CDR: Re: Gort in granny-shades (was Re: Al Gore goes cypherpunk?)

[Tim May]

At 7:43 PM -0400 10/24/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>
>Moreover, all of these Hollywood Computer Generated Image applications were
>designed to model *physics* to begin with, and it's just plain ignorance on
>Hollywood's part, or at least on their audience's part, that keeps them
>from being used the right way in the first place. Blame it on public
>schools, or at least 30 years of socialist control of same.

Nonsense, on at least a couple of accounts. I was active in the image 
processing field in 1980-84, and attended various SIGGRAPHs and 
suchlike. Fact is, "ray tracing" and various illumination models, and 
Gouraud and Phong shading and all the rest...were NOT motivated by a 
desire to model "*physics*." Physicist didn't give a dang about 
modelling light sources in 3D environments, and about morphing and 
wrapping and all that.

The motivation was to produce special effects for education films (a 
la James Blinn at JPL), effects for movies (a la Alvy Ray Smith, 
eventually of Pixar), and advertisements for Hollywood and Madison 
Avenue.

For many years, from at least the early 70s onward, the highlight of 
SIGGRAPH and similar conferences were the demos from leading makers 
of advertisements, digital paintboxes for t.v. weathermen, and so on.

--Tim May
-- 
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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