In April 1983, Lucasfilm’s computer division created the first ever high-definition CGI image. The people from the so-called Graphics Group, who split off three years later to found Pixar, named the picture The Road to Point Reyes.
It was a realistic rendering of a real place, Point Reyes is a rocky cape in California about 50 kilometers from San Francisco. But REYES was also an abbreviation of the then prototype rendering software (Renders Everything You Ever Saw). He then became RenderMan, who in ten years helped bring to life the liquid T1000 in the second Terminator, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or Buzz and Woody in Toy Story.
The Road to Point Reyes, zdroj: Pixar
Today, you could create a similar one in a few minutes, for example, in the game engine Unity or Unreal. But then everything was created from the ground up, art and programming precision combined. Six people are behind the picture: Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter, Tom Porter, Bill Reeves, David Salesin and Alvy Ray Smith. Everyone cared about a part of the scene, and Smith did on your website devotes to the details of the creation.
The Road to Point Reyes was created on a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX series computer and took about a month to complete. The image had a resolution of 2048 × 2048 px and used a palette of 16.7 million colors. It rendered in 512 x 512 px tiles, no more could fit in memory. Unfortunately, the original file in full resolution no longer survives, but a film copy was created then, which hangs in the Boston Computer Museum.
The ability to render at a resolution of 4 Mpx was the key to the mass adoption of computer tricks in Hollywood. By the way, the same people tried this back in 1982 when they created the “Genesis Effect” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The resolution was lower, but a whole animation of about a minute was created showing the transformation of a dead planet into a world resembling the current Earth. Even after more than 40 years, the result is impressive.
Source: Pixar
2023-04-26 06:45:13
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