The History of 3D Graphics (Blog Post #3)

Computer Graphics have evolved substantially over the past decade and it is very interesting to look into the presence of 3D Graphics in the past in comparison to the amazing photo-realistic 3D Graphics available today. This blog will outline what I see as some of the key points in the timeline of 3D Graphics which will mainly revolve around film and animation as the technology in Video Games has lagged behind quite a bit.

 Futureworld was the starting point of 3D graphics in television and animation as it was the first ever 3D animation in a film which was created a year before Star Wars Episode IV: A new Hope in 1976 as opposed to 1977. Early the next decade in 1981, “The Looker” was released which was the first film to feature a CGI Human Character and also the first film to feature the use of 3D shaded CGI, I believe this is an important point in the history of 3D graphics as shading is a very important aspect of 3D modelling in modern society and it generally assists with providing a sense of realism to the illusion of the assets.

(http://fanaticaboutfilms.blog.com/files/2013/05/Looker-CGI1.jpg)

 Luxo Junior, a famous early Pixar short film released in 1986 which was the first to implement fully rendered shadows in CGI with special developed software Renderman improving upon the technology used in Looker. Toy Story released another decade on my year of birth, 1995 was the first feature-length 3D animation which despite the sentimental value I have from watching the film understand the impact it had on 3D animation for the years to come. 6 years later in 2001 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released and although it did not reach critical acclaim and was a commercial failure it was very influential in the future of 3D Graphics.

(http://images.wikia.com/pixar/images/archive/b/b4/20120622045344!Luxo_Jr.jpg)

I would also like to talk about the term democratisation in relation to the 3D Graphics Industry. This refers to the process of technology becoming more available to the public which I believe is positive to the extent because if 3D modelling software becomes more available to the public it allows creative individuals like myself to become involved in this industry whereas we normally wouldn’t be able to. The only negative thing that comes to mind when thinking about the democratisation of 3D Development Software is the fact that due to the availability of the product, there will be immense competition in the field of 3D Graphics.

In relation to democratisation, I think it is worth mentioning the Ptex software developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios which claims that textures can be applied with this software without the assignment of UV maps which I believe is quite revolutionary if it works as it is intended to. With this kind of technology I believe that texturing 3D models will be much less tedious as UV unwrapping can be a very time-consuming task. Relating back to democratisation again I believe that due to the ease of texturing without UV mapping there will be extremely high amounts of competition.