[Graphics_History]
ADVANCES OF THE 1990s
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 1980s
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
In May of 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0. It followed a GUI structure
similar to the Apple Macintosh, and laid the foundation for a future growth
in multimedia. While in 1990 only two of the nation's top ten programs ran
under Windows, this rose to nine out of ten just a year later in 1991.
Later that year, in October, Alias Research signed a 2.3 million dollar
contract with ILM. The deal called for Alias to supply 3D, state of the art
computer graphics systems to ILM for future video production. While ILM in
turn would test these new systems and provide feedback.
NewTek, a company founded in 1985, released the Video Toaster in October of
1990. The Video Toaster is a video production card for Amiga personal
computers that retails for $1,595. The card comes with 3D animation, and
24-bit paint software and offers video capabilities such as a 24-bit frame
buffer, switching, digital video effects, and character generation. The
practical video editing uses of the Video Toaster made it very popular, and
today it is used on broadcast television shows such as Sea Quest and Babylon
5 for 3D computer graphics.
Also in 1990, AutoDesk shipped their first 3D Computer animation product, 3D
Studio. Created for AutoDesk by Gary Yost (The Yost Group), 3D Studio has
risen over the past four years to the lead position in PC based 3D computer
animation software.
Disney and Pixar announced in 1991 an agreement to create the first computer
animated full length feature film, called "Toy Story," within two to three
years. This project came as a fulfillment to those early NYIT'ers who had
the dream of producing a feature length film. Pixar's animation group, with
the success of their popular Listerine, Lifesavers and Tropicana
commercials, had the confidence that they could pull off the project on time
and on budget.
"Terminator 2" (T2) was released in 1991 and set a new standard for CGI
special effects. The evil T-1000 robot in T2 was alternated between the
actor Robert Patrick and a 3D computer animated version of Patrick. Not only
were the graphics photorealistic, but the most impressive thing was that the
effects were produced on time and under budget.
The same year another major film was released in which CGI played a large
role, "Beauty and the Beast." After previously having one success after
another with computer graphics, Disney pulled out all the stops and used
computer graphics throughout the movie. In terms of the beauty, color and
design Disney did things that they could not possibly have done without
computers. Many scenes contained 3D animated objects, yet they were flat
shaded with bright colors so as to blend in with the hand-drawn characters.
The crowning sequence was a ballroom dance in a photorealistic ballroom
complete with a 3D crystal chandelier and 158 individual light sources to
simulate candles.
The effect of these two movies in 1991 on Hollywood was remarkable. Catmull
explains, "So what happened was in 1991 'Beauty and the Beast' came out,
'Terminator 2' came out and Disney announced that they had entered into a
relationship with us to do a feature length film computer animated film for
them. Beauty and T2 where phenomenal financial successes and all of a sudden
everybody noticed. That was the turning point, for all the ground work that
other people had been doing yet hadn't been noticed before. It all turned
around in 1991, it was the year when the whole entertainment industry said
'Oh my God!' and it took them by storm. Then they all started forming their
groups and their alliances and so forth."
Early in 1991, Steve Jobs gave the ax to all application development at
Pixar. Fearing that the selling of application software would discourage
other third party software developers from writing software for Job's NeXT
computer he halted all application development at Pixar. He gave the
employees 30 days to try and spin off a separate company to focus on
application software. This of course did not prove to be enough time, so the
president of Pixar, Chuck Kolstad, along with about 30 employees (almost
half of Pixar's workers) were laid off. Ed Catmull moved back into the
position of president. Pixar lost a lot of talent including Alvy Ray Smith
who went on to start a new company called Altamira (funded by Autodesk) and
created a PC version of his IceMan image editing software he created at
Pixar. This product is now commercially available on the market under the
name, Altamira Composer.
A Technical Award was given to six developers from Walt Disney's Feature
Animation Department and three developers from Pixar for their work on CAPS.
CAPS is a 2D animation system owned by Disney that simplifies and automates
much of the complex post-production aspects of creating full length cartoon
animations.
In 1993, Wavefront acquired Thomson Digital Image (TDI) which increased
Wavefront's market share in the high-end computer graphics market. Wavefront
immediately begin integrating products from TDI into their own line of
computer graphics software.
Early in 1993, IBM, James Cameron (writer/director/producer), Stan Winston
(special effects expert) and Scott Ross (visual effects executive from ILM)
joined forces to create a new visual effects and digital production studio
called Digital Domain. Located in the Los Angeles area, Digital Domain hopes
to give ILM a run for its money. Not to be out done, ILM followed with their
own announcement in April to form a joint "media lab" with Silicon Graphics
Inc. called JEDI (Joint Environment for Digital Imaging). ILM will get the
latest and greatest SGI hardware and SGI will get to use ILM as a testing
facility.
PDI opened their Digital Opticals Group in Hollywood to create special
effects for motion pictures such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Batman
Returns," and "The Babe." Now, PDI has become one of the leaders in digital
cleanup work such as wire removal, for motion pictures. Often wires are used
for special effects like people flying or jumping through the air. Sometimes
scratches occur on irreplaceable film footage. For "Terminator 2," PDI used
image processing to erase the wires that guided Arnold Schwarzenegger and
his motorcycle over a perilous jump. PDI uses software to automatically copy
pixels from the background and paste them over the pixels that represent the
wires.
Another edit for T2 involved a semi truck crashing through a wall and down
into a storm ditch. The original shot was made at the wrong angle. So the
director wanted the footage flipped left to right, to keep the continuity
consistent with surrounding shots. Normally this would not be a problem, yet
in this instance a street sign was in the picture, and even the driver could
be seen through the windshield of the truck. So these elements prevented the
normal flip that any studio could have performed. To solve these problems,
PDI first flipped the footage. Then they cut the sign from the unflipped
footage and pasted over top of the flipped sign. Then they copied and pasted
the driver from the left side of the truck to the right side. The finished
sequence looked flawless.
PDI performed many other sleights of hand for the movie "Babe," a
documentary about baseball legend Babe Ruth. A number of challenges faced
the producers, one of which was that the main actor, John Goodman is right
handed, while Babe Ruth was left handed. As you can imagine, this really
threw off many scenes where John had to pitch the ball. To resolve this
problem, PDI used digital image processing.
To create the effect of a pitch, John Goodman simply mimed it, without using
a ball. Then they filmed a left handed pitcher throwing the ball from the
same position. Then the baseball from the second shot was composited onto
the first shot. However, the actor playing the catcher had to fake it along
with John Goodman and the result was he didn't catch the ball at the same
time it arrived. To solve this problem, they split the scene down the middle
and merged the catcher from the second shot into the first shot. This
resulted in a flawless left-handed fastball. "Cleanup" special effects like
this have become a mainstay for computer graphics studios in the 80's and
90's.
Nintendo announced an agreement with Silicon Graphics, Inc. (the leader in
computer graphics technology) to produce a 64-bit 3D Nintendo platform for
home use. Their first product, Ultra64 will be an arcade game to be released
in 1994, while a home version will follow in late 1995. The home system's
target price will be $250.
In the early 1990's Steven Spielberg was working on a film version of the
latest Michael Crichton best seller, "Jurassic Park." Since the movie was
basically about dinosaurs chasing (and eating) people, the special effects
presented quite a challenge. Originally, Spielberg was going to take the
traditional route, hiring Stan Winston to create full scale models/robots of
the dinosaurs, and hiring Phil Tippett to create stop-motion animation of
the dinosaurs running and movements where their legs would leave the ground.
Tippett is perhaps the foremost expert on stop-motion and inventor of
go-motion photography. Go-motion is a method of adding motion blur to
stop-motion characters by using computer to move the character slightly
while it is being filmed. This new go-motion technique eliminates most of
the jerkiness normally associated with stop-motion. As an example, the
original King Kong movie simply used stop-motion and was very jerky. ET on
the other hand used Tippett's go-motion technique for the flying bicycle
scene and the result was very smooth motion. Tippett went to work on
Jurassic Park and created a test walk-cycle for a running dinosaur. It came
out OK, although not spectacular.
At the same time, however, animators at ILM began experimenting. There was a
stampeding herd of Gallimimus dinosaurs in a scene that Spielberg had
decided to cut from the movie because it would have been impossible to
create an entire herd of go-motion dinosaurs running at the same time. Eric
Armstrong, an animator at ILM, however, experimented by creating the
skeleton of the dinosaur and then animating a walk cycle. Then after copying
that walk cycle and making 10 other dinosaurs running in the same scene, it
looked so good that everyone at ILM was stunned. They showed it to Spielberg
and he couldn't believe it. So Spielberg put the scene back into the movie.
Next they tackled the Tyrannosaurs Rex. Steve Williams created a walk-cycle
and output the animation directly to film. The results were fantastic and
the full motion dinosaur shots were switched from Tippett's studio to the
computer graphics department at ILM.
This was obviously a tremendous blow to the stop-motion animators. Tippett
was later quoted in ON Production and Post-Production magazine as saying,
"We were reticent about the computer-graphic animators' ability to create
believable creatures, but we thought it might work for long shots like the
stampede sequence." However as it progressed to the point where the CGI
dinosaurs looked better than the go-motion dinosaurs, it was a different
story, he continues, "When it was demonstrated that on a photographic and
kinetic level that this technology could work, I felt like my world had
disintegrated. I am a practitioner of a traditional craft and I take it very
seriously. It looked like the end."
However, Tippett's skills were very much needed by the computer animators.
In order to create realistic movement for the dinosaurs, Tippett along with
the ILM crew developed the Dinosaur Input Device (DID). The DID is an
articulate dinosaur model with motion sensors attached to its limbs. As the
traditional stop-motion animators moved the model, the movement was sent to
the computer and recorded. This animation was then touched up and refined by
the ILM animators until it was perfect. Eventually 15 shots were done with
the DID and 35 shots were done using traditional computer graphics methods.
The animators at ILM worked closely with Stan Winston, using his dinosaur
designs so the CGI dinosaurs would match the large full-scale models Winston
was creating. Alias Power Animator was used to model the dinosaurs, and the
animation was created using Softimage software. The dinosaur skins were
created using hand-painted texture maps along with custom Renderman surface
shaders. The final scene which is a show-down between the T-Rex and the
Velociraptors was added at the last minute by Spielberg since he could see
that ILM's graphics would produce a realistic sequence. The results were
spectacular and earned ILM another Special Effects Oscar in March of 1994.
In February 1994, Microsoft Corporation acquired Softimage for 130 million
dollars. Microsoft's initial use of TDI technology will be internal, to
enhance their multimedia CD-ROM products and interactive TV programs.
Microsoft also plans to port the Softimage software over to its Windows NT
operating system. This may be the first move in starting a trend for the
shifting of high-end graphics software from workstations to personal
computers.
The summer of 1994 featured blockbusters full of computer graphics. Some
effects however, were so photorealistic that the computer's role was
undetectable. For example in the movie "Forrest Gump," artists at ILM used
digital compositing, overlaying different video sequences on top of each
other, to give the illusion that the actor Tom Hanks was in the same scene
as some famous American politicians like John F. Kennedy. They also used
standard image editing techniques to "cut" the legs off of an actor who
played the part of a wounded soldier who lost his legs in war. They simply
had him wear knee-high blue tube socks. Then after the film was scanned into
the computer, the artists used Parallax software to copy portions of the
background over the blue tube socks in every frame. The result is that Tom
Hanks picks the actor up off a bed and it looks as if the actor really has
no legs.
Another major project for ILM was the movie, "The Mask." In this movie, the
computer graphics artist at ILM had full creative freedom in producing wild
and extravagant personalities for the character of the Mask. In one case,
they digitally removed his head and replaced it with the head of a computer
generated wolf. In another scene, they animated a massive cartoon style gun
that the Mask pulls on a couple of criminals. This gun has multiple barrels,
swinging chains of machine gun bullets, even a guided missile with a radar
locks on the criminals. All of it was created photorealistically using 3D
graphics and then composited onto the live action shot.
Considering the quality and realism that we see in computer graphics today,
it's hard to imagine that the field didn't even exist just 30 years ago. Yet
even today the SIGGRAPH, the conference and exposition, continues to excite
the computer graphics community with new graphics techniques. And while
companies have come and gone over the years, the people haven't. Most of the
early pioneers are still active in the industry and just as enthusiastic
about the technology as they were when they first started. Many of these
pioneers that were discussed can be readily reached on the Internet. This
access is similar to being an artist and being able to pick up the phone and
call Monet, Michelangelo, Renoir, or Rembrandt.
[Image]
[Image]
[Image]
© The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.
Additional restrictions apply.
Mr. Potato Head® is a registered trademark of Hasbro Inc.
Used with permission. © 1995 Hasbro. All rights reserved.
Slinky Dog® © James Industries