40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics

The smoothing/shading gfx was quite good. Better then anything I thought they had at that time. The lack of pixels was also quite shocking. What the hell rez were they running back then? From now on when I'm gaming and I see a poorly rendered hand, I'm gonna throw my controller in disgust and yell, "What is this 1971!" :D
 
Betaboy1983 said:
I wonder how long that took to render. Cool stuff.
Click to expand...

I am going to guess a very long time... Since essentially the CPU's at that time would be considered shitty micro-controllers today with 10k or less transistors. Even a super computer then would still take some time to do that.
 
really neat stuff, I remember seeing the hand a while ago but not the face's, that hand was pretty neat for being 1970's.
 
You have to remember that this wasn't rendered in real-time.

Back in highschool I made a really impressive 3D presentation for class, but it took two P2 233mhz computers over a week to render! :D
 
Ducman69 said:
You have to remember that this wasn't rendered in real-time.

Back in highschool I made a really impressive 3D presentation for class, but it took two P2 233mhz computers over a week to render! :D
Click to expand...

If Pixar is any indication it could have taken months for that to be rendered at 7 hours per frame for Toy Story 3
 
apart from the rendering, did anyone notice how mangled that guys hand was. specifically the 3rd and little finger. looks like they were broken in a few places at some point.
 
I kept waiting for the middle finger on the hand to pop up...


sort of like the secret x-rated animation of Mickey and Minnie mouse that got 2 animators fired at Walt Disney's birthday party one year.... hidden away somewhere. :eek:
 
Not surprised, unlike most people my age I grew up with pixar animation. Long before they were doing films like toy story they were doing short films for the "animated film festival" with animators like bill plymton. I never knew the history went back this far. Pretty cool stuff.

I really suggest you guys go back and see some of the early stuff when animators were really pushing the limits of their time with films like Robot Carnival.

I'm a huge of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Fleischer
 
And so the era of the polygon was born (a little earlier than I thought). I wonder when it will finally come to an end, and we've moved on to the next big thing (voxels, or whatever).
 
AMAZING that this was actually done in 1971.

Any chance someone would come forth and tell us what kind of rendering machines did they use back then?

//subscribed.
 
Checked. Teapot was made in 1975, so this animated 3d model actually predated it.
 
Spare-Flair said:
There's a face in there that looks exactly like Alyx in HL2.
Click to expand...

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought that. She did look like the spitting image only, what, 33 years prior?

And, yeah, very impressive especially the per polygon mapping of the hand. That process alone must have taken a fairly long time to do. I could tell just by watching that short video that I would have gone insane trying to render that back then.
 
33 Years old on less then a MHz and no artifacting. Impressive! There is a reason this guy runs Pixar!

Honestly that looked smoother then my Monster 3D... (And yes I still have it)
 
AlderaaN said:
AMAZING that this was actually done in 1971.

Any chance someone would come forth and tell us what kind of rendering machines did they use back then?

//subscribed.
Click to expand...


Did some looking and a slashdot reader posted this link with more info:
http://geekfun.com/2011/09/03/early-cgi-animation-by-ed-catmull/

"According to the paper, it took about 2.5 minutes to render out an individual B&W frame of the facial animation. That’s on hardware that was probably in the ballpark of $400,000 in 1972 dollars."

Pretty cool stuff.
 
Spare-Flair said:
There's a face in there that looks exactly like Alyx in HL2.
Click to expand...
Haha, you took the words out of my mouth. I was wondering whether anyone else would notice. :)
As for the render, very impressive especially for its age. I imagine it took them a long time to render that.
 
When it was just the line tracing of the face I was like "Oh hell, it's the MCP!" But then it turned out to be a chick.

This is pretty interesting. I'm guessing they abused the hell out of the college mainframe all year to produce that 5 minutes worth of footage.
 
And now I can make that in 12 minutes with maya or 3s studio max even on a weak ass mx11 from alienware laptop.


Oh and the interface for these 3d programs is still dumb and way more compicalted than it has to be you spend more time fighting technical issues than you do making things look good.


Mudbox and zbrush has made it better though now its like sculpting digital clay and makes more sense and it is more fun to use but there still is a bunch of stupid crap they should have changed or replaced on 3d prgrams by now.

like the fact the the ball primitives in most 3d programs are toaly crap and dont give good quad polygons so you have to make your own ball from the box cube primitves,..... why don't they just give good fucking primitves with quads to you in the first place it is a waste of time and they should have made stuff like that better after all these years.
 
Also and I am from Utah and went to the uiniversity of utah 3d classes to learn maya and 3d studio max.

I have seen the real UTAH teapot.

that Teapot in serious sam and 3d studio max shown in Tech demos is a real teapot bought at a store in utah it is an inside joke it was one of the first 3d models ever made the real one is in the schools 3d department still or at least a copy of it I think they bought more than one.

you would never understand the joke about that teapot though unless you are doing 3d work, you will see it hidden in games and movies and show up in tech demos all the time if you look hard and that is why it shows up all the time, its the same 3d model file they used back in the 70's before this footage.

it was scanned of course

0.jpg


I am amazed they did not show the teapot in this viideo.
 
From the blog:
"it was rendered to actual film; this, of course, predated any kind of real time digital playback by many years"

Puts it in a bit of perspective. You couldn't even watch this on the PC screen. These guys truly were pioneers.
 
CacaSapo said:
Did some looking and a slashdot reader posted this link with more info:
http://geekfun.com/2011/09/03/early-cgi-animation-by-ed-catmull/

"According to the paper, it took about 2.5 minutes to render out an individual B&W frame of the facial animation. That’s on hardware that was probably in the ballpark of $400,000 in 1972 dollars."

Pretty cool stuff.
Click to expand...
Thank you very much!
funkydmunky said:
From the blog:
"it was rendered to actual film; this, of course, predated any kind of real time digital playback by many years"

Puts it in a bit of perspective. You couldn't even watch this on the PC screen. These guys truly were pioneers.
Click to expand...
Thanks!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top