Items26The creator’s order
  1. 1SketchpadSketchpadThe starting line. Ivan Sutherland built Sketchpad for his 1963 MIT thesis on the TX-2 computer, and a light pen let him draw straight onto the screen. Before it, a computer turned out plots and printouts; with it, a person could draw a shape, grab it and change it while the machine kept up. That…0
  2. 2Gouraud shadingGouraud shadingHenri Gouraud's 1971 University of Utah dissertation Early 3D objects were built from flat polygons, and lighting each facet as one block of color made a sphere look like a cut gem. Gouraud's method computes the lighting at each corner of a polygon and blends the colors smoothly across the face in…0
  3. 3A Computer Animated Hand (1972)A Computer Animated Hand (1972) 6.2/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 31, 1972One of the earliest examples of 3D computer animation, made in 1972 by Ed Catmull, later a Pixar co-founder, as a University of Utah graduate project with Fred Parke. The one-minute film shows the hand turning, opening and closing, pointing at the viewer and flexing its fingers, and ends with a…0
  4. 4Phong shadingPhong shadingBui Tuong Phong's shading method and reflection model, University of Utah, 1973 Phong did two things at once. His reflection model added a specular term, the bright hotspot light makes on a glossy surface, and it was the first algorithm for simulating that effect. His shading method then computed…0
  5. 5Edwin CatmullEdwin CatmullBorn Mar 31, 1945Edwin Catmull's 1974 University of Utah thesis on displaying curved surfaces Catmull's thesis rendered smooth curved patches by splitting them again and again until each piece covered a single pixel, and it showed photographs being mapped onto those patches. That second idea is texture mapping:…0
  6. 6Utah teapotUtah teapotThe most famous test object in graphics started as a real Melitta teapot on a kitchen table. In the mid-1970s Utah graduate student Martin Newell needed something to model in 3D, his wife Sandra suggested their teapot, and he built it from Bézier patches, curved surface pieces instead of flat…0
  7. 7Ray tracing (graphics)Ray tracing (graphics)Turner Whitted's recursive ray tracing, presented at SIGGRAPH in 1979 Whitted's paper, An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display, stored a tree of rays for every pixel: from the eye to the first surface hit, then onward to other surfaces and to the lights. Following those bounces simulated…0
  8. 8Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 4, 1982The Genesis sequence, made by the Lucasfilm Computer Division, 1982 About a minute long and widely called cinema's first entirely computer-generated sequence, the Genesis demo shows a barren moon transformed into a living world. It is really a showcase of two techniques that are still everywhere.…0
  9. 9Tron (1982)Tron (1982) 6.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 9, 1982Tron was the first live-action feature to use 3D computer-generated imagery to any lengthy degree, and it took four companies to do it: Triple-I, MAGI-Synthavision, Robert Abel & Associates and Digital Effects, a measure of how much computer imagery the film demanded in 1982. The Lightcycle race…0
  10. 10Radiosity (computer graphics)Radiosity (computer graphics)Goral, Torrance, Greenberg and Battaile's radiosity paper, Cornell University, SIGGRAPH 1984 Ray tracing excels at mirrors and sharp shadows but misses the soft light that bounces between matte walls. Radiosity borrowed a method from heat transfer: divide every surface into patches, work out how…0