Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "" video.

  1. NASA has published models of Voyager and other craft in various formats for free download and use. Because these were funded by the US Government, there is no copyright on them.
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  2. To model elaborate shapes, they were first sculpted in wood, I think it was. This was then sliced into thin layers, which were individually scanned to build up the mesh data in the computer.
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  3. One famous name tragically died young--Bui-Tuong Phong. He gave us Phong shading. Who knows what else he might have done ... Also I don’t know if Pierre Bézier and Paul de Casteljau are still alive ...
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  4. The Last Starfighter looked so far ahead of its time because the rendering was done on a multi-million-dollar CRAY-X/MP supercomputer. Even compared to stuff done 10 years later, it still looked pretty good.
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  5. I keep hearing about this “woke” thing. But nobody seems able to tell me what it is. Can you help?
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  6. 1989 was the “big bang” when most of the Unix workstation vendors switched away from the old Motorola 68K processor family and adopted RISC architectures. This made a massive difference to the sorts of things that became possible, in CG and other areas.
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  7. Another hotbed of CG development in the 1970s was the New York Institute of Technology. They somehow acquired a rich benefactor who would gift them with lots of expensive hardware. For example, there was this new thing called a “frame buffer”. It had 64KB of RAM, which was just about enough to hold an entire greyscale video frame. The computer arts department asked their patron if he could get them one. He came back with three. And so they had the world’s first full-colour RGB frame buffer.
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  8. I think each frame buffer might have been 256kiB of RAM ...
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  9.  @AndrewBlucher  Turtle graphics was part of the LOGO programming language from 1967.
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  10.  @Tod_oMal  So what would you call it when it is a “true need of social justice”?
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  11.  @RCAvhstape  Those flat-panel screens were just rear-projection screens. They were all fixed in place.
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  12. “JCL” was an IBM thing.
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  13.  @PhotoArtBrussels  You could have been thinking of “DCL”. That was originally only on VAX/VMS, but DEC brought a version of it to some of its PDP-11 operating systems as well. Was this in the early 1980s, by any chance?
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  14.  @PhotoArtBrussels  That would have been about the right time for DCL.
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  15. One odd thing is, Jim Blinn described bump maps in a paper published in 1978. Yet you don’t see the technique used, even into the 1990s. For example, there was a PC-based CG program called “KPT Bryce” that was very popular in the 1990s, and was used to produce a great many characteristically surreal landscapes/seascapes with strange shapes, bright colours and elaborately-patterned surfaces. Yet all that elaborate patterning didn’t change the fact that the surfaces remained completely smooth. It wasn’t until, say, the latter 1990s/early 2000s that the software started to support bump maps to try to add some texture to surfaces.
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  16.  @Tod_oMal  Is it something worth fighting for?
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  17. Ah, the CDC 6000-series, the first family of computers to be worthy of the name “supercomputer”. They were a massive jump--about 50 times faster--over anything else out there (particularly IBM). Designed by the legendary Seymour Cray.
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  18. The very first machine that Evans & Sutherland put out was called the “LDS-1”. Officially it stood for “Line-Drawing System 1”, but given they were based in Utah ...
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  19. But that was all miniatures, no CG.
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  20.  @antigravityworkshop1436  Oh yeah, that one little bit.
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  21. 2:10 There are some documents at Bitsavers describing the IBM 2250. Basically it had a CRT calligraphic vector display, with either 4kiB or 8kiB of onboard RAM (oh, the luxury), and a high-speed connection back to the mainframe. Plus a light pen and keyboard. The display was black-and-white only, no colour, not even greyscale, just white lines on a black background.
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  22. Blender is really the only one left that covers it all. All the proprietary apps have become narrow specialists.
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  23. The company “Pixar” (from “Pixel Array”, I think) was named for that one hardware product--which they stopped making a long time ago. But they kept the name!
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  24. CAD software normally uses OpenGL for drawing on-screen, and that does indeed render surfaces as made up of triangles. The same would be true of Vulkan. It’s just easier for the hardware to work with triangles. Of course, the CAD software has much more elaborate mathematical structures, like surface patches, that it uses for calculations like FEA, BOM and so on. But all the on-screen visualization is still done with triangles.
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