Gregory's ServerAlso in 1983, Lucasfilm (later Pixar) made the first high-resolution computer-generated image that was supposed to be near-photorealistic and "a single-frame movie".
"The Road to Point Reyes" took a month to render.
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For some other cool stuff, see the timeline at the Computer History Museum; their website is always worth a visit! https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1983/ Honestly not sure why early computer graphics don’t get more attention, even a lot of computer-savvy folk don’t know much if anything about it Apparently people have a 80s computer graphics craving, didn’t think this would be so popular! I’ve a few books on the topic, maybe I’ll post some stuff here and there. :) @thomasfuchs This is my tribute to Steve Hillage, who regularly featured on my radio broadcasts in 1972  Tom, have you been working at all with Julian Gomez on the field's history? He's trying very hard to do the work on the tech as opposed to the art history of it. The Computer History Museum is involved as well, maybe not as much as they should be. The image in my previous post is the sketch for the Utah teapot by Martin Newell, read more here: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/computer-graphics-music-and-art/15/206  @thomasfuchs This takes me back. A friend had an Amiga toaster and did some very cool stuff in the late 90s, and another worked on the first CG cartoon, Reboot, produced here in Vancouver... .an we have come such a long way!!  @thomasfuchs I spent a lot of time staring at that pot in my advanced computer graphics class in 1986. For my major project I implemented Torrance-Sparrow shading, which gave a metallic as opposed to plastic look to the 3D rendering with shading.  @thomasfuchs I found "A Biography of the Pixel" by Alvy Ray Smith to be a fascinating history of the sampling theorem, photography, film animation, computers and, eventually, computer graphics. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542456/a-biography-of-the-pixel/ A blog post about the book and Smith at [ https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-true-history-of-the-pixel/ ] @thomasfuchs @thomasfuchs  @JohnMashey @thomasfuchs I do wonder how many man-days I've spent in the CHM. Wonderful stuff, thanks for all your work with CHM.  @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io In 1994 the PS1 was released and could do that in real time @thomasfuchs i remember reading about this, hopping in a car and driving out there. point reyes is truly magical @dmitry @thomasfuchs it is, but you don't get a double rainbow in a cloudless sky in real life. @thomasfuchs "Pencil Test," Apple's first 3D animated short took a month or so to render on a network of 30 Mac IIs. Fun time, but far from photorealistic.  @thomasfuchs fascinating. this image is referred to in an excellent book on the history of Lucasfilm, especially the origins of the pixar imaging computer.. Droidmaker by michael rubin @thomasfuchs Puts the whole „The moon landing was just CGI“ conspiracy theory in context. 😁 @thomasfuchs what did it look like? You seem to have attached a beautiful scenic photo by mistake. @thomasfuchs @wjarosz Don't forget to mention the backronym Renders Everything You Ever Saw - the name of Pixar's rendering architecture @thomasfuchs   I have that framed on my wall next to the Pencil Test Pencil! Pixar sent the poster out to all of the graphics companies, and no one at AED but me wanted it!  @thomasfuchs Snow Crash, the book that coined the term “metaverse,” was written in 1982.  @jimfl @thomasfuchs 1992. That book was used as a blueprint for so many Web1.0 tech startups, for better or worse. Kind of funny that Zuck is trying to go back to that well considering he's firmly a Web2.0 era tech bro. Everything old is new again, I guess.
 @thomasfuchs This is a great depiction of all the speculation about ChatGPT replacing all programmers and writers recently on Twitter.  @thomasfuchs Ok, but that doesn’t look like a road going to Point Reyes. It kinda looks like the road going from Bolinas, but only if you remove the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco.   @thomasfuchs I thought that was a screenshot from Need For Speed II. My biggest shock was that Myst remakes had way better real-time graphics than the pre-rendered original. @thomasfuchs "Reyes" is a reference to "Render Everything You Ever Saw" ... Lucasfilm's (and later Pixar's) renderer which became the core of PR RenderMan. It was first used to render the Genesis Effect sequences in Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan. And yeah, at 6000x4000, a month to render on the VAX. ;) @thomasfuchs @tschak  @thomasfuchs i can't tell if this is based off an actual stretch of road out by Point Reyes, and if so how closely (the distant terrain definitely looks like it could just be a perlin heightmap or somesuch) but i know this stretch of land pretty well... it might be the view south down Oyster Road heading towards Drake's Bay (38.083867 x -122.931750 roughly). either way, lovely image for 1983 and a bit of lucasfilm history i wasn't aware of. @jplebreton @thomasfuchs I think this image predates the publication of Perlin noise (1985). The mountains were, I believe, done by Loren Carpenter. Here's a nice interview where he explains the technique and inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5moYMIp8iU  @thomasfuchs Am I doing the math right? A year of rendering for half a second of film? Really gives an idea of how far things have come since then. I remember rendering short ordinary videos in the AV club in the 90's. Took an hour to render a minute of ordinary edited video with minimal effects. That feels so long ago now, I sometimes forget how things were. @thomasfuchs the first computer generated movie I saw was in an IMAX theatre in the Netherlands as part of a treat for contestants of a computer programming contest. It was called "The Magic Egg", released as part of SIGRAPH in 1984. It blew my teenage brain. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0087662/ Edit: The movie itself: https://youtu.be/nf7jpGMkOnI  @thomasfuchs I've seen this image many times in a Soviet book about computer graphics. It was a translation of an American book. The title escapes me at the moment, but there were many pictures inside, including a very impressive & realistic shot of pool balls hitting each other with accurate motion blur and everything. @thomasfuchs I wonder if people back then bought this a realism. It's not the same but I remember thinking some mid/late 2000's games were very realistic when I was a kid @thomasfuchs I remember seeing this on the back of "The home computer course" magazine series, I was gobstruck compared to what we had with spectrums and C64s...  @thomasfuchs Remember how wowed we all were at the CGI genesis device in The Wrath of Khan?    @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io thats impressive for 83 :anya_whoaa:  @thomasfuchs Wow. Was it raytraced? Those subtle puddles have some nice reflections. I'm really struck by how flat the lighting is. I guess they just hadn't figured out the algorithms for better lighting yet?  @thomasfuchs now demosceners create better stuff in 4096 bytes of exegfx :D @thomasfuchs I actually adore repeated textures in things like this, shows how far we’ve come 🥰  @thomasfuchs And these days it's "the puddles are not shiny enough in 4k 120 fps GaAAaaHhHHHH!!" @thomasfuchs I remember seeing this at the time (maybe in Byte? Can't recall) and being so astounded by it and how realistic it was and thinking it would be an amazing day when this level could be rendered real time. It happened a lot faster than I thought it would and this picture looks so dated now 🙂 @cmrdporcupine yeah, you could render stuff like this about 10 years later or so on mainstream PCs @thomasfuchs I remember first seeing CG art in a kids tv show art show around the same time. Memory is hazy (and I can’t find the clip) but I think they used an Amiga. This was a very mainstream show, so was very cool to see. I remember a cool Art of Noise soundtrack to it, too. I do love learning about CG art from back then - what was achieved with (relatively) so little is amazing. @thomasfuchs Wow! And what an interesting mix of apparently really low resolution detail (e.g. the coastlines, the road markings) and really high resolution detail (e.g. the plants). What's up with that? @thomasfuchs I remember seeing this image in a magazine and bringing it into my computer class. @thomasfuchs I want to believe it rendered in one, uninterrupted session. In 1983 it would also have been impressive to find a display that could have done justice to this image. I wonder how many people looked at a 60hz interlaced version.  @thomasfuchs and now my iPad renders better than that real time while tracking cycling metrics live. Tech is pretty cool |
40 years later our phones or even our watches can render much more detailed and realistic scenes in real-time.