Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!sri-unix!WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA From: WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: THE LAST STARFIGHTER (COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD July 1984) Message-ID: <1888@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Thu, 12-Jul-84 04:45:00 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.1888 Posted: Thu Jul 12 04:45:00 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jul-84 02:27:55 EDT Lines: 97 From: William Daul - Augmentation Systems Div. - McDnD Scene on the cover article on page 62. The following is copied wthout permission. 3-D Images for the Film Industry Behind Digital Productions' Closely-Guarded Doors By W. Mike Tyler The largest producer of computer-generated 3-D images, in terms of sheer volume, is located in an obscure section of Los Angeles. One might not even notice Digital Productions' presence if it were not for a huge water cooling tower, or the extra power lines coming from a nearby utility pole. John Whitney, Jr. and Gary Demos founded Digital Productions in 1982. Together, they developed a process known as Digital Science Simulation(tm) for creating totally computer-generated images for the film industry. This month, the firm will add motion pictures to its list of TV commercial accomplishments when Lorimar Productions releases THE LAST STARFIGHTER, a full-length feature film containing 21 minutes of computer-generated images. Behind Digital Production's closely-guarded doors is the most sophisticated hardware and software ever assembled for the sole purpose of creating computer-generated imagery and simulation. The facility is capable of producing 12 minutes of film per month, where the average frame complexity is 250,000 polygons. At 24 frames/second, that is 17,280 individual images (4.3 trillion polygons). To accommodate this intensive computational load, Digital Productions has acquired a Cray X-MP computer (hence the need for the cooling tower which extracts heat from liquid freon circulating through the Cray's PC cards). In addition to the Cray X-MP, Digital Productions has a full array of data entry, encoding, and movie previewing workstations. Ramtek RM9460 imaging/graphics display systems give technical directors the ability to view fully rendered images before they are committed to film. The amount of data that can be displayed is 1280 x 1024 pixels x 24 bits per pixel, or approximately 4 mega-bytes per frame. Interfacing to the Cray X-MP via a DEC VAX 11/782, these previewing stations provide immediate feedback and allow the technical directors to experiment with a variety of different display attributes. The hardware also includes a 2560 x 2048-pixel by 10-bit/color film recorder and a high-speed custom interface to the Cray IOP. Both were designed and built be Ramtek. From a systems perspective, Digital Productions' designers are interacting with a graphic database--representing 3-D shaded solid objects, something common to many CAD system designers. However, the scope and scale of their system sharply departs from your everyday CAD operation. This has to do with the special requirements involved in the production on images for film. Most significant is the need for raw computational speed. Quality film production work for a single 35mm frame requires a film recorder resolution of 3000 x 4000 pixels and 10 bits for each color. At 10 floating-point calculations per color, per pixel, it would take 8.64 billion calculations to produce one second of film (3000 x 4000 pixels x 3 colors 24 frames/sec. x 10 calculations/color pixel). In creating realistic computer-simulation scenes, lighting and rendering algorithms require one to 10,000 calculations per color. Thus, anywhere from 864 million to 8.64 trillion calculations are needed to produce one second of animation. The Cray, at 200 million floating-point instructions per second, takes anywhere from three seconds to 10 hours to generate one second of film. Since adjacent frames contain common image features, programming shortcuts exist for reducing the overall number of calculations. Large-format 70mm movie film resolution (4600 x 6000 pixels/frame x 30 bits/pixel, or approximately 100 Mbytes of data) ups the computational requirements even further. How economical is all this? In the case of THE LAST STARFIGHTER production costs were significantly lower than filming scale models of the Armada ships and performing post-processing to make them look real. When comparing industry firsts, THE LAST STARFIGHTER includes over twice the amount of simulation that appeared in STAR WARS, and was produced in approximately one third the time, at about one quarter the cost. CONCLUSION There are fundamental parallels between Digital Productions' supercomputer environment for film-making and high-performance systems for mechanical CAD design or engineering simulation. All have a common purpose: design productivity. Each has its own intensive computation burden. But not everyone can afford access to a Cray-class computer. However, these application needs have spawned a new generation of graphics peripherals with special-purpose computation accelerators to tackle the dynamic display of complex 3-D solid objects. Ramtek's new 2020 products fall into this category. The major improvement brought by this class of device is the 3-D design takes that formerly took anywhere from tens of minutes to hours can now be done in seconds. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mike Tyler is manager of the product management group at Ramtek Corp. Prior to this, he was employed by Computer Science Corp. Mr. Tyler graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.