Reach for the sky: Pixar founders win Turing Award for pioneering 3D animation – and getting rid of jagged edges
- Reference: 1584565613
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/18/pixar_founders_turing_award/
- Source link:
Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull are largely responsible for moving computer graphics from jagged polygons trying to represent reality to the smooth, shaded, 3D images that we take for granted these days; a process that took nearly half a century of hard work.
Their leaps in thought extended into pragmatic realities have forever changed how we interact with computer-created images and, as the Turing Award Committee [1]acknowledged this week, “have had implications beyond computer graphics, impacting diverse areas including data center management and artificial intelligence.”
Although the pair are best known for the extraordinary leap in 3D animation that films like Toy Story displayed to enormous acclaim, their work began at university in the 1970s. Catmull did a PhD in Computer Science that was focused on getting rid of the jagged edges that were then a part of all computer graphics, because they used polygons, defined mathematically, to build up images.
He took a different approach, introducing curves into the programming through a combination of adding a z-axis to allow for image depth and texture mapping, where a 2D texture was wrapped around a three-dimensional object. The result was a smooth surface that allowed for all kinds of additional techniques that increasingly reflect how we experience the real world.
He founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) Computer Graphics Lab which was one of the very first labs that were dedicated to computer graphics. He dreamed of making an animated movie using just computers - rather than, say, a stop-motion approach that used physical models photographed thousands of times.
And that dream became a reality when he was hired by Star Wars director George Lucas to move toward photo-realistic images. But it was when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs bought the animation division of LucasFilm and turned it into Pixar that things really took off. Catmull became president.
The award winners: Pat Hanrahan (left) and Ed Catmull
Curves
That’s where Pat Hanrahan comes in: he was one of Catmull’s first hires. Hanrahan worked at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab that Catmull founded and he became the lead on a new graphics system that would allow the new curved surfaces to be given realistic properties, reflecting different textures and accounting for different lighting.
Google gives its $1m Turing prize to, er, top Google bods: RISC men Hennessy, Patterson [2]READ MORE
The key aspect of this system - later called RenderMan - was the concept of “shaders” which calculated the behavior of light separately from the animation of the shapes within a program. Instead, the color and texture was computed at points over the shapes: an approach that brought a new level of realism to the graphics.
He went on to perfect other rendering techniques, such as improving how skin and hair can be recreated realistically, making more realistic lighting effects, and modelling approaches that enabled animators to move the viewer through and into scenes, rather than observe them from a detached perspective.
In short, he’s a very clever man whose work has been behind every time you’ve sat in awe at an animation or CGI or computer game in the last 20 years.
But that’s only part of the story. Hanrahan left Pixar in 1989 and took an academic approach to the advances in computer rendering - in that he shared his ideas and innovations, rather than try to lock them down for maximum profit.
That open approach had an enormous impact not just on animation, but on the actual chips - the graphics processing units (GPUs) - that computers use to recreate the images that software like RenderMan produces.
Open source
His teams at Princeton and Stanford University developed programming languages for GPUs that changed how pretty much everything was done at that point. And while commercial versions were developed, he continued to work and push open-source languages.
The result of that decision was that, rather than everyone just enjoying the extraordinary scenes that recent movies have offered (scenes that would be literally impossible to create in real life), the techniques have spread into other fields, most recently - and perhaps most significantly - artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, Catmull stayed at Pixar. where his academic approach meant that the animation powerhouse kept investigating in new techniques and technologies that you can effectively track by watching Pixar movies. The sense of motion, of increasingly real materials, and of advanced story-telling techniques were all innovations that were then pulled into the next film and the next film.
Thanks in large part to these two men’s 40+ years of work, leadership and guidance not only have millions of people been entertained but the boundary between the real world and the virtual world has been blurred in ways that we are only beginning to understand and enjoy.
Which is why they got the Turing Award. They also got $1m - courtesy of Google. They’ll pick up the award at a banquet in San Francisco on June 20 - at least in theory; it may be postponed due to current conditions. ®
[1] https://amturing.acm.org/
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/21/google_turing_award_mips_risc/
Re: So well deserved !!!
Absolutely!
I did a bit of computer graphics at Uni in the 90s - but my head borked at some of the maths required so I didn't take it any further.
Kudos to the two of them!
Re: So well deserved !!!
Absolutely. In these days of social distancing so much of my entertainment relies on their pioneering work.
Interesting article, but...
It could really do with giving us the names of the methods as well as just trying to provide a layman's explanation.
What are we talking about here? Bilinear/Trilinear Interpolation? NURBS? Something like that?
Go on, give us the maths. We can handle it.
Re: Interesting article, but...
40+ years of bleeding edge research.... Nope, we can't handle it, if we could we'd already be working in that field, following their work and know the details already.
Re: Interesting article, but...
Maybe you can't handle it, but I guess that I can. And that's not being boastful. Any gamer that's evaluating graphics cards and how certain games might play out on the new hardware will be totally au fait with a shit load more details in how it works under the hood than the article provides.
Expert knowledge has a way of becoming mainstream, after all. That's science, bitch!
Frumious - come up from the basement, Moms made your favorite tea!
Yes, you are the cleverest Prince in town!
I've been upgrading my graphics card since - (checks records) - 1992. Yes, I've read up on interpolation, yes I know what NURBS are and can tell that I want a card to do that. But know how it works ?
Sorry, bud, I'm a gamer, not a mathematician. I check the specs and choose my card because I've been told what to look for. I have a vague idea of how stuff works because I read about it. I absolutely cannot fathom the math behind it and, being a gamer, I don't have the time. Those games aren't going to play themselves, you know.
Now, if only I could get a version of Minecraft that used Toy Story graphics. That would be awesome.
Re: Interesting article, but...
Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces is probably the big one. It's a technique that allows a single polygon to simulate multiple smaller polygons with a smooth gradation between the joins.
This allows a model to appear to be high-polygon when it is in fact relatively simple and low-polygon.
What's more the technique is open and as such is widely used. Blender includes it as a modifier. Its user guide also includes some nice example images of subdiv in action.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/generate/subdivision_surface.html
Came here to saw
Clark wuz cheated!
Yes, I use Blender.
Re: Interesting article, but...
Toy Story 1 didn't use GPUs, it was rendered (with RenderMan) on a farm of SPARC systems:
"The images required 800,000 hours generation time on a RenderFarm consisting of 87 2-CPU SparcStation 20's, 30 4-CPU Sparc-Station 20's and a SparcServer 1000." (IMDB)
That was state of the art at the time, it took 7 weeks elapsed time to render the 75 minutes of film. Apparently they redid it in 2011 on then-current hardware, it was 50-60x faster.
I'd like to see some mentions of others that built up the NYIT lab and worked at Pixar
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit/masson/nyit.html
A good fried, Lance Williams (who died way too soon):
New York Institute of Technology (NYIT)
In 1974 Dr. Alexander Schure, a wealthy entrepreneur, began to assemble the Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL) at the New York Institute of Technology. His vision was to create a feature length animated film, with the aid of the days most sophisticated computer graphics techniques. NYIT itself was founded by Dr. Schure, had grounds encompassing numerous estates situated in the beautiful wooded hillsides of Old Westbury New York. Some of these estates were owned by members of the Rockafeller family, who also happened to have a seat on the board of Evans & Sutherland. Because of the close association of E&S with the University of Utah, Dave Evans recommended to Alex to seek out Edwin Catmull to head the new CGL. Ed Catmull had just finished his Ph.D. at Utah and taken a job at a CAD/CAM company called Applicon. It was not a hard sell to get Ed to leave Applicon for NYIT however, so he and fellow Utah graduate Malcolm Blanchard packed their bags for New York. Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco (both fresh from Xerox PARC) joined the team a few months later in what was called the 3Gerry Mansion2. Alvy and David had heard of Dr. Schure9s plans from Martin Newell at Utah (whom Alex had just hired briefly as a consultant). Dr. Schure had recently come through Utah and literally ordered 3one of everything2 to jump start his NYIT project. Some of this equipment included a DEC PDP-11, a new E&S LDS-1 and the first random access frame buffer also from E&S. Later, the CGL group would also receive the very first commercial VAX.
[SIDEBAR] VAX ALMOST SMASHED! In fact, the VAX almost never made it inside the building, if not for Alvy Ray Smith9s quick actions. It seems that when the computer was just lowered off the back of the delivery truck, another truck parked behind and uphill had it9s brakes slip, which started it rolling towards the brand new machine. Alvy quickly jumped in the driver-less truck and stopped it just before it could smash the VAX back into the very truck it was just unloaded from.
The CGL quickly attracted other technology experts and artists, including Christy Barton(from E&S), Tom Duff, Lance Williams, Fred Parke, Garland Stern, Ralph Guggenheim, Ed Emshwiller, and many others. Throughout the 1970s, the people of the CGL thrived in a pioneering spirit, creating milestones in many areas of graphic software. Many of the 3firsts2 that happened at NYIT were based on the development of the first RGB full color (24bit) raster graphics.
A few of the more notable 3firsts2: First RGB anything (because they had the first RGB framebuffers in the world). First RGB paint program (Paint by Alvy Ray Smith). First soft-edged fill (Alvy Ray again). First computer-controlled video editing. First TV commercial with raster graphics (Lance, I think, or maybe it was Ephraim Cohen). First pixel dissolve. First networked computer system (Christy rolled our own for us). The alpha channel is invented by Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith. First hidden surface algorithm within a pixel (Ed). Lance Williams invented mipmapping (texture mapping is still done this way today). Garland Stern implemented the first scan and paint system (this is how the Disney/Pixar CAPS system now makes 2D animation - different system but same idea).
The atmosphere at the CGL was also very open, with many invited tours coming through the lab all year-round. Other universities like Cornell, and companies such as Quantel were among those to visit and take notes about what was being developed. The personnel structure was virtually non- existent, with never any heavy handed management from Dr. Catmull. People did what they were best at and helped each other out whenever needed.
[Strangest Job Title ever!] Alvy Ray Smith would later accidently come across an organization chart for the lab put together by Dr. Shure. Ed Catmull was running the lab of course but there where people listed above and below him that no one had even heard of. Alvy was particularly amused to find that his official title was 3Information Quanta2. A term very much in keeping with Dr. Shure9s somewht unique, and non-standard form of communicating.
Ed Catmull9s Tween, Alvy Ray Smith9s Paint program, and the 2D animation program SoftCel, all were in keeping with the original charter of the CGL, which was 2D CG. There were also many breakthroughs in image techniques involving fractals, morphing, image compositing, and Mip-Map texture mapping and many others. Key to this pioneering effort was the seemingly unlimited financing evidenced by Alex Schure. One such example took place when Alvy Ray Smith spoke with Alex about how good it might be to have not just the one, but three frame buffers. This way, Alvy explained, the three 8bit buffers could be combined to create the first RGB color frame buffer ever! Sometime later Alex not only delivered the two additional frame buffers, but an additional 3, which gave the CGL team a grand total of 6. (3Enough for two of those RGB things2 said Alex.) At $60,000 each (plus the $80,000 for the first) what this meant in today9s dollars was that on a simple request, Alex had just delivered about $2million worth of equipment. More Utah people joined the CGL, including Garland Stern who would write the vector animation system BBOP. David DiFrancesco would also begin what would be turn out to be a long association with film recording at this time. Jim Blinn even worked at the CGL as a summer intern in 1976.
Re: I'd like to see some mentions of others that built up the NYIT lab and worked at Pixar
"A good fried"
Also tasty broiled...
Respect
Well deserved.
My first 3D work was RenderMan.
So good I bought the company
A long time ago I read an article in which it said Steve Jobs bought the animation company solely to have a customer for his Next computer business.
Of course, I've never been able to locate said magazine article so it's probably not true. Probably.
Re: So good I bought the company
Just post it on Facebook, then it will be true.
Don't forget Catmull Clark subdivision surfaces, which are still heavily used today.
Well deserved
I've been watching these developments over the years with great interest (and enjoyment). I couldn't begin to understand the maths, but can still appreciate its complexity.
Well deserved
As a graphics geek, I've always been watching for those little scenes where Pixar would just plain show off their graphics capabilities. Mrs Fink gets quite peeved when I point at the screen and go "wow - that's REALLY difficult!" while the poor girl is just trying to watch the movie.
So, it's fantastic to see these guys properly rewarded for their decades of effort.
So well deserved !!!
See Title.