1977 Star Wars Computer Graphics 271
Noryungi writes "The interestingly named 'Topless Robot' has a real trip down memory lane: how the computer graphics of the original Star Wars movie were made. The article points to this
YouTube video of a short documentary made by Larry Cuba, the original artist, that explains how he did it. In 1977."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMeSw00n3Ac
NOT the original graphics! (Score:4, Funny)
Don't believe these lies.
The wireframe of the death star did not shoot first in the original.
Lucasfilm VAX (Score:5, Interesting)
Dials for manipulating 3D objects (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Re:Dials for manipulating 3D objects (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.3dconnexion.com/3dmouse/overview.php [3dconnexion.com]
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"Get 50% fewer mouse clicks and 20% greater productivity using a 3Dconnexion navigation device."
Only 20% increased productivity ?
Why not say 50% or 100%...
amateurs
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Battlezone on the lowly 1 megahertz Atari VCS (1977) - I like the cool effects when the tank blows up. It's also very colorful for an ancient 70s game (128 colors)
http://www.atariguide.com//ss/batlzone.gif [atariguide.com]
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Flash movie of Battlezone Arcade in action: http://www.thelogbook.com/pdfmedia/1980/battlezone/ [thelogbook.com] - Atarisoft version on C=64: http://www.lemon64.com/games/screenshots/full/b/battlezone_02.gif [lemon64.com]
Other vector-based games: http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/category/arcade/vector/ [thelogbook.com]
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Those were common in early cadd systems, they didn't have a mouse. They used digitizing tables and 3d inputs like you see in the video.
I would have liked to know more about the technology, not just how he did it with "a computer". What cadd package was it? What hardware?
Most likely something from Unigraphics or Intergraph, as those were big 3d modeling packages of the era.
Nowadays 3d inputs are easier with spaceballs and a simple mouse, or a 3d mouse.
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Are you referring to these Spaceballs [wikipedia.org]?
May the Schwartz be with you!
Re:Dials for manipulating 3D objects (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Until about 2002 or so (about when SGI tanked), most of the high-end 3D systems supported MIDI devices as controllers. You could plug in a MIDI knob or slider box and connect it up to the joints of your character. For some reason, few people do that any more. Support for that never really caught on when 3D moved to the PC, even though MIDI devices were cheap.
The Jurassic Park guys had a small dinosaur skeleton model with sensors at the joints wired up to a MIDI interface, so they could pose the thing and the animation would follow. That sort of thing was popular around 1995-2000 because it required little retraining for stop-motion animators.
Re:Dials for manipulating 3D objects (Score:5, Funny)
I just imagine manipulating 3d graphics with a casio pg-380 midi guitar.
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Perhaps improved IK algorithms and motion capture have proven even more helpful than MIDI-connected dumb models.
I suspect, if you want to bring the models back, that you are going to need feedback: stepping through frames and having the "physical model" update its joint positions would make it a lot easier to avoid accidentally jerky inputs. As to whether this would be a significant enough improvement over skeletal models with elaborate constraints, I dunno.
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You can get a bunch of these: http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/ [griffintechnology.com]
These used to be common, long ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial_box [wikipedia.org]
The "3Dmouse" mentioned above is not a dial. It is a puck that's spring-loaded to stay centered.
You cannot rotate it freely, so it is a relative control and not an absolute control.
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Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Yeah, here [amazon.com].
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Griffin Technology's PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller [griffintechnology.com].
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Yes my ancient 1985 Amiga at just 7 megahertz has a pirate demo like that. It showed a 3D rabbit, and you could spin him in any direction using just your mouse and the right button. It was impressive in the 80s.
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Yes. I think it's called a mouse.
Really, you could just use the mouse wheel combined with a single key modifier (hold a key on the keyboard) that would rotate whatever plane (X/Y/Z) you wanted when you spun your mouse wheel.
Mouse wheels have shitty resolution, though. They click to individual stops, they're sent to the host as if they were button presses...
More to the point I think is the fact that in current software, when you rotate a model with the mouse, it normally rotates it relative to the position it's in. I'm not sure if this is how those dials worked, but I'm guessing not: probably it would have been simpler then to have each dial affect rotation parameters in a matrix, and then create the projection just by multip
your sig (Score:2)
Perhaps we could train the butterknife to do acrobatics or sing Stairway to Heaven and it would be more interesting. Maybe cast the handle as a Mandelbulb http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/15/2032233 [slashdot.org]
yeah (Score:5, Funny)
The interestingly named "Topless Robot"
*click*
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It would just be schematics.
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Re:yeah (Score:4, Funny)
One of the few times Slashdotters have actually bothered to click the links...
2001 Space Odyssey "computer graphics" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:2001 Space Odyssey "computer graphics" (Score:5, Interesting)
That's right, kids: no computers were used in the making of "2001". Pretty remarkable.
It's ironic: in "2001" (the movie) Kubrick had to use analog methods to simulate digital technology. But by 2001 (the year), filmmakers were using digital technology to simulate analog objects. [imdb.com]
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The last SF movie claiming to be made with totally analog eFX was Bladerunner [cinefex.com]. Now *that* was film making.
Analog Computers (Score:5, Interesting)
The first digital computer I programmed was an IBM 1800 built in 1966 (and was donated to our university in 1975 where I got my hands on it) so I well know the level of computer power available when 2001 ASO was filmed. Back then analog computers were more suitable than digital computers for many real world tasks. Anyone studying computer science then was expected to be able to build an analog circuit to solve differential equations for example, that way was faster than the digital methods at the time. It would have taken quite a while to render a movie scene with the 4K that was left of the 1800's RAM after the compiler/runtime was loaded.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, Get off my lawn!
Re:Analog Computers (Score:5, Interesting)
Daisy was sung by a digital computer.
That's "bicycle built for two" - and if we're talking about computers in movies, here - HAL's singing "bicycle built for two" was a human actor singing, of course. The inspiration for that bit was one of the early examples of computer music by Max Mathews [emf.org]...
So basically I don't think that's really relevant as an example of computer-generated stuff in films.
Re:Analog Computers (Score:4, Interesting)
John Whitney only proposed using computers for that sequence. Douglas Trumbull was inspired by his work and used the (analog) slit-scan technique [blogspot.com].
Re:2001 Space Odyssey "computer graphics" (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure? I was so certain that the last part of that movie was directed by a random number generator.
Re:2001 Space Odyssey "computer graphics" (Score:5, Interesting)
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My personal favorite substitute for expensive early computer graphics was in Escape from New York [wikipedia.org]. To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
Yeah, I do tend to wonder why they did that sequence in Star Wars with computers when they could have used the models they were already building and faked a "computer display look" via photographic processes... Among other things I guess this would have meant delaying the briefing scene until they were done with all the Death Star trench parts (since the parts would need to be re-painted in order to do the phosphorescent lines trick) - and it would be a different effect, like wireframe with hidden surface
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To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
It wasn't phosphorescent paint and they didn't shoot it in the dark. They painted the boxes black, and used reflective tape to make the grid lines; then they lit the model brightly and panned the camera through it. With black background and super-bright glowing white lin
Better Then CGI (Score:4, Insightful)
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Jar Jar Binks is indeed more fitting for a Benny Hill [youtube.com] bit.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. The scenes where the Vogons are done with puppetry are amazing, the scenes where they're CGI are 'meh'. Same goes for the original Alien vs the A v P movies, as soon as I see CGI (especially for characters/animals) the emotion center of my brain says 'nope' and shuts down.
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I don't understand the anti-CGI attitude, and I'm in the older age group that is supposed to. I see a guy in a rubber suit/mask and I *my* brain says nope and starts to laugh. They're *both* fake. Who cares, really, about the tool used to realize the fakeness? Yeah, there's some poorly integrated CGI out there, but there's also CGI most people don't even notice because it's so slickly done and depicts everyday objects.
You don't have the same reaction if the whole film is CGI, do you?
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Interesting)
CGI is like make-up; it's good for covering blemishes, but if it's obvious then you're probably doing it wrong.
The problem is that the film industry is to CGI what a ten year old girl is to make up; nothing and no one is safe.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Funny)
*** someone what of a spoiler alert ***
If you ever watched the making of one of the Aliens movies you found out the slime from he aliens mouths is corn syrup. All that sweet smelling stuff free flowing over everything. After I found that out the aliens lost a lot of their scariness. I seen the slime drooling out of one of those alien's mouths and my brain goes "ooo candy".
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HFCS? You should be more scared.
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as soon as I see CGI (especially for characters/animals) the emotion center of my brain says 'nope' and shuts down.
I have the same experience, but it's probably just a cognitive bias. It doesn't seem to affect young children without preconceived expectations. Anecdotally, my kids prefer CGI over puppetry because the latter isn't "cool" enough.
At any rate, the common Hollywood explanation/excuse seems to be that it's not the quality of CGI that makes it preferred, but the cost and flexibility. Once you bu
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie.
Do I have to?
People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing that they seem to have forgotten about the "Ford is supposed to be funny" thing...
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Without CGI the tv show Babylon 5 could have never been made (too many war scenes) for the cheap cost that WB could afford (half Star Trek's budget).
Other shows that likely wouldn't exist in the format we got are the New Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG1, SGA, SGU with their numerous space battle. Instead we'd have something like Buck Rogers or Space 1999 that barely have any space scenes at all, due to the cost of models being too high. i.e. Claustrophobic.
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Without CGI the tv show Babylon 5 could have never been made (too many war scenes) for the cheap cost that WB could afford (half Star Trek's budget).
There's a big difference between using CGI for exterior shots (cheaper than models and looks fine; models and CGI both look better if you spend more time on them, but CGI looks better for the same investment) and using CGI for interior shots. Babylon 5 used it for backdrops on a few shots, but most of the sets were full of props. The newer Star Wars films had almost nothing except green boxes in the sets and added everything else later. In Babylon 5, all of the aliens used props. If they couldn't make r
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:4, Interesting)
I think most of the problem with CGI is that filmmakers trust it too much.
Take the Burly Brawl scene in The Matrix: Reloaded. Amazing CGI work for most of the fight. Then they go to slow motion and you can see every mistake in plain view.
If you did most CGI effects the same way they generally do them with models (bad lighting, odd angles, quick cuts) you'd never know it was CGI.
Oddly enough, it's often the camera-work that gives it away. Some films are finally going away from this, but there's still a very stereotypical CGI camera movement that just doesn't feel natural.
Well, that and the constant presence of over-animated impossible robotics. Old robots felt so much more realistic when they actually had to be driven by something to work instead of having random pieces pop out everywhere with no support structure.
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It was obviously a puppet. Just as obviously, it exists. Just as most CGI obviously doesn't. Neither effect can really be mistaken for the actual object they're representing, but at least the puppet is tangible, striking better emotional cues amongst the other actors and the audience.
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but at least the puppet is tangible, striking better emotional cues amongst the other actors and the audience.
Uhh yeah. Because if Jar Jar Binks was a puppet instead of CGI he somehow would have been less unfunny and annoying?
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Insightful)
What made the original star wars great was the animitronics for all the characters instead of jar jar binks super imposed cartoon characters.
What made JarJar obnoxious was not how his image was created for the film. That's like blaming YouTube for the abundance of noisy idiots on-line.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Insightful)
No, AOL was to blame for that.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:4, Insightful)
>CGI has ruined movies
Are you kidding? Yoda looks like a rag doll in the originals. The cantina puppets are pretty bad and Jabba's palace is a B-quality muppet showcase. If anything, CGI is producing a seamlessness that is impossible with the old techniques.
If you cannot suspend your disbelief then thats your problem, not anyone else's.
>jar jar binks super imposed cartoon characters.
Thats an implementation issue, not a technological one. There's tons of CGI in those movies that looks amazing. In fact, I suspect its so good you dont even know its CGI. Blame Lucas and his people for skimping out when it came to their ridiculous Jamaican amphibian. If anything, it was probably a design decision to make JarJar look more cartoony and less realistic than the other CGI.
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Actually, on further thought, you're right and I'm wrong. Jim Henson was a moron who animated a crappy character and any CGI done by someone who knows the menus of Maya must b
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I'd go along with that... these are the same people who decided that the definitive battle of the 3rd movie should take place on Endor rather than Kashyyk as originally planned.... Oh, and while we're at it, let's cut the Wookiee in half. I mean, seriously... taking out an AT-ST by throwing rock
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I am pretty sure Jar Jar would have sucked even more as a muppet.
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Can we all agree never to mention JarJar again.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:5, Insightful)
CGI has ruined movies, they are so in your face that you can't enjoy the movie
It's not just the graphics, it's the film-making.
Did you notice on this one how the initial shots of the Death Star graphics are a wide shot showing all the pilots slouching around listening to the briefing? That was the point, not the graphics.
Today they would have framed that shot tight on the graphics with the speaker on one side. But by not focusing on the graphics they're more powerful - in this universe, it's just commonplace, nothing that needs highlighting (until the detail is small enough that the audience wouldn't be able to follow, so they zoom in then). To somebody watching in 1977 the effect is heightened.
The point here is the briefing and the reactions of those assembled to highlight just how ridiculous and impossible (without an assist from the "more powerful than you can possibly imagine" Ben Kenobi) the task is. But they're going to try anyway because humans fight to be free.
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:4, Funny)
Today they would have framed that shot tight on the graphics with the speaker on one side.
And the guy would be showing a PowerPoint, littered with stock photos of generic, diverse, Stormtroopers sitting around an office conference table with happy looks on their faces.
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I would argue that it and other elements of LOTR that used CGI were of the calibre that they were because they relied on *real* stuff (in the case of Gollum, an actual actor having his actions/features captured, not just dialogue). So many wonderful settings, although augmented and given backdrops or details filled in by CGI, were actually created as sets and props. Even the obvious CGI looks better due to relying on real stuff (e.g. replicating orc hordes based on a sizable enough mini-horde of people dres
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Naah. What made EpIV stand out was that the characters were animated by actors and technicians rather than by puppetteers.
In the later films, "Original Yoda" looked and sounded too much like Fozzie Bear, and moved just like a like a muppet.
"Fozzie Bear am I, muppet am I being". Pah.
Had the exaggerrated theatricality that some puppeteers get off on, which was fine on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, but on a "realistic" film just amounts to really hammy acting. You know the thing, where every action is l
Re:Better Then CGI (Score:4, Insightful)
1920's Sound has Ruined movies, they are so in your face you can't enjoy the movie. ...
1940's Color has Ruined Movies, they are so in you face you can't enjoy the movie.
1960's Elaborate Costumes have Ruined moves....
1980's Animtronics
2000 CGI...
It is just a new toy that its use hasn't been fully realized yet. And excuse to hate something new. They made bad movies in the past and they will do so in the future. It is not CGI but bad use of it. Jar-Jar was a stupid character who wasn't needed especially as they kept the droids. Having him as not a CGI character wouldn't make him any better.
The "lastest toy" phenomenon (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed each of this new technology did it share of ruining.
It's not that these technologies are inherently bad. It was just the "latest toy around" and lots of directors felt compelled to over-abuse it and put it everywhere even where it definitely shouldn't be used. Directors started considering as a magic trick that will inherently make a film better as soon as it is used.
It happened with every single stuff you mention.
It happened in other media too - any one remember how "let's all go full 3D" completely
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bull shit.
It's called 'poor movie making'. CGI didn't ruin anything. CGI has been used in a lot of good movies as well as high grossing movie.
The only problem with Jar-Jar is that he fell into the uncanny valley; which made people feel odd and therefor they don't like it. Also, the character was stupid as a rock. To my that was the ubforgivable sin of Jar-Jar. Almsot everything he did could be chalked up to being alien.
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Even if there was no CGI used in the prequels they still would have sucked. Jar Jar wouldn't be less annoying and less unfunny had it been an animatronic. Hayden Christiansen's stilted acting would have still sucked had the environments not been CGI rendered scenes. The midichlorian angle would still have been stupid. The failings of the prequel trilogy had almost nothing to do with the CGI and all to do with a poorly written story with piss-poor acting by many of the main actors. Using animatronics an
Looker (Score:2)
Looker came out in 1980, and that featured some cool wireframe models of humans. IIRC it also had textures. Not sure if it was entirely CGI, but it looked wonderful nonetheless.
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I used one of those (Score:2)
I had a job around 1990 using a digitizing pad. I used one of those four button mice that had the wire ring around cross-hairs that I would put over the point I wanted to capture. Very cool to see something like that again. Ah, the memories.
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I'm very envious. Ten years after this guy's work I spent some time writing a (lesser) version of the trench graphics sequence in Turbo Pascal. I derived all the coordinates from sketches on graph paper. :)
OK, so that was about the extent of my budget too.
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Bleah! I was a cart-tech and dig-tech for about 6 years. If I never sit at a digitizing table or look at a Nat'l Wetlands Survey map again, that's fine by me!
Ah yes... (Score:5, Funny)
Vector vs Raster graphics (Score:5, Informative)
The reason Larry Cuba could do real-time rendering in 1976 was that he was using a vector graphics display (http://www.cca.org/vector/). In a vector display, there are no pixels. There is no video RAM. Instead, there is a list of (x y) pairs (a list of positions on the screen, each with an off/on flag). The controller simply loops through the list over and over: the (x y) are fed to digital-to-analog converters, which drive the left/right and up/down deflectors for the CRT's electron beam. The on/off flags turn the beam on and off. In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
If you stick to black and white, you don't need a CRT mask to separately illuminate the red, green and blue phosphor dots. Without this mask, you can get some very sharp images.
If Cuba were using pixels instead, he would have needed megabytes to hold an image. I doubt anyone could afford a megabyte. Moreover, I doubt that in 1976 the electronics was fast enough to even read an image's bytes and turn it into a CRT signal. And that's just displaying the image on the screen. To create the image in the first place, he would have needed, for each line segment, to fill in all the pixels from endpoint to endpoint. There's no way he could have filled that many pixels in real time. But with a vector display, filling is done by the movement of the electron beam, and costs you zero computation.
Alejo
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In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
Since you obviously know a lot more about this than I, I'm curious: I had a graphics workstation from the early 1980's, and the monitor had a panel that was filled with tiny adjustment knobs, that allowed me to adjust the x/y for individual sections of the screen so straight lines were actually straight. Your comment about 'the longer the list' makes me wonder if that monitor had 9 different electron guns rather than just one, since it was (for the times) a huge screen and the obvious way to deal with the
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This is speculation, but I have a feeling that what you're talking about was a clever way to help create a "flat" screen.
If you have a single CRT and you want the beam to be focused on every part of your screen, you have to project onto a section of a sphere--which is why a CRT TV screen has a "bulge" to it.
If you project onto a flat surface, and have the beam focal point at the distance to the center of the screen, then it'll be out of focus as you move away from the middle (since the depth from the gun is
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I wrote a vector line drawing app on my Ti 99/4A back in '83. You'd enter a double column of x,y coordinates (start and stop point of line) and it'd then draw it to screen. I did that all in basic when I was 15. Never did get around to figuring out how to view the layout from different angles.
What Lucus Didn't Change (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article:
And it reminds me of something -- when the Star Wars special editions were about to come out in '97, I was certain that Lucas was going to redo those computer effects, like from the Rebel briefing and on the Millennium Falcon's display during the TIE Fighter dogfight. Dead certain, because if anything dated the Star Wars movies (besides Hamill's hair) it was the computer effects.
Quite true. In fact, the original model effects of the whole battle still look pretty good, but other parts of the movie are quite dated, and not all of them were changed in the new versions. Another example is Yoda's death scene, where the muppet disappears and sheet slowly falls into the unoccupied space. It's an obvious piece of stop motion animation, and I'm surprised Lucas didn't redo it in CGI in some of the newer remakes of Star Wars (the ones where Han shoots at the same time). He already had a Yoda computer model by then from the prequels, which is half the work done right there.
Seen it (Score:2)
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we're not. At least I'm not. I've been aware of how they did it since 1980.
So, what was the machine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Larry said he wrote the software to do the combining of the primitives for the trench, but what was the hardware? I've used E&S consoles similar to those, but those were VAX driven, which wasn't an option in 1976. The terminal looked similar to a VT05, but that was just an impression while watching.
Re:So, what was the machine? - I used it. (Score:5, Interesting)
The machine was a PDP-11. It was a PDP-11/45 running a one-of-a-kind graphics OS, called GRASS, the Graphics Symbiosis System written by Tom DeFanti, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle). Tom's appointment then was to the Chemistry Dept.; the GRASS system was used primarily for molecular modeling. It drove an Evans & Sutherland Picture System, a giant $100,000 vector graphics engine worth five times what the PDP-11 was worth.
Larry's work pushed the system to its limits. His work was done at night, on the QT, with Tom's permission. This was done by giving Larry his own disk pack with a copy of the system on it. Larry's use of the system worked around all sorts of bugs in that relatively early version of GRASS. The film was made by pointing a (film) camera at the E&S screen, and running a macro which would render a frame, click the camera, render a frame, click the camera... While the PDP-11 system could in fact render the Death Star trench in real time, by the time you included all the little bits and frobs, the E&S took long enough to draw it that the display flickered. Hence the need to do frame-by-frame. Also, there was no frame-sync hardware in the system; the camera and display were connected only by the solenoid that tripped the camera shutter.
I played with that disk pack a year or two after the fact and it was a hoot to fly around the Death Star by hand. GRASS pioneered the interactive control of complex graphics, so all the position (and other) variables could trivially be tied to dials, etc. I was discouraged by one thing: the final version of the run had apparently been deleted from the disk. The only version I could find had the big "dish" directly on the equator of the Death Star, not at 45 degrees north latitude as in the film.
Years after that, I happened to talk to Larry Cuba by phone about something else, and asked him about that. He said the version I saw WAS the final version. Years after that, when I went to my "farewell to Star Wars viewing of Star Wars", I saw he was right. The plans shown to the rebels show the dish on the equator. Obviously the plans were fake. Those rebels were all dead men.
Larry Cuba's comments on the video (Score:2, Informative)
Taken from Motionographer [motionographer.com]
Greetings all.
I have a few comments about this post:
The Video:
This “making of” video was originally produced for my personal presentations as I was often asked to explain the process (back in the 70s and 80s when it was still obscure). Lucasfilm was vigilant in protecting its copyrighted material but OK’d this video at the time, since i had no intention of distributing it. (although copies apparently escaped) I wonder what they would say, now that the EVL in Chicago has resurrected it (after 30 years!) and posted it on YouTube.
The YouTube link to “Calculated Movements”:
It should be noted that this video is an *excerpt* from the film, posted by the EVL.I also posted my ‘official’ excerpt here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH0MXZ-T4Js [youtube.com]
Some day soon, all of my films will be available on DVD. They should be projected large, if possible as scale is important when you’re dealing with visual perception.
Those who are interested, should watch my site for news, or sign my guestbook and I’ll notify you when it’s released.
http://www.well.com/~cuba/ [well.com]
Thanks for the attention.
Regards,
Larry Cuba
Effects. (Score:2)
This reminds me of this application I had on my old 4Mhz PCjr that did nothing but draw a 3d wireframe of a cowboy hat. It took a good 30 minutes to draw that thing. I recall us running it on some faster machine some time later and it drew the thing in seconds. On one of my machines now I could have a far more complex hat, with textures, lighting and more and not only would it render the thing pretty much immediately, but it could move around at a nice framerate too.
Regarding effects in movies, I agree with
Great work first time around (Score:2)
It's just too bad that they couldn't clean up all the slugs and garbage mattes [cinenet.net] in all the reissues since.
Buck Rogers (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember seeing, hearing or reading something, a long time ago, from one of the effects guys on the Buck Rogers TV series (the Gil Gerrard one.) He was describing an effect in which they needed a 3-D wireframe model of a spaceship rotating on a computer monitor (much like you see here.)
He said that he spent a fair bit of time trying to program a computer to do it, but couldn't get it to work (not really a math or computer guy at all). In the end, he fell back on what he knew best: mechanical effects. He whipped up a wireframe model using actual wire, painted it day-glo orange, mounted it on a gimbal, and stuck the whole thing inside a hollowed-out computer monitor with the insides painted black.
Sometimes the old ways are the best ways...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
First post, and you still got modded redundant. :(
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Everyone knows that Firefly is way better.
Re:Firefly sucks (Score:2)
V is better.
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I didn't even realise that any of the graphics in that movie were CGI. I RTFA, and I was disappointed (no video, I'll have to look again at home). The text of TFA was incredibly lame.
It seems I saw a "making of Star Wars" once and don't remember anything about computer generated graphics, buut rather computer-controlled models. IIRC the first CGI used in a feature length movie was Star Trek 2 [wikipedia.org] in 1982, and the only CGI there was the Genesis Effect that lasted less than two minutes.
The CGI in TRON [wikipedia.org] (the same y
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The first CGI used in a feature length movie was in Westworld (1973). Other notable uses are Futureworld (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Alien (1979), Looker (1981) and Tron (1982).
For my money, though, the biggest breakthrough was in 1984, with two movies which used what we would now think of as CGI visual effects (The Last Starfighter and Young Sherlock Holmes). If you don't count the star field warp effect in Star Wars, this was the first time that computers were used to produce the look of something in
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No he drew almost-everything by hand, tracing the photographs of the models. I thought it was interesting it took the computer 2 minutes to display just 1/24th second of the animation. Slow and time-consuming.
~3 years later computers could do these graphics in realtime:
http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/video/batlzone.swf [thelogbook.com]
"amazing by today's standards"?? (Score:4, Interesting)
...even for todays standards...
For today's standards? Seriously?
Twenty years ago this is the kind of project a hobbyist could have taken on, working alone. A PC from that era would have been sufficient to do all the modeling and rendering work.
These days, a $300 computer would be plenty for modeling and rendering a superior final product. It's not just about raw rendering power, either - it's also about having access to software (Blender, for instance) which makes the modeling and animation tasks a lot easier to manage...
Don't get me wrong - I think early examples of early CG work in movies is cool stuff, and I love seeing how it was done. It was impressive stuff by the standards of the day. But today? No... It's only impressive if you look at it in terms of what the guy had to work with.
I gotta say, though, it's interesting that they chose to do that sequence with a computer. I would have thought that, since they were building models of everything anyway, it would have been easier to do the sequence as a set of model shots... With the right treatment and photographic process, a physical model could be used to create a shot that looks like a computer sequence... (Basically: paint it black, paint the edges white, light the hell out of it, and start filming... Or clear-cast a copy of the model parts, paint it black, sand off the paint on the edges, and light it from inside or behind... They could get a stark black/white shot out of that via photographic processes...) The downsides, I guess, is they'd have to have the models ready for this before shooting the briefing scene, and it would be a somewhat different look (more like a wireframe with occlusion, but shadows and such would probably blot out some of the edging, too...)
ironically, less is more (Score:4, Interesting)
The ironic part about this is less is often more.
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
The fact that they stretched the current technology at the time helps in the total illusion of high-tech. Anything higher-tech would have just gave the impression of "magic" and lead to a completely different feeling for the movie go-er and limited the suspension of disbelief.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
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