How NASA Visualized Voyager, and Helped Revolutionize Cinema
Vložit
- čas přidán 19. 06. 2023
- In the late 1970's NASA & JPL were preparing for the Voyager spacecraft to fly by Jupiter, the first destination on their grand tour of the solar system, a mission which would revolutionize our understanding of the outer planets. And a small group of computer wizards had an innovative idea on how to explain to the public what was going on using the nascent technology of computer graphics. The animations which were produced used computer hardware which was state of the art in that era, but today my phone's CHARGER has more processing power (forrestheller.com/Apollo-11-C...)
And those animations would be some of the first attempts at realistic CGI, and very likely the most widespread from the era. The creator would spend some time at ILM getting the visual effects industry a real start in CGI for cinema.
If you're interested, there's a lot more on the subject and Jim Blinn has a website with his own presentations and even more articles on this subject and many more
www.jimblinn.com
Follow me on Twitter for more updates:
/ djsnm
I have a discord server where I regularly turn up:
/ discord
If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon
/ scottmanley
Mario Bava Sleeps In a Little Later Than He Expected To by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: chriszabriskie.com/vendaface/
Artist: chriszabriskie.com/ - Věda a technologie
Jim Blinn was my first CGI teacher at Art Center College of Design in 1985. I believe he was teaching at Cal Tech down the road and somehow ended up teaching CG to industrial design students! It was awesome and I loved every minute. We were using software Jim wrote on PC-AT's. It was manual point entry (like a spreadsheet) and was a far cry from today's 3D programs. Fast-forward 10 years and I'm in the computer games biz and attending Siggraph. Who do I see in the hallway but Jim Blinn! I had to stop him and tell him how much I loved his class and how I was now working at Lucasarts and how he was critical in sparking my interest in CGI. He lights up and says he and his wife love LEC's adventure games! It's a wonderful closed-loop memory for me. Good to see Jim is still going strong.
Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractus, those are the ones I remember.
Re "like a spreadsheet" could be worse. Could be FORTRAN.
There was an audible groan from the audience when James stated that his animations (Voyager, later _The Mechanical Universe_ series) were programmed in FORTRAN.
@@JohnDlugosz It wasn't even really a spreadsheet, just a simple text file. But it had to be properly formatted for the program to read it. We'd make our text file matrices of numbers and bring it into the lab on those 5-1/4" floppies! As clunky as it seemed, it was fun and I even made a phone handset, albeit a very simple geometric one! There was no way to output a rasterized image so we shot pics of the crt screen on 35mm film cameras! And yeah, mechanical universe was awesome! I was already a fan of Jim's work from the Voyager stuff, so to have him as a teacher was an amazing honor!
How cool is that! Thanks for sharing
Wow, that's an absolutely beautiful story!
To model elaborate shapes, they were first sculpted in wood, I think it was. This was then sliced into thin layers, which were individually scanned to build up the mesh data in the computer.
When people ask why we spend money on going to space, this is great example why. Innovations in science and our understanding of the universe ultimately come back to improve the public good.
JPL have been incredibly productive. Eric Fossum was working there when he invented the modern CMOS imaging chip that is enabled the development of low-cost, low-noise sensors and which are now made by the billon for use in every type of camera. It wasn't the first implementation of an active pixel sensor where the photodiode is combined with one or more transistors for charge readout and amplification, but it was the first implementation using low-cost CMOS fabrication (similar to other microchips) and it went on to change the industry completely. Eric was a long time contributor on dpreview when it was still going and it was amazing to be able to ask a question about camera technology and have it answered by one of THE pioneers who made it all possible.
As primitive as those graphics seem now, as a kid, they absolutely blew me away. It was immediately clear that NASA wanted to give you an accurate "over-the-shoulder" look at what Voyager was imaging. (I'm still getting the tingles as I did as a boy seeing it for the first time!)
Thanks Scott!!
One of the frustrating things about Project Apollo was the cheap model-based or hand-painted simulations they put on the screen when there was no live camera view. Seeing these animations used to describe what was going on with Voyager was so much nicer! It was a difficult time for me as an Apollo kid because it seemed we would never have an interesting space program again. Apollo was over with, and the shuttle was delayed again and again. Viking and Voyager helped me cope, and these animations, though not as spectacular as the actual images they took, helped sustain me.
I watched that Voyager 1 film as a kid in elementary school, where they used a 16mm projector to show our class. Great research!
I'm a game developer and find this really fascinating. This is all really fundamental stuff being pioneered here. Like seeing the how and why of the invention of each of the basic components of an internal combustion engine or the invention of the modern bicycle wheel.
I am too. Displacement mapping in the late 70s? Mind blown!
@@dat_chip He invented environment mapping in 1976 and wrote one of the seminal works on simulating clouds and particle systems in 1982 which he used in his visualisation of the Rings of Saturn. From what I've seen, the guy wrote paper after paper outlining many of the algorithms that underpin modern computer graphics. What amazes me is that it's one thing to have to write your own program to create a particular graphics sequence, but this guy was inventing the mathematical models his (and later many other) programs were based on and doing it time and again.
Props to Jim Blinn. I have all his CG books (one of them is signed!). A real unsung hero.
I knew Jim. We both played in the CalTech Jazz Band. I was also a graphics programmer at the time and so I was well aware of all of this tech. It was heady days!
@@RockHoward Very cool! What I would give to have experienced those early days!
One of the cool aspects of learning computer science is that the people whose names everyone knows from textbooks are mostly still alive (and sometimes come to conferences). It feels like being able to meet Newton or Einstein
@@RockHoward Did you have any idea how this field would advance back then? I'm always curious about how innovators in the early days predict where their new technologies will go.
The Blinn. My favorite shader. (Back in the day)
Wow! In the Air Force, (1975 era) I used a PDP-11 mounted in a truck to run a program that tested the guidance system of the Titan II in the silo) over a 24 hour cycle.. The program was loaded from a punched tape reader on a Teletype machine after about 45 switch settings…. Results printed out on the teletype. Three years later, I had an Apple ][ with a floppy disk drive! ($3,500) I loaded (and saved) PONG from the Big Red Book, using basic hand controllers. For only $145 I upgraded from 32 KB to the maximum 48kb ram. Seven years later…MACINTOSH!
I was lucky enough to get to take CS174 Intro to Computer Graphics from Jim Blinn when I was a freshman at Caltech in the 80s. It was mostly a course on matrix math and coordinate transformation matrices, and I still use what I learned there when I do web dev and have to scale and rotate things. Two things about Jim Blinn: One, he's an amazing teacher, maybe the best professor I ever had. And two, he's gigantically tall. When his shoe was untied, he'd put his foot on the top of his desk and bend down to tie it, like most people would put their foot on a chair.
Ah those matrix transformations!
In '76 I was working on drawing software in Fortran that output to a flatbed plotter (Girba?). Being a Physics dropout meant I had my textbooks to help me produce my own transformations. I actually invented what I found was called Turtle Graphics (thanks to @lawrencedoliveiro9104 for the update pointer). In those days all programmer invented stuff; you just produced what you needed.
Edit: to correct the year! Plus the Turtle Graphics note.
@@AndrewBlucher Turtle graphics was part of the LOGO programming language from 1967.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That's true, I believe. At the time I'd never heard of it :-)
I'll edit my post to "I later found was called".
Thanks for that.
@@AndrewBlucher That plotter was probably a Gerber. The company Gerber Scientific is still alive and kicking ... out top notch plotters and precision cutting machines.
@@realulli Thanks
This just goes to show how long the Voyager spacecraft have been active.
The rendering technology progressed by many orders of magnitude since then, all the while the Voyagers themselves are still fine and working.
3:33 The PDP-11 shown was the first PDP-11 model than came standard with floating point instructions. On this model and all later models of PDP-11, floating point calculations were about as fast a integer calculations.
The PDP-11 did not have any of the program ROM that was mentioned in the video. The PDP-11 model at this point in the video was the first to have virtual memory, which allowed a separate 64K memory space for the operating system (kernel), and a 64K memory space for the user program (user), and a third 64K address space that was rarely used (supervisor), all in RAM.
A side note, the "++" and "--" operators in some modern computer languages such as C++, C#, and Java, came from the C language taking advantage of PDP-11 processor instructions having a pre and post increment snd decrement addressing modes.
In 1972, we used Tektronix monitors to make 3-D solar system fly-by videos. We used monitors with storage scope technology, where once something is written to the screen, it passively stayed on the screen until the entire screen was erased in a brief flash. No scrolling on this screen. After a frame was drawn, the computer would trigger a film camera to capture one film frame, then erase the screen in preparation for drawing the next frame. These film videos were used in planetarium presentations. We had even done realtime 3-D wireframe graphics on an earlier PDP-8 using scaled integer arithmetic.
So cool 😎
Ah yes. The PDP8. It was built from 7400 series TTL logic chips with 8 gates per chip. And paging was a thing even way back then. Every byte of memory was valued.
Those Voyager animations were a huge inspiration to me and not only got me interested in space as a kid but also got me into tinkering with 3D rendering with POVray (which also uses things like sphere and cone primitives rather than triangles, and I always wondered why later programs didn't do that). I even made my own Voyager model in POVray so I could do my own flybys (which took ages to make, and really makes you appreciate how complex that Voyager model is when they made it for the original animations!)
Having worked with POVray myself I really loved the smoothness of the objects created out of geometric primitives. No loss of quality regardless of how close you zoomed in. But I guess it is a property of raytracers, that makes those gemometric primitives easier to use. I still wish there had been wireframe modellers available that created output for POVray. Because creating those objects was really a pain. For one CeBIT fair (used to be Germany's larges Computer and Tech event of the year) I took the print designs of our company logo and turned it into a POVray object. The text was literally the most annoying one and I wondered, if TeX and Metafont could be used to create 3-D text to be used in POVray. So I ended up with the main logo being 3-D, put into a 'clear resin' cube and the claim was just a bitmap 'graved' into the surface with a bumpmap. In the end I had to dowgrade the resolution to 160x120 and only 15fps or it never would have been ready for the fair and converted the images to mpeg. To be fair, in 1995/96 the machines weren't mostly not fast enough to actually play the video in the background. Pretty fun. To bad all the data is lost.
I also worked with POVray. I built a few different animations but wish I had been a little more inspired at that time with what to do with it. Today, I'm a 3D modeler for game development and prototyping.
I played with POVray, and even as far back as its ancestor DKBtrace.
NASA has published models of Voyager and other craft in various formats for free download and use. Because these were funded by the US Government, there is no copyright on them.
POVray was a fantastic system and it's a shame in many ways that it got overtaken.
Jim Blinn is an absolute legend for anyone working in the field of CG..
I went to a lot of the big annual SigGraph meetings/trade shows - and you could always find Jim Blinn in the crowds because he was about a foot taller than everyone else and he had this little group of fans moving around with him asking questions causing a kind of turbulent wake effect in the crowd!
its amazing to see how much modern tech exists simply because we looked up at the stars and yearned to explore.
An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. But the approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set off a chain reaction. The shaft is ray-shielded, so you'll have to use proton torpedoes.
thats impossible! even for a computer.
@@IIIDemonit's not impossible, I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than 2 metres.
Or something....
I bet the engineer designer of the reactor exhaust port did not get their yearly bonus.....I mean seriously, engineering stuff ups...
SIGGRAPH was the most cutting-edge conference around in the 70s and 80s. Even though i was a hardware design engineer and didn't directly work in computer graphics I attended every year just for the WOW effect. I got to know many of the key researchers in the field - brilliant thinkers!
When I moved to the US in 1996 one of the very first things on my bucket list was to attend Siggraph. I did for several years at my own expense. Some of the best experiences ever and met some really cool people along the way. Some of whom are now working for Pixar / Nividia and any number of big names today.
It might be half a century later, but wireframe 3D graphics (especially green on black) still speak to me. Their limitations inspired the elimination of needless detail: the animations included only what was strictly necessary to tell the story. I kind of miss them.
As a kid, one of my favorite vides to watch was "The Planets: Epoch 2000 Narrated by Patrick Stewart"as the name suggests, it was narrated by Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard from Star Trek TNG), and showed NASA/USSR footage of the planets all while playing Isao Tomita's electronic version of Holst's "The Planets" I recognize almost al of these animations from that video, especially the "through the rings" shot and the view from Mimas' crater. It is really cool to see where they came from, thanks!
Fascinating video. It truly makes you realise that just because the video can be played in real time, it isn't generated in real time.
I was able to attend a lecture giving by James Blinn in the early ‘80s where he discussed the process of creating these views for the Voyager team. I was a undergrad and the university brought him in for a guest lecture.
Jim Blinn was one of my heroes as a kid and that interest probably helped lead to my current career in software (I got in through graphics, initially scientific visualization).
In the 1980s I had a summer job at NCAR producing visualization software for atmospheric scientists that was not far advanced beyond what Blinn had been doing for JPL. Initially I was working on VAX systems, producing output through Raster Technologies and Chromatics graphics hardware. Later we got some DEC MicroVaxen and graphics workstations, running on either VMS or Ultrix, and I moved to that. One of them actually had an Evans and Sutherland 3D accelerator card, the first one I'd ever encountered.
I then went to grad school in physics, but when it seemed like it was good time to get out of academic physics I drew on that NCAR experience to get my first programming job out of school. And I really owe it to a large degree to my fascination with the early efforts from Blinn and from Lucasfilm/Pixar, before they were making feature films.
interesting comment, do yyou know of ian chislholm, craig zerouni, chris briscoe, paul brown? all people i have worked for around the late 1980's at digital pictures and cfx (london).
@@HarryNicNicholas I wasn't au courant enough to be familiar with them but I probably saw their work at some point!
Some of those Voyager wireframes may predate the actual Voyager program. In the MLI video there's a shot at 9:16 that shows a Pluto flyby. The shots are also labeled 'JSP 76/77' which are launch opportunities for a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto mission, as far as I can piece together. The original Grand Tour plan from the 1960s was for four spacecraft, two to visit Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto, and two for Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune (JUN).
Yes they may go back to the early 70’s, I can remember in the BBC series The Planets a brief clip of a wireframe animation of Mariner 10 approaching Mercury which happened in March 1974. The original Grand Tour programme that featured the JSP’77 and JUN’79 mission profiles had been cancelled in December 1971 to be replaced with Mariner Jupiter-Saturn. It was only through some very sneaky mission design that NASA was able to give Voyager 2 the option to Uranus and Neptune. Which is why it was launched before its sister and why the whole project was renamed Voyager in the spring of 1977 so that it had an open ended goal. If Voyager 1 had passed up the option to make a close flyby of Titan then it could have reached Pluto in about March 1986.
The whole development of Voyager is almost as fascinating as the missions themselves. Maybe Scott could cover it in the future? 🙂
As an elementary student, my "current events" article for the week was the iconic Pioneer 10 false-color pic of Jupiter that still makes the scene. I still remember the pain of my disappointment when the Grand Tour plans were scaled back into Voyager. What a success that JPL managed to build two amazing spacecraft that are still going, and were able to slip Uranus and Neptune in!
@@garethmurtagh2814 Yes. The JPL mission team was using guerrilla tactics to overcome the bean counters. It can probably be argued that they set the standard of planning the hardware and mission for "extended objectives". The bean counters are so short sighted. For instance, why would we fling a spacecraft all the way out to Pluto and only visit Pluto?????
Blinn is actually a name of shading technique in 3D graphics (things like DirectX and 3D Studio Max) so his name will stay in history! :)
Nice video, thanks Scott.
I started programming in 1969 at school, using a teletype linked to a mainframe. They had a moon lander programme which I thought was great but I wanted more so I started coding. It was a complete failure, I had neither the experience or the maths to handle it.
But over 50 years later - my day job is as a web developer. I never stopped writing code.
(In the early 80s my job was working on Acorn/BBC Micros and I invented ray tracing. Yeah, I know, it had already been invented but I didn't know that at the time - I was trying to create a 3D view for a first person tank game. Story of my life always trying to do something I didn't quite have the skills for 😆)
Not only did Rick Sternbach work under the Okuda's in the Star Trek design appartment, but he was also one of the main designers of the USS Voyager from Star Trek Voyager. I bet Rick found that coincidence hilarious.
The Star Trek Voyager intro has striking similarities with the renderings from Voyager 2 passing Saturn, including the camera moving through the ring plane. 😄
One odd thing is, Jim Blinn described bump maps in a paper published in 1978. Yet you don’t see the technique used, even into the 1990s. For example, there was a PC-based CG program called “KPT Bryce” that was very popular in the 1990s, and was used to produce a great many characteristically surreal landscapes/seascapes with strange shapes, bright colours and elaborately-patterned surfaces. Yet all that elaborate patterning didn’t change the fact that the surfaces remained completely smooth.
It wasn’t until, say, the latter 1990s/early 2000s that the software started to support bump maps to try to add some texture to surfaces.
Scott, this video is a great help in sorting through the timeline of the evolution of the computer graphics of my youth! Thank you!
I was always a bit muddled at how Kubrick’s beautiful “2001” got ahead of everything else I was aware of…. The use of LITERAL Wire Frame Models makes much better sense within the timeline.
For what it’s worth, I would really enjoy seeing @CorridorCrew wrap their heads around these ORIGINAL technological evolutionary steps. Maybe even a @ScottManley and @CorridorCrew collaboration?!? (Especially since you have that recent experience technically advising on a movie production in 2021(?).
Either way, Thank you again for your content. 👏🏻👏🏻
I'd like to see CorridorCrew use PovRay, with Notepad as input. Oh, and all preview/practice renders are done on a 80386 running at 33 MHz.
When the BBC made their TV adaption of Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's' Guide to the Galaxy" in 1980/81, the "computer graphics" of the Guide where still all faked using traditional hand cel animation. That won a BAFTA. I bet they could have just about done it with CG by then - even the humble BBC Micro we had a year or so later in schools could do real time wireframes with sufficiently cunning machine code and hackery (see Elite released in 1984).
Kubrick's 2001 also had flat panel screens on the spacecraft, something that was way ahead of its time, we literally didn't see those get widespread until, well, around 2001 or so. Even the sequel film, made in 1985 and set 9 years after the first film, had CRT screens, which by that time had real computer graphics on them.
@@RCAvhstape Those flat-panel screens were just rear-projection screens. They were all fixed in place.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes, the props were fake, but in universe they were real tech of the early 21st Century.
It's impressive. We take all this for granted these days, but they were doing it back in 70s on such antique stone knives and bear skins? It's mind boggling. It doesn't surprise me that this evolved into genesis in wrath of khan. What impresses me with with that movie is that the effects still hold up to this day.
What a magnificent nerd-out this episode is ! Thank you Scott, I really appreciate how you explain these very different aspects of the space industry/science.
Hi Scott. I'm a fellow 'Scot' , from Paisley, not too far from your homeland. I'm old enough to have used several PDP-11's in anger. I also used the wonderful HP9845B with it's external 'mass memory' cartridge storage system. That HP9845B ran day and night, 24*7 for over 14 years in a production environment. One PDP-11 (running RSX-11M) was used for job tracking using VT100 terminals all over the factory and another one (running RTE-11) controlled our entire dye-house using "AREL AutoColor2 dyehouse controllers fitted to each dyeing machine. A PC (A 386 running Netware) collected telemetry (data from the machines connected to the PDP-11 and provided a paper trail of the dyehouse machine parameters. . The HP9845B? It ran Colour Physics software written in house, essentially electronic colour matching. A very very expensive Zeiss RFC-3 spectrophotometer, A Digico Computer (British made and had mag-core memory and a Boot ROM) , an HP paper tape reader amd a FACIT 'comb' printer pretty much completed the setup. It all ended up going to a computer museum... still in working order. I remember we had a HALON fire-protection system. It wasn't for *my* protection but to protect their investment. Best job I ever had.
Ah yes, Halon fire protection!
If the fire alarm went off we had 30 seconds to get out of the machine-room, before it was flooded with halogen gas. Which halogen? Maybe Xenon, but don't really remember :-)
@@AndrewBlucher It used Bromotrifluoromethane. Lovely stuff!
As someone who had a BBC Model B micro computer as a kid, it never ceases to amaze me just how far computer tech has come in a few decades.
Going from 8-bit color and sound to HD video on my phone is a mind-blowing thing to witness.
My hats off to these CG pioneers. Been an animator since the late 80s, and even then completing jobs as envisioned was often very difficult. There were still alot of limitations the contend with.
The Voyager 2 animations had a huge impact on the 8 years-old me, it really triggered a life-long passion for everything about space, astronomy, rockets. Thank you Scott!
Dear Scott Manley, during the late 1980's I was assigned to a project to produce a corporate information system using an early graphics package - VCN Concorde, The screens we produced although mainly static picture files, updated on a monthly basis, could do rudimentary animation. We designed interactive navigation bars so the user could access differing levels of the information being reported. We also designed a house-style for each screen and the front end. In some ways it was creating a very early in-house internet, before there was a world wide version. We ran these systems and screens on IBM PS1 and PS2 machines, using the corporate mainframe architecture to distribute the images to the appropriate users. Great fun and great memories. PS and yes the files and the graphics package did just about take over the machine.
Had never considered how these graphics were so far ahead of their time - growing up with an Oric-1 and then an Amiga, reflecting back these Voyager animations is mind blowing 😮👍
Scott, Thank you so much for giving credit to those people that worked so hard with such primitive equipment. When I started work for Digital Equipment Corp in 1970 retired in 2020. Seeing the PDP-11's and the VT-50 and 52 brought back so many memories of things that we developed in those starting days of computer and software development. When we developed the communication protocol named "DECNET" it set the stage for today's world integration, the "internet".
Fantastic essay, Scott! I began my CGI career meeting James Blinn at Siggraph 1987. I was a film animator at the time who wanted to get into CGI, inspired by James' "Mechanical Universe" project.
His advice to me was to get onto desktop computing, since mainframe and mini computation was so expensive and exclusive to researchers such as himself.
So my company bought a Cubicomp PictureMaker for $60k running on a 286!
The good ol' days...
I used Cubicomp until it died, then Softimage until it died.
@@jeffs.4854 👍 Alias/Wavefront on SGI, LightWave 3D on the Newtek Toaster, as well as SoftImage.
i'm hearing names that ring bells, i was at digital pictures and cfx in london around 1984 ish and i swanned around soho for another twenty years after that....
1989 was the “big bang” when most of the Unix workstation vendors switched away from the old Motorola 68K processor family and adopted RISC architectures. This made a massive difference to the sorts of things that became possible, in CG and other areas.
Scott just explained the history of the world as we know it, in just over 15 min.!!! The detail of the explanations, fantastic!! I didn't realize he had shadow on Voyager 1. Cut my teeth on Commadore 64. I'm totally blown away with this video. Just wow!😶🌫
Commodore, even.
Really enjoyed this video Scott. I suspect my interest in space as well as growing up with an interest in computer graphics and tech at the time (I'm about the same age as you and also had a ZX Spectrum) In old film references trying to simulate wire frame graphics, don't forget Escape From New York (1981) where Snake Plissken flies his glider over New York and the internal display is showing 3D wire frame graphics of the buildings which I had read was done by them creating a model city scape, painting the edges in luminous paint, and then "flying" a camera around the model in the dark i.e. no computers were involved!
I've always been fascinated by that transition that happened in the 1980s, when we went from it being cheaper and easier to fake computer graphics with practical/optical effects, to the reverse.
Even the movie TRON only had about 15 minutes of real CGI in it, and that heavily done over by hand animators adding coloring and glows. The rest was backlit cel animation combined with live action and optical effects.
I used to be a simulator engineer back in the day. We had some visual systems with Evans & Sutherland image generators. We had the SP1 on a Fokker 28 and SP1T on a SAAB 340 (T stood for texture!). It could do night/dusk with about 4000-5000 light-points in 5 colours (the T could do a couple textures also) on 25 inch beam penetration displays (look it up, cool tech) but that was really good considering it did it at 30 Hz in 1985 (I didn't work on it in 1985, I was only a year old but the systems survived until 2009 when I started working on them and one is still there going strong). We also had a later E&S system called SP-X 500 (from the 80's as well), that could do daytime at 50 Hz with textures. It could render about 500 polygons per channel and the system had 3 channels. It was on a 737 Classic (by UK based Rediffusion). Best sim I ever worked on.
The very first machine that Evans & Sutherland put out was called the “LDS-1”. Officially it stood for “Line-Drawing System 1”, but given they were based in Utah ...
I love the part around 2:30 when you had a quick aside about how Stanely Kubrick faked the CGI panel displays with real wire models painted brightly, then filmed with back backgrounds and later projected onto ;screens' on the actual set of the spacecraft.
A lot of very early colour CG was done by pointing a colour film animation camera at a hi-res greyscale monitor that was pumping out greyscale images. Three grey images for red, green and blue but combined with RGB coloured gels over either the lens or screen for each frame of animation but when combined together made a beautiful colour frame of animation. It was a laborious and thankless task. I believe Tron used this method. I hope I've explained this properly. Probably not, but if you don't like it you can **** my ****.
i was at cfx in soho london around 1985 and we used a hi-res vector display (i forget the make) and shot onto film using colour gels for each colour pass, but we did exclusively wire frame, any "rendering" was done by plotting onto cel and hand painting.
@@HarryNicNicholas It sounds like a thankless task mate. Can I be the first to thank you for your effort.
I remember the introduction of the IBM 2250 for CAD/CAM back in the day. As I remember they cost around $100,000 each or about ten times at least the salary of the operators. They also had to be close to the mainframe. Ours were immediately on the floor above. We used to joke that they were the cost of a house and a Jaguar with change left over. They also dragged the mainframe along as they were effectively the first real time task so we ran each one with a dedicated software image and virtual memory on the highest priority setting to get reasonable performance out of them.
I've been using Blender for 15+ years, and i have to admit, some of these tasks would certainly give me a good amount of a head scratching. Truly amazing!
When it does the maths for you it’s hard to recognize that is all it’s doing, some clever clever maths.
On the topic of Star Trek, in the second Star Trek Movie (The Wrath of Khan, released 1982) there is a completely-CGI sequence called "The Genesis Project" which shows a planet being terraformed. It was really groundbreaking for the time and it definitely came as a result of the technologies described in this video.
Still watching and commenting right?
@@scottmanley Darn it, I posted the comment when I was halfway through the video and you mentioned it around 14:20 . But yes, I remember seeing that animation of Voyager passing past the planets a long time ago and I just assumed it was made in the early 90's/after the mission was over and CGI was more widespread.
@@martianbuilder5945 Yeah, it was really ahead of its time.
@@scottmanley Just goes to show how much of the modern technology we take for granted today is derived from the space race! Humanity could advance by leaps and bounds if we just look to the stars again!
@@scottmanley and don't forget "flight of the navigator" i think omnibus did the graphics? i started in CGI in 1974 (!) see my comment.
I followed the course "Computer graphics" at Caltech in 1986. The professor was James Blinn. He was very proud that he got the interlacing correct for the TV on the rapid movements around the time in the video that Voyager flew past saturn.
I subscribed to IEEE’s Computer Graphics magazine in the ‘80s. Loved James Blinn’s articles, his writing style was very accessible.
Thanks for telling this perfectly. Graphics have come a long way since Igor Sutherland first "drew" a line on a screen. He is the inventor of computer graphics really. Jim Blinn and folks like him really expounded on it all. And those were some of the graphics that helped excite me to get into animation and graphics. OK, Star Wars and Star Trek may have helped a bit too.
The Rick Sternbach connection was a surprise. I guess the opening sequence in StarTrek: Voyager is, in fact, an homage (and Easter egg?) to the Voyager sequence. Kind of like, "This is what I wanted the 1970's video to look like and now I have the power."
The first time I remember seeing this type of CGI in a movie was in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, with the Discovery spinning against the backdrop of the moving clouds of Jupiter. Thanks for this video Scott, it pushed so many of my interest buttons! 🙂
That Elite sequence... thank you for bringing that game back from my memory's deep storage.
Those original Voyager animations with just the white lines in the blue background, very much remind me of the Death Star schematics.
Funny you should say that….. still watching while commenting right?
@@scottmanley yep! Wait a minute....that's probably where Lucas got the idea for the art style for those technical drawings.
i really hope the data for these is still around somewhere. id love for it to be released and people port them to modern c/c++ code to re-render them
Another early use of computer graphics was in the film Westworld (1973), where the representation of the Gunslinger's POV was generated using computer graphics. This might be the first use of CGI in a film.
In Escape from New York (1981) the wireframes of New York City (used to represent Kurt Russel's navigation display in his glider) were also generated using models. It was, at the time, simply easier to do it that way.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) TV series simulated computer graphics with hand animation. Again, at the time it was cheaper.
In the 70s I was using a Textronix vector terminal connected to an Altair 680b (and sometimes a PDP 11/70) to generate still frames. I can only imagine how much work it took to produce those animations back then.
Very interesting. Always learn something new even though I started working in large graphic displays and custom real time CGI hardware design in the late 70s. There was a world of difference between early and late 70s designs and especially into the 80s. I am amazed how much one can get from the earliest hardware and how clever one must be to do it.
Yea, the big difference being semiconductor RAM.
Being in computer graphics in astrophysics this blew my mind on how we still use the same techniques (or at least how they're high-level described here) but accelerated graphics make it so much easier and allow for so much more details. Hardware really is amazing today.
Thank you so much for circling back on this stuff Scott, that was awesome.
I remember watching this as a teen and being blown away.
Also, in the early 90s, one of my roommates came across a PDP-11 for sale, for something like $100, and snatched it up. We all (a house full of tech workers) hooked up to it and had a few months of fun fiddling around with it. It was interesting to observe how it was dog-slow in some areas and surprisingly fast at other tasks. It was fascinating to play with, especially in the era of "needing" to upgrade our own PCs every few months or so, watching in real time as the technology innovated and expanded at breakneck speed. By the standards of the day, that machine was already "ancient" technology.
I remember seeing some form of these animations as a kid and it left a really huge impact on me. I can still remember the awe and excitement.
Same here. I bought a VHS tape that featured the computer animations of all the Voyager encounters - set to various classical music compositions. The makers mixed-up the launch dates of Voyager 1 & Voyager 2, but it was always my favourite tape to throw-in.
@@nicholashylton6857 I am pretty sure we are thinking of the exact same tape!
@@LoriH2O Could be! I wouldn't be surprised.
2:12 Vector displays were used in the 1980's in the Willams Archade Video games like 'Asteroid's' and 'Tempest' and of course 'Gravatar'
I owned an Asteroids game in my living room in the 1990's ha ha
my favorite was the 1979 Lunar Lander Videos game that used a Vector Graphic display
@@firstandbest5921 my favorite was star castle
Awesome video. Another great resource for the state of graphics and visualization in the late 70s and early 80s is the book The Making of Tron by William Kallay. Obviously the book is largely based on the Disney film but it also focuses a lot on the state of the art, the blend of hand-drawn mattes and cells with composited CGI and a who’s who of the companies working in the field at the time.
Loved those animations as a kid and may have spent an hour or 2 playing Elite on the BBC. Those were the days.
My father wrote some engineering train line simulation software on PDP-11 on the early 80’s. With some adaptations we made to run on modern computers, it works perfectly to this day, being used to plan big infrastructure projects. The difference is that now you can do it in a split second, and before would take a day.
OMG, that was so *fascinating* that I don't feel guilty about skiving off what I was supposed to be doing. Big shout out to the ZX Spectrum 48k, which was my distraction on the day, but led me to a rewarding career in tech.
"PDP-11" describes a family of computers. As you can see in the image, this is a PDP-11/45, a larger chassis than the PDP-11/34s that I used to work with. There's an article on Wikipedia describing the series and their innovations. What I found fascinating was at the time I was going to a system school learning the workings of the 11/34 in detail, I bought my Commodore Amiga A500. I started learning about the MC-68000 processor, and the similarities between that and the PDP striking, the major difference being that the PDP was largely 7400 series TTL logic, vs the MC-68000 being a single chip. Things were moving fast back then.
I remember seeing that on BBC Horizon in about 1981? I was spell bound, for the first time, I had seen the future! In 1994 I was at PC Magazine and trueSpace came in for review - now you could do this on a desktop PC, it was a life changing moment. Anyway, here I am nearly 30 years later, I've run my own animation studio and worked for the BBC, Warners and Disney. I used to use SoftImage and it had a Blinn shader (incidentally, 'Blinn' is Russian for pancake, Mandelbrot is German for 'Almond Bread') Life changing!
Thanks for reminding us older progammers of those days Scott!
I was a Physics student in '74, writing orbital reentry simulations on our Cyber 72. A couple of years later after dropping out I was writing flatbed plotting software to do engineering drawings. I recall one job on a PDP 11, but I've no details lol.
I recall the Cyber used the directed electron beam approach to draw text and graphics, including in its chess program.
Thanx for giving Jim Blinn the exposure he deserves. He's one of the Elder Gods of Computer Graphics.
I'm so glad you decided to make this video!!!
I was am undergraduate at Caltech working at the Space Radiation Laboratory (headed by Dr. Ed Stone, who later headed JPL) when the Voyagers encountered Jupiter. There was concern that the cosmic ray detector would be overloaded and damaged by the high radiation levels in Jupiter's radiation belts, so students like me were enlisted to plot the relevant telemetry by hand 24 hours a day and issue a warning when the edge of the radiation belt was encountered, so that the power to the detectors could be turned off. I recall having a late night shift, and encountering Carl Sagan in the hallway early one morning. I worked with a DEC-11 at SRL, but I recall one of the computer science wizards had a PDP-11 that he used to lock his room for Senior Ditch Day. Thanks for this video - it obviously brings back fond memories for me!
_"I recall having a late night shift, and encountering Carl Sagan in the hallway..."_
Whoa! Did you get to say hello or chat for a minute?
I remember the Evans and Sutherland cards, our 3d game artists got them, massive things that I'd always assumed were somehow MOD related.
Engineers moved onto Voodoos and eventually early Nvidia stuff - then we weened the artists off.
We also had a couple of Silicon Dream render machines that had massive gold wired interconnects, the interconnect alone cost £60k which at the time was the same price as my first tiny house.
I was the editor of ASTRONOMY magazine and covered the Voyage missions at JPL. Somehow I got word that Jim Blinn was the guy to see, so I spent an afternoon interviewing him and put one of his graphics on the cover of the issue about the flyby. I was completely blown away by the graphics! As a magazine cover graphic, the image was a failure because 1) it was a photo of a computer screen and 2) what looks great on a screen often looks flat and dull on the printed page. But that helped get me into programming image processing for astronomy....
My wife worked at JPL from 1984 to 2016 in MIPL (multi-mission image processing lab). Our children grew up with all of the great images and videos.
Those early animations look like the Death Star schematics from A New Hope, which makes since both the Voyager missions and Star Wars were being made at around the same time
Excellent video!
I had a Commodore 64 back then and was amazed at its graphic capabilities using a TV as your screen!
I had always assumed that the Voyager and Cosmos graphics were cartoons!
i really love it when you do videos like this one. i learn an amazing amount of things i didnt know i wanted to know, and thus never researched it. now i know, and thus will do some digging. thank you.
TI-99/4A was one of my first computers to play with before having my own C64 with the eventual Cassette + Floppy Drive. Was such a wonderful time to then get a 2nd Floppy + Cassette Drives to increase the ability to get content to others to help with different projects. Was a whole new world to then have Cartridges but not have the means to push my Software onto a Cart in order to get more performance.. Had dreams back in the day to be able to pull from multiple Carts to increase performance even further. Was fun to have grown up as a Software/Hardware Engineer as a child and use that know how to Repair Consoles where I then tried to link devices together dreaming about Internet beyond BBS. So much nostalgia and this was a fun journey into what the Pro's were using and how wonderful it must have been for them to run on multiple displays. They'd have such a great time using the tools we utilize these days~ Especially the power of recent Cell Phones.
much later than this, one of my classes in college(probably 1979) had us draw a table and lamp and be able to rotate it(matrix manipulation). It was displayed on a textronic(sp), just green lines drawn on a display, ie, take something 3d and map it to 2d for display. anyhow, cool video...
Love the early realms of displacement maps and displacements and their origins. So glad you arr able to talk about it so well and entertaining. Thank you for your research and passion, I do 3D VFX and seeing this was absolutely fascinating to see
Lovely work, Scott. I remember these animations from fortyish years ago, and it's great to now get a clearer idea of just how clever and imaginative the people who created them were.
seeing this, and the mention of cosmos, reminded me of so many 70s and 80s science shows, i always looked forwards to them and the daddy of ted talks the RI christmas lectures, now they are all gone and peoples mainstream viewing is 'love island' or eatings insecrs as a castaway challenge
These short documentaries really make my weeks. Thank you.
You are very good at explaining things that I didn't even realize I wanted explained.
I am surprisingly verklempt at all this interconnected lore. Big feels seeing the Voyager visualization!
Elite on C64 FTW!
Definitely the best music (hurrah for those SID chips!). I originally played the game on an Electron; later I obtained versions for most other systems (Beeb, Amstrad, Spectrum, C64, etc.), but the C64 version is I think overall the best of them.
Wow super awesome video! Well done Scott! This is amazing!
Excellent video. I wasn't quite a teenager when these were launched. The animations and pictures were truely ground breaking. I still follow their progress today.
Fantastic video, Scott! Thanks for making it!!
Top notch report. As always, amazed by your research.
A random THANK YOU for all you share Scott. Love your channel & great job with the flying. Awesome mate
Amazing to learn how much of these developments are used in video and game production.
I worked at Evans & Sutherland through most of the '80s, and I remember being very proud of how our equipment was being used in so many pioneering ways, including the production of The Wrath of Khan. I also did some BASIC programming for my department on one of their PDP-11s. Good times!!
thank you for this Scott! i used pdp 11-70 with new C compiler in 1982 (Stirling uni) for relational database dissertation
Jim Blinn's animations of the Voyager probe encounters with the planets of the outer Solar System, helped fire my interests in space flight, astronomy, space probes and computer graphics as a young kid in the mid-80's. Thank you for doing a video on this great man Scott!
I was a graduate student at University of Utah in the late 1970s around the time that James Blinn was finishing his PhD in Computer Science at U. of Utah. Blinn was almost legendary at the College of Engineering, and there were various poster displays of his work in the hallways. I spent many hours at the College of Engineering building at a work station writing code and analyzing data for my Master's thesis on the room-sized Univac 1108 multi-user computer system.
As a computer graphics and 3d modeler guy, it's really cool seeing such familiar concepts come to be like this
omg thank you for a whole video on this!
Very cool, learning how video games pulled this off was one of my earliest hyperfixations.
hey Scott - loved your callout on that video about how it's just Kapton. Even I assumed they had a vaccum deposited gold layer on one of the outer layers (although I knew the inner was silver/Al)... thanks for clarifying just Kapton.
I’ve been watching your videos from day one and this is one of the most interesting stories you’ve ever told. Thank you for sharing!
Fascinating video. Great research and scripting!
Good data visualization always fascinates me, especially when it concerns spaceflight.
EDIT: I have some experience with this relating to online multiplayer games and heat maps. It’s a difficult but fun subject.