During the 1970's there was a boom in
techonology and software which helped Computer graphics and animation
break out into the world due to the work of the well respected Ivan
Sutherland in the 1960's. He helped to pioneer computer graphics with
his work at MIT with the development of a program called sketchpad
which allowed the user to interact directly with the image on screen,
this was considered as the first Graphical user interface. He then
teamed up with David Evans in the late 1960's and started the company
Evans & Sutherland which was a driving force in the creation of
hardware for the Univeristy of Utah such as the Head mounted display,
frame buffers and flight simulators. In addition to this both Evans
and Sutherland were professors at the University.
The University of Utah was one of the
largest areas for computer animation as it had developed a number of
basic techniques for both computer graphics and computer animation
such as Gouraud, Phong and Binn shading, texture mapping, raster
image display hardware and many more. Due to the higher caliber of
hardware at the university they housed a large amount of successful
students such as Ed Catmull – co-founder of Pixar and John Warnock
of Adobe Systems.
In 1969 the Scanimate was an anolog
computer animation system designed to produce a vast amount of video
animation on television, it was widely popular due to the speed in
which is could create animations in real time rather than waiting for
the animation to load like the older film based animatino techniques.
The thing that helped distinguish the Scanimate from other systems
was the way it used 60 fields per second rahter than the 24 frames
per second which made the colours much brighter and more saturated.
There were other areas of the world
where computer animation was booming, one of theses areas was the
National film board of Canada. They started to delve into computer
animation in the early 1970's and completed a few animated films.
Metadata was one of the early films completed, in the film it used
"interpolating" otherwise known as inbetweening or
morphing, this was a technique where the drawings were animated by
gradual changes in the images making them seem like they are changing
into one another. Another film to come from this area was a film
called Hunger/La Faim which was one of the first films to have solid
filled raster scanned rendering in their animations.
After this a full length feature film
was released in 1974 called Westworld, this was the first film to use
digital image processing. It used it to portray the point of view of
a robot which was more pixelled than a normal view. Towards the end
of the 1970's the direction of computer animation turned to using
more 3D techniques within animation. In 1976 the sequel to Westworld,
called Futureworld was one of the first films to use 3D wireframe
imagery. It was used to create the computer generated face and hand
that was used in the film. Furthermore additional films used this
technology such as a number of vehicles in the Star Wars such as the
Death Star plans and Millennium Falcon. Due to the success of this
technology it was used in more and more films , such as The Black
Hole in 1979 to create the black hole, and in Alien where it was used
to render the navigation monitors in the spaceship.
In addition to this more 3D technology
was developed to further advance the film making process and the
limitations it had. The Framebuffer, fractals increased the realism
that could be created within 3D animation and in the late 1970's
motion control photography was developed which was a technique where
the computer records the exact motion of a film camera which can be
duplicated. This helped to perform motions around stationary models
for a more coordinated shot.
