things were going very well for Digital Productions,
perhaps things went too well.
In 1986 the two largest computer graphics houses in the United States were
bought out by Omnibus Computer Graphics Inc. in hostile takeovers, Digital
Productions (in June) and Robert Abel & Associates Inc. (in October). The
reason this is significant, is that both companies had invested heavily in
high-end supercomputers like the Cray X-MP (which cost about $13 million
each). This had put the focus on buying the fastest number cruncher money
could buy and then creating your own custom software.
As soon as Omnibus took control of Digital Productions the two co-founders
of Digital, John Whitney and Gary Demos, sued the majority owner of Omnibus,
Santa Clara-based Ramtek, for a portion of the sale proceeds. Omnibus
subsequently locked both of them out of their offices at Digital Productions
in July of 1986. In September Omnibus obtained a temporary restraining order
against Whitney and Demos alleging that Whitney and Demos founded a
competing firm, Whitney Demos Productions, and had hired at least three
employees away from Omnibus and were using software and other information
that belonged to Omnibus. The restraining order required Whitney and Demos
to return certain property temporarily to Omnibus.
In October, Omnibus acquired Robert Abel & Associates Inc. for $8.5 million.
However, by March of 1987, Omnibus started defaulting on the $30 million it
had borrowed from several major Canadian creditors. Most of the debts were
the result of acquiring Digital Productions and Robert Abel & Associates the
previous year. In May, Omnibus officially closed down and laid off all its
employees.
According to Gary Demos, "Abel & Associates was sunk just the same as us. At
the time, we were the two largest effects studios, and that crash fragmented
the entire industry. It changed the whole character of the development of
computer graphics." Talented people from both studios found their way into
other animation studios. Jim Rigel went to Boss Films, Art Durenski went to
a studio in Japan, some went to PDI, some went to Philips Interactive Media
(then known as American Interactive Media), others went to Rhythm & Hues,
Metrolight, and Lucasfilm. Whitney and Demos created Demos Productions in
1986. It lasted for two years, then they split up and formed their own
companies in 1988. Whitney formed US Animation Labs, while Demos formed
DemoGraphics.
In the personal computer field, computer graphics software was booming.
Crystal Graphics introduced TOPAS, one of the first high-quality 3D
animation programs for personal computers, in 1986. Over the years, Crystal
Graphics would continue to be a major contender in the PC based 3D animation
field. The following year, Electric Image was founded and released a 3D
animation package for both SGI machines and Apple Macintosh computers. In
Mountain View, California, a new 3D software company was founded under the
name Octree Software Inc.. They later changed their name to Caligari
Corporation and now offer 3D animation programs for both the Amiga and PC
platforms.
Also in 1986 computer graphics found a new venue, the courtroom. Known as
Forensic Animation, these computer graphics are more geared to technical
accuracy than to visual aesthetics. Forensic Technologies Inc. started using
computer graphics to help jurors visualize court cases. Still creating
Forensic animation today, they have been in the business longer than any
other company. Now they use SGI workstations from RS-4000's up through
Crimson Reality Engines. For their 3D software they exclusively use
Wavefront but have a few interfaces to CAD modeling packages. For 2D
animation they use a program called Matador by Parallax.
In that same year, Disney made its first use of computer graphics in the
film "The Great Mouse Detective." In this first Disney attempt at merging
computer graphics and hand draw cel animation, they only used the computer
for some of the mechanical devices such as gears and clockworks. A Computer
Generated Imagery (CGI) department was formed and went on to work on such
films as "Oliver and Company," "The Little Mermaid," "Rescuers Down Under,"
"Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin." With the highly successful results of
"Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast," Disney has increased the animators in
the CGI department from only 2 to over 14.
About this time at Lucasfilm, things were getting a little complicated. The
computer graphics division wanted to move toward doing a feature length
computer animated film. Meanwhile ILM was getting interested in the
potential of computer graphics effects. Catmull explains, "Lucas felt this
company was getting a little too wide and he wanted to narrow the focus into
what he was doing as a filmmaker. Our goals weren't really quite consistent
with his." So the computer graphics division asked if they could spin off as
a separate company and Lucas agreed to do that.
It took a year about a year of trying to make that happen. Catmull
continues, "One of the last things I did was hire two people to come in and
start a CGI group for ILM because they still wanted CGI special effects
capabilities. So I went out to a number of people but mainly focused on Doug
Kay and George Joblove. They turned us down the first time. We talked to
them and interviewed them and they called up and said 'We decided not to
come up, because we have our own company.' So I put down the phone and
thought 'damn I have to keep on looking.' Then that night I called back
again, and said 'Doug, you're crazy! This is the opportunity of a lifetime!
Something went wrong in the interview. Come back up here and let's do this
thing again.' He said 'OK!' so I brought him up again, we went through it
all again, and this time they accepted."
The computer graphics division of ILM split off to become Pixar in 1986.
Part of the deal was that Lucasfilm would get continued access to Pixar's
rendering technology. It took about a year to separate Pixar from Lucasfilm
and in the process, Steve Jobs became a majority stockholder. Ed Catmull
became president and Alvy Ray Smith became vice-president. Pixar continued
to develop their renderer, putting a lot of resources into it and eventually
turning it into Renderman.
Created in 1988, Renderman is a standard for describing 3D scenes. Pat
Hanrahan of Pixar organized most of the technical details behind Renderman
and gave it its name. Since then Hanrahan has moved to Princeton University
where he is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science.
The Renderman standard describes everything the computer needs to know
before rendering your 3D scene such as the objects, light sources, cameras,
atmospheric effects, and so on. Once a scene is converted to a Renderman
file, it can be rendered on a variety of systems, from Macs to PCs to
Silicon Graphics Workstations. This opened up many possibilities for 3D
computer graphics software developers. Now all the developer had to do was
give the modeling system the capability of producing Renderman compatible
scene descriptions. Once it did this, then the developer could bundle a
Renderman rendering engine with the package, and not worry about writing
their own renderer. When the initial specification was announced, over 19
firms endorsed it including Apollo, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, NeXT, MIPS,
Prime, and Walt Disney.
An integral part of Renderman is the use of 'shaders' or small pieces of
programming code for describing surfaces, lighting effects and atmospheric
effects. Surface shaders are small programs that algorithmically generate
textures based on mathematical formulas. These algorithmic textures are
sometimes called procedural textures or spatial textures. Not only is the
texture generated by the computer, but it is also generated in 3D space.
Whereas most texture mapping techniques map the texture to the outside
'skin' of the object, procedural textures run completely through the object
in 3D. So if you were using a fractal based procedural texture of wood grain
on a cube, and you cut out a section of the cube, you would see the wood
grain running through the cube.
The interesting part however was that Kay and Joblove (along with the other
CGI specialist at ILM) became so efficient and the CGI grew and grew until
today the CGI group is ILM. Its not a major department, it is...ILM. This is
viewed by some as one of the most stunning developments in computer graphics
history. One of the reasons the CGI department became so important is that
it succeeded in what it intended to do. They set goals, budgets and they met
them. Meanwhile, back at Pixar in December of 1988, Steve Jobs stepped down
from his post of Chairman of Pixar, and Ed Catmull took his place. Charles
Kolstad, the company's VP of manufacturing and engineering, became the new
president.
Paul Sidlo had worked as Creative Director for Cranston/Csuri Productions
from 1982 until 1987 when he left to form his own computer graphics studio,
ReZ.n8 (pronounced resonate). Since then, ReZ.n8 has continued to be a
leader in producing high quality computer graphics attracting such clients
as ABC, CBS, Fox, ESPN, NBC along with most of the major film studios.
Jeff Kleiser had been a computer animator at Omnibus were he directed
animation for the Disney feature film "Flight of the Navigator." Before
Omnibus Kleiser had founded Digital Effects and worked on projects such as
"Tron" and "Flash Gordon." As things started to fall apart at Omnibus he did
some research into motion capture. Then when Omnibus closed, he joined up
with Diana Walczak and formed a new company in 1987, Kleiser-Walczak
Construction Company. Their new firm's specialty was human figure animation.
In 1988 they produced a 3-1/2 minute music video with a computer generated
character named Dozo. They used motion control to input all of her
movements.
Brad DeGraf, also from Omnibus, joined forces with Michael Wahrman to form
DeGraf/Wahrman Production company. At the SIGGRAPH conference of 1988, the
showed, "Mike the Talking Head" which was an interactive 3D computer
animated head. Using special controls, they were able to make it interact
with the conference participants. Later DeGraf would leave Wahrman and go to
work for Colossal Pictures in San Francisco.
The Pixar Animation Group made history on March 29, 1989 by winning an Oscar
at the Academy Awards for their animated short film, "Tin Toy." The film was
created completely with 3D computer graphics using Pixar's Renderman. John
Lasseter directed the film with William Reeves providing technical
direction.
At the 1989 SIGGRAPH in Boston, Autodesk unveiled a new PC based animation
package called Autodesk Animator. As a full featured 2D animation and
painting package, Animator was Autodesk's first step into the multimedia
tools realm. The software-only animation playback capabilities achieved very
impressive speeds and became a standard for playing animation on PCs.
In 1989 an underwater adventure movie was released called "The Abyss." This
movie had a direct impact on the field of CGI for motion pictures. James
Cameron, director and screenwriter for Abyss, had a specific idea in mind
for a special effect. He wanted a water creature like a fat snake to emerge
from a pool of water, extend itself and explore an underwater oil-rig and
then to interact with live characters. He felt it couldn't be done with
traditional special effects tools and so he put the effect up for bid and
both Pixar and ILM bid on it. ILM won the bid and used Pixar's software to
create it. Catmull explains, "We really wanted to do this water creature for
the Abyss, but ILM got the bid, and they did a great job on it."
Cameron viewed this effect as a test piece and that if it didn't work out
then he could have done without it. But it did work, and it worked so well
and had enough of an impact, that it convinced him that CGI could create a
major character in his next film which would be "Terminator 2."
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