Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The 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. Bill Reeves animated the spreading wall of fire with particle systems, clouds of tiny moving points that model fuzzy things like fire, smoke and water; his 1983 paper on the method used this sequence as its example. Loren Carpenter made the fractal mountains, generating terrain detail from mathematics rather than modeling it by hand. The division that made it later split, and one of its halves became Pixar.