BY MICHAELA McBRIDE and JOEL SCHULTE

On many computer screens throughout Walter Scott Engineering Center, students work on design projects through computer-aided design (CAD).

Three-dimensional models, systems and machines bring calculations and creativity out of each designer. Most designs are envisioned to exist in reality — but some may not. Some are intended only to be seen on a bigger screen and perhaps help generate some popcorn sales.

In modern times, CAD is a staple of the engineering world. But throughout its history, it has branched out heavily into the entertainment industry.
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is a common term for most three-dimensional designs created by computers that are applied to special effects. The origins of CGI date to 1962 and a program called Sketchpad, created by Ivan Sutherland, a Ph.D student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Sketchpad was a mere skeleton of the programs used today.

Sutherland worked with David Evans, a professor at the University of Utah, to create the first academic computer graphics department. This program developed many technologies such as virtual reality and desktop publishing.

Evans and Sutherland founded the world’s first computer graphics company in 1968, Evans and Sutherland. A year later, the company created the first corporate work station for CAD programs. Previously, computers that were capable of making graphics were costly and often used only by the military. Evans and Sutherland opened the doors to corporate use of CGI technology.

CGI was first implemented into the big screen in the movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn,” which featured a one-minute scene created completely by computers. George Lucas founded the company responsible for this scene. Lucas was instrumental in helping computer graphics make the transition to the big screen. He began in 1978 when he hired Edwin Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology to start the Lucas Film Computer Development Division, which researched the impact computer graphics could have in the film industry.

The mid-1980s marked a time of incredible improvement in technology for CGI. The computers needed to engineer these images became less expensive and easier to get. Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) computer division was instrumental in jump-starting the CGI industry. In 1989, the ILM was used to create a water creature in the movie “Abyss.” This was the first realistic and believable character in a movie generated by computers.
The 1980s also marked the explosion of the video game industry. However, this side of the entertainment industry would take some time to catch the 3-D trend. Early prototypes and simple 3-D rendering games surfaced in the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, many first-person computer games such as “Doom” in 1993 and the release of Nintendo’s gaming console Nintendo 64 brought 3D into the video game mainstream.

UNL alumnus Joel Gompert (B.S., Computer Engineering; M.S., Computer Science) works for Infinite Ward, a programming company owned by game manufacturer Activision. Gompert sheds some light on the video game industry’s progress: “They (game manufacturers) have been a few steps behind movie CGI,” Gompert said. “The goal of creating video games, of course is to create something that runs on consumer hardware. So, games have often been making the same leaps in capability as film, just several years later.”

Recently, CGI has entered the center ring of film production. Pixar’s “Toy Story,” released in 1995, was the first full-length film to be created solely using computer generated images. Toy Story was not only a huge hit in box offices, but it also was a huge landmark for the movie industry. It even created a new definition for cartoon. Previously, animations were simply flowing sequences of drawings on paper that became frames of a movie. The use of computers brought film creators a seamless way to animate, not to mention a third dimension. Following Toy Story’s lead, many other films such as “Shrek,” “Finding Nemo,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Shark’s Tale” have made CGI a standard for animation.

CGIs are becoming more detailed and are boldly expanding past the children’s arena of filmmaking. A well-known and prime example is the character Gollum from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Gollum’s features and movements reached an all-time high in detail. His presence within a live-action film, interacting with real actors, may have been an even bigger landmark. Gollum was a more sophisticated CGI; however, he was not designed from scratch on a computer. Rather, he was generated from a live actor, Andy Serkis.

Using a method called motion-capture photography, an actor performs the character’s movements and dialogue, only he or she is dressed in a suit (often nicknamed a “mo-cap” suit) with many motion sensors located on various joints and contours of the body. Places of more complex movement, such as the hands and face, have a higher concentration of sensors. When a scene is completed, the movements and behaviors of each sensor are recorded to a computer, where a CAD system reproduces the actor as a wire frame. The wire frame can then be tweaked, given textures and shadows, and finally become a fully digital character. The computerized process is still nothing short of complex.

“When creating CGI for film, the back end is very heavy,” Gompert said. “They (filmmakers) don’t need to render at 60 frames per second on consumer hardware, so they can have huge render farms that perform all the raw computation to produce the final images. The images are often rendered in a distributed manner on large computer clusters, and it still may take days to render one frame of a film.”

Motion capture photography traces its roots to the video game production industry.

Athletes often are used to create the most natural and realistic movements for sports video games. Big name sports stars often are called into studios to zip on a “mo-cap” suit and perform a signature touchdown celebration or a special slam dunk so their characters can be easily replicated in game play.

At the beginning, computer animations had very little personality, but technological advancement has enabled personality to be their center focus. But even throughout countless technological advances, creating the human character remains the highest hurdle to clear.

“Humans are so good at recognizing subtleties in the human face and in human movement that we can easily detect a fake,” Gompert said. “That will be a huge step when viewers are no longer able to tell the difference between CGI and the real thing.”