By Saint John Walker, Computer Games, Animation and Facilities sector manager, Skillset.

Written for Imagine magazine. Subscribe on http://www.imagineanimation.net/

 

 

In a panel discussion at SAND in November 2008, Shelley Page, Head of International Outreach of Dreamworks, casually mentioned that Dreamworks were now committed to producing all of their projects in stereoscopic 3D starting in 2009. Indeed, Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks Animation’s first feature film produced entirely in 3D, is slated for a release date of March 2009.

 

It seems 3D CGI is taking over the world of animation.

 

The current state of animation has developed via two strands - those of 2D and 3D with two distinct toolsets, two different workflows, like two tributaries flowing into the same river.

 

To some animators, the immediacy you get when you draw something in 2D is increasingly being mediated by complex 3D software, a kind of prism that favours a certain look, a certain aesthetic.

 

Whilst 2D digital animation software has concentrated on providing limited colour palettes and comfortable artist-friendly icons within the graphic user interface, 3D digital animation has developed within a more industrial and scientific sphere of influence. The advantage of 3D CGI became apparent to users very early on. It has no fixed viewpoint. The virtual object or character can be framed from any angle, modified, copied and reused elsewhere, offering easily changeable lighting and surfaces. Nothing ever needs to be fixed until the final render.

 

But this freedom from a fixed viewpoint cuts both ways. At a previous SAND conference in November 2007 acting coach and author of “Acting for Animators” Ed Hooks was commenting on motion capture in Beowulf, and pointed out that whilst on a traditional film set actors will deliberately act differently for a close-up or a wide-angle, or tweak their performance to the conditions, there are no such cues in motion capture. The director decides the framing of the shot later, in a 3D environment with a virtual camera. Because the relationship between camera and the actor’s performance has been broken, Hooks claimed that motion capture driven avatars can’t really fulfil the actors’ potential. However, Hooks is often a lone voice pointing out what we might be losing with the reliance on motion-captured 3D data at the expense of other expressive animation techniques.

 

This might be a small example of how 3D CGI Animation changes the nuances of the stories it tells, but if 3D continues to take over, will the production of animation shift away from its more imaginative, surreal and maverick roots? This article attempts to shine a spotlight on some of the key moments in the development of 3D CGI - a kind of hidden history. Just as you can learn a lot about an adult by peering into episodes of their childhood, it’s worth examining the roots of 3D CGI animation and the environment it emerged from in order to see if we can discover a little more about its personality. This isn’t a chronological or objective history, but a selective look at the early trajectory of 3D animation.

 

 

3D GOES TO THE MOVIES 3D

 

CGI only really started colonising our minds when it began being used in Sci-fi Cinema in the 1970s. Since CGI animators didn’t really exist, film makers started to call in the boffins from university research centres to help them realise their visions of the future.

 

There is plenty of debate about chronology but The Andromeda Strain (1971) may have featured the first use of 3D CGI in the images of the rotating structure of an underground laboratory. However, better known is Futureworld (1976), the inevitably disappointing sequel to sci-fi thriller Westworld. It utilised 3D CGI to portray Peter Fonda's animated face and hand. The work was created by University of Utah graduate students, Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Earlier in 1974 at the University of Utah, Catmull had also developed the z-buffer, a key technology in the history of 3D Graphics as part of his thesis “A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces”. It wasn’t his last invention, nor his last appearance in the 3D hall of fame, with seminal work on texture mapping and rendering still to come. Catmull of course went on to become a co-founder of Pixar and is now president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

 

Star Wars (1976) featured 3D wireframe graphics in its Death Star briefing session. This sequence was only possible thanks to the creation of a programming language developed by student Tom DeFanti for his Ohio State University Ph.D. thesis in 1974. He called it GRASS (the GRAphics Symbiosis System). Larry Cuba from the University of Illinois utilised GRASS to create the 3D wireframe view of the trench on the Death Star that was used to train rebel pilots. Interestingly, other shots assumed to be 3D weren’t - an image of the Death Star being revealed behind another planet was created using an Analog Computer system called a Scanimate. High contrast flat artwork was placed on a conventional light table, scanned and then animated through the control of up to 250 knobs that distorted a standard cathode ray tube, which was essentially re-filmed. In the 1970s not everything that looked digital actually was.

 

The writing was on the wall. Thanks to a couple of students’ theses, it was the start of Hollywood’s love affair with 3D CGI. Audiences became familiar with wireframes, polygons and shaded renders. Chunky as they were, they represented the future. At this time, computer 3D was associated with science, not the arts, and was about visualising data, not expressing imagination. It wasn’t until Disney’s Tron in 1982 that computer 3D was used to create an imaginative world of its own.

 

 

TECHIES, CURVES AND CARS

 

Back in the 1970s, 3D computer animation was the fiefdom of the software technologists, the kind of people who understood CPUs and Command Lines but not sculpture or anatomy, never mind the tools of the animators craft such as pegbar, graticule and lightbox. The new 3D technologists didn’t like to appropriate from traditional animation, nor from sculpture. What craft animators had called fairing (a delightful term from sailing), the new 3D techies coldly named acceleration and de-acceleration (more at home in the physics department). What animators called squash and stretch (summoning up fun and possibilities) became deformation - a term that could be read to imply negative connotations about departure from true scale.

 

Partly due to the early gravitation towards CADCAM (Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing) and its attendant mathematical simulation, the tools that 3D software programmers developed concentrated on describing the ‘real world’ rather than enabling an artist’s inner world of imagination. It was all about manufacturing rather than creating. Many of the functions that we have today within 3D software were taken from the automotive and shipbuilding industries - and the nomenclature persists; you’ll find functions like hull, spline, loft, bevel, lathe, in today’s software, an echo from the past.

 

Bezier curves, a key 3D tool used to design the characters we see in films by Pixar or Dreamworks, originated from the offices of Renault cars.

 

Pierre Bezier, an engineer who worked at Renault until 1975, needed a way of economically describing complex curvilinear lines and surfaces that could be uniformly reproduced in metal or plastic. As 3D Animators will know, we still have Bezier Curves and their antecedents in much of today’s CAD and 3D software. Bezier himself designed the UNISURF computer aided design system in 1971 for use by Renault, and also managed to find time to be a Professor of Production Engineering at the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. As often happens it appears that Bezier was actually beaten to the application of what are called polynomial curves and surfaces by Paul De Casteljau, who worked at rivals Citroen from 1959. However, De Casteljau never published his invention, so Bezier got this now indispensable equation for 3D curves named after himself. History is cruel.

 

So it seems that some of the tools for Pixar’s Cars come from, well, cars.

 

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE UTAH TEAPOT

 

From the early days of 3D software, the holy grail of photorealism was evident. The technicians didn’t see 3D software as a liberator of the imagination, but as a descriptive tool, to simulate reality.

 

This is evidenced in the phenomenon that became known as the Utah Teapot. Conceived at the University of Utah in 1975, this was a very early 3D reference model, a protean digital form.

 

Created by computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, the Utah teapot could be said to be symptomatic of both a bankruptcy of imagination and the technologist’s urge to mimic the real. It consisted of about 110 vertices and used hand-drawn Bezier curves. The story goes that Newell created it because he didn’t have any interesting 3D computer models to work with. His wife suggested the tea service in front of them. And so, that’s how a teapot became one of the first complex 3D CGI models. This was 1975 and 3D modelling software didn't exist. 3D Models had to be inputted into the computer by typing spatial coordinates by hand. There are around 77 lines of hand typed code used to describe the Melitta style Teapot. Later commentators were to spot that Newell had forgotten to put a bottom surface on the base, (so it had a virtual hole!) but this didn’t dampen enthusiasm in the technical community.

 

This bizarre object could be seen as a distant ancestor of Shrek, Wall-E, Niko Bellic and all the 3D digital characters we know and love today.

 

For a while the digital teapot joined the pantheon of sphere, cube, cone, rod and torus basic objects available as building blocks by the 3D user in early commercial 3D software in the 1980s and early 1990s, such as 3D Studio, AutoCAD and POVRay. The model became so beloved of 3D technologists that they even coined the term “teapotahedron”. Of course, the Utah Teapot is highly useless to today’s 3D artists, but the idea then was that it was a familiar ready made object that could be textured and rendered as a test. However the inclusion of such a depressingly ordinary yet incongruous form seemed to contradict any idea that your imagination could really be free to soar in this new medium.

 

The Utah Teapot computer graphics in-joke lives on; Utah Teapot homages can be found in Toy Story, (in the scene after Buzz loses his arm and has tea with the headless dolls), Monsters Inc., Disney's Beauty and the Beast, as well as in The Simpsons. At the 1989 Boston SIGGRAPH Newell bemoaned the fact that, of all the discoveries and work he’d done in the emerging field of computer graphics he would forever be associated with "that damned teapot."

 

From the start, the cri de coeur of the 3D zealots was “it may not look like much now, but Moore’s Law is on our side!” The ultimate prize of realism was always deferred.

 

Moore's Law was expounded by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel in 1965. He predicted that the number of components placed on a computer chip would double every year. To appreciate his visionary thinking you need to remember that it wasn’t until 1969 that Intel released the 1k (yes, 1k) RAM Chip. In 1973, Moore took stock and updated his prediction to once every two years. Essentially, this is usually read as meaning the computer doubles in capacity every year or two. Moores Law has remained relatively correct to this day.

 

If you have an urge to pay homage to the original teapot it now resides in the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, California- and it does have a bottom.

 

 

3D TODAY: MISSING THE SIMPLE TOUCH?

 

Many Animators find 3D CGI controls directs their art practice too much. Joan Ashworth, Head of the Royal College of Art’s Animation Department expresses concern about the aesthetics that can be explored in 3D.

 

Ashworth sees the current trend for 3D as part of a greater zeitgeist. A number of artists are currently working (in galleries and on screen) around ideas of immersion and embodiment and 3D CGI environments are one expression of this. “2D often feels more distant and hence character is more important to bring you into the story. With 2D you need to work harder at the narrative” she remarks. Many of her students are not drawn to the aesthetics that 3D creates, and will try to remedy this by combining it with traditional media to bring texture and tactility to the screen. “The students are keen to use 3D tools, but are keen to subvert them and weave them into complex worlds where the methods of construction get hidden. There’s a real feeling you need to fight the software at times” she comments. In her investigation into 3D software which led to her animated film How Mermaids Breed (2002), Ashworth’s dissatisfaction with the software tools led her to model characters in clay and then laser scan them to get 3D meshes onto the computer. She also comments on the unintuitive process of building a wireframe, then lighting and texturing it. “I wanted to start working with ideas of how I might mix the tangible qualities of water and foldable cloth, to make a new material I called "graspable water" which seems to me to be one of the areas where you can really push the software, but the modelling always got in the way- there wasn’t the immediacy and feedback I required to let my ideas flow”.

 

Ed Hooks is also concerned about how the artist can sometimes be compromised by 3D, but from the actors’ point of view. Something as simple as a blink is loaded with meaning to Ed Hooks who suggests that characters in Beowulf often blink in the wrong place. The blinks have been manufactured in 3D as mere keyframes on a timeline, to be shifted around to suit the director and hence no longer “punctuate thought”. If Hooks is right, then Sony Pictures Imageworks, with more than 14 terabytes of performance capture data to filter and tweak on Beowulf, are still missing the small things that 3D technology can often overlook.

 

Brad Bird, a traditional animator who went on to direct Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille points out how hard it is to do simple things in 3D. “It's easy to blow up a city in CG, but it's hard for a character to grab another character's shirt. You could have some really spectacular scene, and the animation staff would just go, "No problem. How many of those do you need?" But one character touching another character's hair? "Aaah! No! Isn't there anything else you could do?" I mean, I had to budget shirt-grabs” he exclaimed.

 

 

EXIT 2D?

 

3D CGI software is still developing at an astonishing rate, having emerged from the university science departments and industry research centres of the 1970s. Maybe in the future when we look back we’ll see that part of the reason why 3D proved so popular is that it had all the cool moves - 2D animation programmes just didn’t innovate; they were built on tired old outmoded metaphors. 2D interfaces such as Adobe Flash and Toon Boom never really looked beyond replacing the traditional processes like page flipping, paint and trace methodologies that they were designed to replace, whereas 3D programs made possible new visions through particle systems and dynamics that were originally built for mimicking smoke, fire, spray, and complex physics, but that soon developed into highly articulate and open ended tools that allowed many rich new images.

 

Even in the shiny High Definition world of seemingly unlimited pixels, 2D digital animation still seems to be chained to the look of ‘economy of line’, that sprang from the ‘economy of the production line’ – the need to produce 12 or 24 frames a second quickly within a hand-drawn, yet industrial setting. Even though those days are long gone, vector-based digital programs are still complicit in maintaining a flat, unmodulated simplicity of style. Look at Adobe Flash for instance. In the new High Definition world of today, so full of new possibilities of detail and spectacle, surely there is a need for a new breed of 2D software.

 

Someone, somewhere is developing new software which will change the way we create animation.

 

Bring it on.

 

 

by Saint John Walker, Computer Games, Animation and Facilities sector manager, Skillset

Written for Imagine magazine.

Subscribe on

http://www.imagineanimation.net/