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lazygecko

70's/80's early computer animation

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I find this stuff so damn fascinating. I'm always blown away by how some of this tech has been around for much longer than I thought.

Here's 3D facial animation and raytracing from 1974 and 1978 respectively:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPMFhcC4SvQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV4qXzM641o

Around the mid to late 80's we started getting a lot more of that wonderfully cheesy (and sometimes awkward) stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIfh0XMrg6w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ovn8qRezPA

I used to think there were only chromed surfaces, teapots and chessboard tiles in the past.

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Well, it's a little known rule-of-thumb that whatever you see as (not necessarily cheap or affordable) commercial commodities today, existed in some practical proof-of-concept form at least 15-20 years ago somewhere (that "somewhere" being some university's lab, or classified R&D for either the military or a major corporation), though the time gap may be larger or smaller depending on the exact tech being considered.

For stuff that depends purely on processing power or consumer electronics, thanks to Moore's law and the magic of chinese sweatshops, the gap seems to be closing in much more rapidly than e.g. the 70s or the 80s, even the 90s. Of course, marketing plays a role. If e.g. people didn't want realistic video games or CGI movies, that face technology would probably be forgotten or used only by the police or in some more exotic context.

For stuff that requires more manufacturing refinements/economies of scale in more traditional sectors (e.g. energy, metallurgy, mechanics, materials etc.) even an entire generation may pass without -mere mortals- even hearing about it.

It would be interesting to learn if these animations were possible to do in real time: they must have taken the full processing power of some of the best supercomputers of the time, or the very least custom hardware. Then again, we don't know exactly what the state-of-the-art in the R&D dungeons might have been... remember the 10-15 year rule.

Edit: related, is Audiosurf just a ripoff of Star Rider, 25 years later? :-D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7z25MrF1hk

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They had 3D computer animation back in the early 70s? Son of a bitch! It would have been cool if we got 3D games back in the 70s, and todays video games would have been much better than what we have now if 3D computer games started in the early 70s.

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If you can find The Mind's Eye and the sequel Beyond the Mind's Eye, both videos showcase some experimental computer animation from times of yore. I prefer the first one, Jan Hammer did the soundtrack and he's fairly awesome.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167285/

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NitroactiveStudios said:

They had 3D computer animation back in the early 70s? Son of a bitch! It would have been cool if we got 3D games back in the 70s, and todays video games would have been much better than what we have now if 3D computer games started in the early 70s.

Yeah, but the CPU that rendered that bit of animation could probably be seen from space. You needed a machine that could fit in your living room and not cost the equivalent of the moon landing.

Aliotroph? said:

The scenes from those are all over YouTube. I used to really like it when they came on TV in the 90s.


If you are old enough to remember early nineties YTV.

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The first two videos (from the 70s) are interesting. Particularly the first one. I can't imagine the computer required to render the shadows and facial movement in the middle part. To think now we carry more powerful machines in our pockets.

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Cool stuff in this thread. The first time I remember seeing conspicuous CG in mass media was this:

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Technician said:

Yeah, but the CPU that rendered that bit of animation could probably be seen from space. You needed a machine that could fit in your living room and not cost the equivalent of the moon landing.


Not only that, but 3D (or at least "vector") games actually were available in the late 70s and early 80s, of course using the more economically viable tech for a marketable system: wireframe graphics, plus the math that made even solid polys possible etc. was already there. Something like Doom could be designed on paper and in formulas, maybe even implemented by a corporation with some billion dollars to spare, but no chance it could be made into a mass-marketable commodity that early.

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Considering the time it was made, the computer animation in Tron is really amazing. The insane thing is that computers were so underpowered back then that it took them several hours to render each frame.

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Probably several minutes (not counting the manual work to be done), but most definitively not hours: they were not done with run-of-the-mill homecomputers or generic workstations, but with expensive custom-designed systems. If an Amiga 500 could render moving polygons in real time in 1985 using nothing more than a stock 68000 and a 2D blitter (even without any fancy shading effects), surely a dedicated piece of hardware purpose-built could do much better.

(Edit: apparently, a modified PDP-10 Foonly (Super Foonly F-1) was used. You could say it had roughly the raw processing power of 5 68000-based Amigas (5 MIPS, according to this ). To put this into perspective, it's just a bit more than a 386 SX/25. At this level, real-time polygon engines with relative smoothness are possible at DOS game resolutions. By sacrificing the real-time constraint, you can add visual "bling", fancier shading modes and go to higher resolutions (Tron used "beautified" polygonal graphics with relatively high count, but not proper textures). We'd still be talking about minutes per frame, not hours (that would be full-blown ray-tracing).

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Danarchy said:

The insane thing is that computers were so underpowered back then that it took them several hours to render each frame.


Not to mention the physics and fast action scenes all had to be calculated and done frame by frame.

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Use3D said:

Not to mention the physics and fast action scenes all had to be calculated and done frame by frame.


I doubt they used "physics" in the same sense as the built-in physics of a modern software like 3D Studio: it's much more likely that they were working with manually manipulated meshes on a frame-per-frame basis, or at most with the aid of simple linear motion automation, e.g. computing all positions for a "tank" or "motorcycle" object. Getting the physics to look right was of course a task for someone with good imagination/visualization skills (3D previews? What 3D previews?) and good old paper & pencil calculations on the side.

Compare building a Doom map with Doombuilder and all its fancy 3D preview and texture alignment vs DEU with its manual sector placement, or even more cruder tools, e.g. a textual, verbose description of level laid down vertex by vertex.

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I'll have to take some time to look through these videos to make sure I don't repost, as I've seen a lot of vintage computer animation. I'm really impressed by a lot of this stuff, and can't help but wonder what the reaction was to it at the time. There's a Pixar short from 1984, the name of which I can't recall right now, that was the first computer animated short to feature motion blur.

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It seems there was a time when even Lucasfilm had to borrow Cray computers. Now they could probably fund their own supercomputer company.

I didn't realize that short was so old. I remember seeing it a lot in the 90s.

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Here's an interesting fact: It took around six months to render the 90 minutes of animation for the original "Toy Story." The third film, "Toy Story 3," took the same amount of time, because although the computers were much faster, the increased level of detail demanded the same amount of rendering time.

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