IS 490

IS 490

SPECIAL TOPICS

Computer Graphics

May 6, 1996

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

How It Was 3

How It All Began 4

Times Were Changing 6

Industry's First Attempts 7

The Second Wave 10

How the Magic is Made 11

Modeling 12

Animation 13

Rendering 13

Conclusion 15

Bibliography 16

Introduction

Hollywood has gone digital, and the old ways of doing things are dying. Animation and

special effects created with computers have been embraced by television networks,

advertisers, and movie studios alike. Film editors, who for decades worked by painstakingly

cutting and gluing film segments together, are now sitting in front of computer screens.

There, they edit entire features while adding sound that is not only stored digitally, but

also has been created and manipulated with computers. Viewers are witnessing the results of

all this in the form of stories and experiences that they never dreamed of before. Perhaps

the most surprising aspect of all this, however, is that the entire digital effects and

animation industry is still in its infancy. The future looks bright. How It Was

In the beginning, computer graphics were as cumbersome and as hard to control as dinosaurs

must have been in their own time. Like dinosaurs, the hardware systems, or muscles, of

early computer graphics were huge and ungainly. The machines often filled entire buildings.

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IS 490

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