The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve three-dimensional realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
The earliest pioneers: 1940s to mid-1960s
John Whitney John Whitney Sr. (1917–1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.SIGGRAPH Whitney Profile page (retrieved April 20, 2012) In the 1940s and 1950s, he and his brother James created a series of experimental films made with a custom-built device based on old anti-aircraft analog computers (Kerrison Predictors) connected by servomechanisms to control the motion of lights and lit objects – the first example of motion control photography. One of Whitney's best known works from this early period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo,Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life which he collaborated on with graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, Whitney established his company Motion Graphics Inc., which largely focused on producing titles for film and television, while continuing further experimental works. In 1968, his pioneering motion control model photography was used on Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also for the slit-scan photography technique used in the film's "Star Gate" finale.
The first digital image
One of the first programmable digital computers was SEAC (the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), which entered service in 1950 at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Maryland, USA.NBS is now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST."Computer Development at the National Bureau of Standards." by Russell Kirsch, National Bureau of Standards, March 31, 2010. In 1957, computer pioneer Russell Kirsch and his team unveiled a drum scanner for SEAC, to "trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs", and so doing made the first digital image by scanning a photograph. The image, picturing Kirsch's three-month-old son, consisted of just 176×176 pixels. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize types of characters and display digital images on an oscilloscope screen. This breakthrough can be seen as the forerunner of all subsequent computer imaging, and recognising the importance of this first digital photograph, Life magazine in 2003 credited this image as one of the "100 Photographs That Changed the World"."Fiftieth Anniversary of First Digital Image Marked", Michael E Newman, Tech Beat (news release), NIST, May 24, 2007 (retrieved August 20, 2012)."Square Pixel Inventor Tries to Smooth Things Out", Rachel Ehrenberg, Wired News, June 28, 2010 (retrieved August 20, 2012).
From the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainframe digital computers were becoming commonplace within large organisations and universities, and increasingly these would be equipped with graphic plotting and graphics screen devices. Consequently, a new field of experimentation began to open up.
The first computer-drawn film In 1960, a 49-second vector animation of a car traveling down a planned highway was created at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology on the BESK computer. The consulting firm Nordisk ADB, which was a provider of software for the Royal Swedish Road and Water Construction Agency realized that they had all the coordinates to be able to draw perspective from the driver's seat for a motorway from Stockholm towards Nacka. In front of a specially designed digital oscilloscope with a resolution of about 1 megapixel a 35 mm camera with an extended magazine was mounted on a specially made stand. The camera was automatically controlled by the computer, which sent a signal to the camera when a new image was fed on the oscilloscope. It took an image every twenty meters (yards) of the virtual path. The result of this was a fictional journey on the virtual highway at a speed of 110 km/h (70 mph). The short animation was broadcast on November 9, 1961, at primetime in the national television newscast Aktuellt.
Bell Labs Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a leading research contributor in computer graphics, computer animation and electronic music from its beginnings in the early 1960s. Initially, researchers were interested in what the computer could be made to do, but the results of the visual work produced by the computer during this period established people like Edward Zajac, Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton as pioneering computer artists.
Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs in 1963, titled A Two Gyro Gravity Gradient attitude control System, which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the Earth as it orbited.Edward Zajac on CompArt database (retrieved 2012/04/20)
Ken Knowlton developed the Beflix (Bell Flicks) animation system in 1963, which was used to produce dozens of artistic films by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz.Knowlton, K. C., "Computer-Generated Movies," Science, Vol. 150, (November 1965), pp. 116–1120. Instead of raw programming, Beflix worked using simple "graphic primitives", like draw a line, copy a region, fill an area, zoom an area, and the like.
In 1965, Michael Noll created computer-generated stereographic 3D movies, including a ballet of stick figures moving on a stage.Noll, A. Michael, "Computer-Generated Three-Dimensional Movies", Computers and Automation, Vol. 14, No. 11, (November 1965), pp 20–23. Some movies also showed four-dimensional hyper-objects projected to three dimensions.Noll, A. Michael, "A Computer Technique for Displaying n-Dimensional Hyperobjects", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 10, No. 8, (August 1967), pp 469–473. Around 1967, Noll used the 4-D animation technique to produce computer-animated title sequences for the commercial film short Incredible Machine (produced by Bell Labs) and the TV special The Unexplained (produced by Walt DeFaria).Noll, A. Michael, "Computer Animation and the Fourth Dimension", AFIPS Conference Proceedings, Vol. 33, 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, Thompson Book Company: Washington, D.C. (1968), pp. 1279–1283. Many projects in other fields were also undertaken at this time.
Boeing-Wichita In the 1960s, William Fetter was a graphic designer for Boeing at Wichita, and was credited with coining the phrase "Computer Graphics" to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time (though Fetter himself credited this to colleague Verne Hudson).University of Washington History: William Fetter (retrieved 2012/04/20) http://www.elysiuminc.com/gpdis/2014/DX28_Boeing-Kasik-Senesac-Visualization-DX-Open.pdf Boeing-Wichita Fetter's work included the 1964 development of ergonomic descriptions of the human body that are both accurate and adaptable to different environments, and this resulted in the first 3D animated wire-frame figures. Such human figures became one of the most iconic images of the early history of computer graphics, and often were referred to as the "Boeing Man". Fetter died in 2002.
Ivan Sutherland Ivan Sutherland is considered by many to be the creator of Interactive Computer Graphics, and an internet pioneer. He worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1962, where he developed a program called Sketchpad I, which allowed the user to interact directly with the image on the screen. This was the first graphical user interface, and is considered one of the most influential computer programs an individual has ever written.Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system (retrieved 2012/04/22)
Mid-1960s to mid-1970s
The University of Utah The University of Utah was a major center for computer animation in this period. The computer science faculty was founded by David Evans in 1965, and many of the basic techniques of 3D computer graphics were developed here in the early 1970s with ARPA funding (Advanced Research Projects Agency). Research results included Gouraud, Phong, and Blinn shading, texture mapping, hidden surface algorithms, curved surface subdivision, real-time line-drawing and raster image display hardware, and early virtual reality work.Utah – Computer Graphics history (retrieved 2012/04/22) In the words of Robert Rivlin in his 1986 book The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age, "almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way".The algorithmic image: graphic visions of the computer age, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. New York, NY, USA 1986.
Shaded 3D graphics
In the mid-1960s, one of the most difficult problems in computer graphics was the "hidden-line" problem – how to render a 3D model while properly removing the lines that should not be visible to the observer. One of the first successful approaches to this was published at the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference by Chris Wylie, David Evans, and Gordon Romney, and demonstrated shaded 3D objects such as cubes and tetrahedra. An improved version of this algorithm was demonstrated in 1968, including shaded renderings of 3D text, spheres, and buildings.
A shaded 3D computer animation of a colored Soma cube exploding into pieces was created at the University of Utah as part of Gordon Romney's 1969 PhD dissertation, along with shaded renderings of 3D text, 3D graphs, trucks, ships, and buildings. This paper also coined the term "rendering" in reference to computer drawings of 3D objects. Another 3D shading algorithm was implemented by John Warnock for his 1969 dissertation.
A truly real-time shading algorithm was developed by Gary Watkins for his 1970 PhD dissertation, and was the basis of the Gouraud shading technique, developed the following year. Robert Mahl's 1970 dissertation at the University of Utah described smooth shading of quadric surfaces.
Further innovations in shaded 3D graphics at the University of Utah included a more realistic shading technique by Bui Tuong Phong for his dissertation in 1973 and texture mapping by Edwin Catmull for his 1974 dissertation.
Virtual reality Around 1972, a virtual reality headset known as the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" became operational at the University of Utah, which used head tracking and a device similar to MIT's Lincoln Wand to track the user's hand in 3D space. This headset, like Ivan Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles", was capable of simple, unshaded wireframe 3D graphics; however, the Sorcerer's Apprentice added the capability to create and manipulate 3D objects in real-time through the hand tracking device, termed the "wand". Commands to be performed by the 3D wand could be chosen by pointing the wand at a physical wall chart.
Character rigging and keyframing