About 10 years ago I dreamed of working in Hollywood. I wanted to direct, of course, but what really fascinated me was postproduction – particularly editing. But also, I loved animation, which meant that I also was fascinated by 3-D animation.
I had first encounted computer animation in about 1986 at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego). I loved it. It was mindbending stuff.
I still have the flyer from the 1987 Festival of Animation—Luxo Jr., though I think I saw it at an earlier showing “The Art of Computer Animation.” I was 16 and 17 years old, tooling around San Diego in a beat up seafoam green 1972 Volvo and these animations inspired me to try and do computer graphics. I vividly remember getting shown raytracing demos at San Diego Amiga User’s Group meetings. These were heady times.
I have a binder with flyers of the animation festivals from this era. Some real classics in there! It looks like earlier than Luxo, I had seen Tuber’s Two Step (which I can’t seem to find online at all, sad!) and “The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.”—both in 1986. I love the description of the rendering of Tuber’s:
The works were realized on a VAX 11/780 computer, a Mark 1I 32-bit frame buffer, Symbolics 3670 and/or Evans and Sutherland PS 300 and in-house software.
Awesome. I bet you never even heard of a
VAX. Luxo and Andre were of course the work of John Lasseter at
Pixar.
But I never did any actual 3-D art. I never worked in 3-Dimensions. I fiddled with a raytracer for the Amiga at that time but it was all based on little text files—in other words, programming. I could just never figure the stuff out.
Fast forward from 1987 to 1996 and computer graphics were very popular. Terminator 2 had come out several years earlier to accliam for the use of high end graphics and compositing of the morphing terminator. I had moved to California from Virginia and was researching everything I might want to do. I was particularly interested in taking classes at Silicon Studio in Santa Monica. Silicon Studio is no more, but they taught expensive classes in computer animation at a neat facility. It was a branch of the then-flying-high SGI. I went to SIGGRAPH and was blown away. I was reading about CG animation incessantlt, reading movie magazines to try and learn all I could.
All that reading made me book-smart about computer graphics. For some reason NURBS stands out in my memory as something to know about. I had it memorized and even understood what it was. NURBS are “non-uniform rational B-splines.” NURBS are math that describes curves, especially a curve you have to reproduce in a computer with a minimum of math. They’re Bezier curves, which I understood from my class in Freehand/Adobe Illustrator. It was a subclass of the kind of math you would need to represent objects in a virtual world. This virtual world I always thought of as Gibson’s Cyberspace.
Right now I’m taking a class in 3-D animation. The tool we’re using is Cinema 4D. It’s an impressive tool, and (so far) straightforward to learn. And one of the tools is “HyperNURBS”—I don’t know what the “Hyper” part means yet, but the image in this post is my very first time actually using these NURBS thingies!
So that’s a brief tale of my own personal experience of 3-D graphics, from fan, to knowledge, and now to application.
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