first ever 3d animation (40 year old 3d computer graphics pixar 1972)
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- Опубліковано 19 сер 2024
- This historical video was recently re-discovered after being lost for many years. It was produced in 1972 and is believed to be the world's first computer-generated 3D animation. It was created by Ed Catmull, a true pioneer of 3D technology, who was a computer scientist at the University of Utah (birthplace of the famous Utah teapot.) If the name sounds familiar, it's because a few years later he was one of the founders of Pixar.
This is like cavemen discovering fire.
Or Chinese discovering opium
Bro no way you found this just an hour before me lol
agreed
Hi Austin! I love your videos so much! I see the algorithm sent us here at the same time!
Or Americans discovering America
The weirdest thing about this is that it's a 3D animation on a film reel rather than some digital medium
Wanna hear something crazier?
Terminator 2 was shot entirely with film camera, how do they merge 3D CGI with it is still ahead of its time.
A lot of movies use film even today iirc. Editing is wild
Film is still used for almost all high budget movies. It's superior to digital in many ways.
I think that something even weirder is that 2:50 looks like something from a videogame from the late 90’s to early 2000’s. Like a GameCube or PS2.
@@lobsterbark this has not been true for about a decade. Lots of directors prefer film in general or for a particular film, but the "default" since at least 2013 (when Marvel Studios switched) has been digital, and it was pretty popular before too.
Why does it feel like I’m watching a 1920s silent film about how they made PS2 games?
Same here 🤣
Your phone is in night time mode. Turn it off, there's color
I know right? Someone tried to make this look much older than it actually is.
Jjajajaja, so true
@@EL100TIFIKO_01
I love when people just don't give a fuck and laugh in spanish 😄
You just read the sentence:
"The model was digitized"
and automatically understood what that meant. In 1972, that would have made you a tech-wizard.
I remember in 1984 when I was 8, my dad brought home a computer from work and I'd never heard the word before. My brother was like "Oh my god, you got a COMPUTER!!" and I was like "What's a computer? Guys? Hello? Anyone? What's a computer??" But once I saw what it could do, I was instantly hooked. Thankfully back then no one told me a girl couldn't use DOS and learn BASIC, so I was doing all kinds of awesome things on it.
Man, it's crazy how much progress we've made in technology. I wasn't even alive during the 1980s (I was born in 2001), but I didn't know how much I took the stuff I have for granted.
@@m0L3ify The first published algorithm for an turing complete computer was actually written by the woman Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Sadly the so called Analytical Engine was never finished by it's inventor, Charles Babbage, before Ada sadly died at the early age of 36. The computer has not been completely built in a physical form by anyone yet. I could not even find an functional 3D model of it online.
@@jannikheidemann3805 coz its a myth.
@@sugarnads No, because they didn't even have standardized screws back then. Every little part had to be custom made on a lathe, which was verry expensive. It's known that Babbage had conflicts with his engineer on how to manufacture the Difference Engine, a prior model which was not turing complete. The Royal Society did underestimate the merit a computer could have had and did decide against funding the Analytical Engine.
now I understand why they thought in 2000 they'll get flying cars. this is too advanced for the first attempt
Well, flying cars _have_ been made, they just aren't efficient enough to be for practical for consumer use yet. Out of all the technological advancements we've had in the past century, not many have regarded energy storage.
Edit: So people stop pinging me without reading the whole thing, yes, self-driving car technology will help counteract driver stupidity, as discussed later in this comments section (which is discussed plenty further below). Such technology would also be equally beneficial on the ground, though.
We have widely available commercial planes. We may not have aircrafts shaped like cars but we do have advanced fast aircrafts that can take you all over the world more efficiently.
I hope flying cars will never be a thing, as cool as it sounds. There are enough idiots on the road causing accidents every day. Letting them fly would be a catastrophe.
Flying cars requires two licenses: lighter aircraft and driving!
I highly doubt this was their first attempt. Probably took them years to get to that point.
Meh.
I don't think this technology will go anywhere.
Computers are just a fad anyway - only nerds are interested in them
@@godslayer1415 Yeah, I much prefer using a good old fashioned piece of paper to 3D model instead.
Plus it'll be too expensive for people to use it so it'll pretty much die out in like 10 years
@@godslayer1415 you use paper? Cringe. I use rock. Rock strong. Rock look swag.
@@quandarioustoddricioushorn9292 Paper beats rock stupid
This is so impressive. History like this needs to be better preserved and taught moving forward.
Totally agree. We need to know how these types of things originated and evolved.
the problem is knowing at the time what you’re doing is important and not a cool novelty
@Minutes Bingo. History has been revised to such an extent that it would take generations to undo the damage.
As if they want us learning
@@MikehMike01 Ed Catmul knew - as a student at the University of Utah in 1972 he already had the vision for doing complete movies using this. (He had wanted to be a Disney animator but discovered he wasn't quite on that level technically from a drawing perspective but then had the idea that he could use computers to do the drawing for him). Eventually, when he finished school at the U of U he went to work for another small school and drafted most of his former school budies to come work and that's when Pixar (a computer hardware company that made computer graphics hard - particularly framebuffers) was formed. Eventually (after being bought for a time by LucasFilm) it was Steve Job's interest in using their computer hardware in his Next computers that led Steve to get involved with the company. Even though they made computer graphics hardware it was always Ed Catmul's dream to do movies and eventually Pixar transformed into Pixar Inc and made Toy Story. And the rest, as they say, is history
At the time they didn't have a digital interface to visualise the end product like today. Basically they had write literally everything about the animation into a file, the vertices, polygons, the movement, then another machine would take this files and render the sequence. It's almost like working in a computer but without the monitor.
That was also the case for the first Tron movie.
Jeez man! And I thought simple word processing without seeing the fonts and junk was annoying in MS Dos!
Did they have a "camera" like we do today in 3D software? Or did they move/rotate each individual polygon in 3D space?
@@FMAiscool the camera very likely was the final render. If they got anything wrong they'd have to manually edit the models in each keyframe
If memory serves me well they had to use three different computers, one to process the data, another to compute the vertices and apply transformation, and a third one to apply the shading and final rasterization. A projection of each frame would then be displayed on a CRT and photographed by pointing a camera at the display, each rendered frame would then be combined into the resulting animation by tranferring the individual photographs into 35mm film for the exhibit. Everything was worked out with pure code and numerical coordinates, with actual drawings and the hand model itself acting as pseudo-code reference. They had to write a program just for this task as there was none in existence at the time.
the people literally discovering 3d modeling were better at 3d modeling than I am now
Well, if you're writing the rules, you know how they work already, and have nothing to catch up on!
@@tehFoxx0rz yeah the joke is that I suck at 3d modeling
@@tylermustardloooser386 Yeah and I'm saying it's not surprising cus you've got to learn a whole 50 years' worth of progress.
Not going to be good at everything straight away heh.
@@tehFoxx0rz that's not how it works. A high schooler can figure out blender or zbrush in a week (I know I did). Dude either is a slacker or just should try another medium.
@@ZigealFaust
> Someone is inexperienced at an art medium
> They must be lazy and should give up
Lmao?
Was not expecting anything that looked this good. Good job, 70's computer geeks.
I'm not impressed, it doesnt look good in 4k... also, the dialogue is a bit weak and theres no anime tatas.
Overall I give it a 2/10
@TheMemeFoogle are you braindead
@TheMemeFoogle call you gay and leave
@TheMemeFoogle
You're gay that's what it is
This looks amazing even today. Imagine the patience they had for the creeping speed the computer had making this...
What they didn’t mention was that the entire city went dark for 8 hours every night as the computers at the time tried to render the end product.
The first version of Blender's Cycles render engine.
@Mr.Springtrap blender cycles steals your entire power plant's cpu to render as quickly as possible...aka 1 frame an epoch
Hah good one
That sounds obnoxious
@@notsure1969 but can it run Crysis
The animation is honestly a lot more realistic than I expected. This shit is like TRON tier.
Ironically, most of Tron's animation was hand-drawn.
You say that, but PS2 games looks worse than this.
The polygon version of the face made me think of the MCP... then it got better.
@@TheSmart-CasualGamer PS2 does this real-time though. This took a lot of hours of rendering
The computers that were used to animate tron existed in 72 when this was made. :)
"oh, it's just a hand. Impressive, but--"
*fingers bend*
"--oh."
_Dat bend doe_
I dont undestand :/
@@gabriel3903 Static models are entire orders of magnitude easier to model than moving objects.
@@Condorito380 They are not harder to model. And this model wasn’t skinned. Definitely a bitch to animate though.
That puzzled me. They digitized the points from the hand in a single position, how did they calculate the movement of those points without some sort of capture?
this looks amazing for the 70s
Still better than the first Tomb Raider game
Nah it looks real bad I mean it is the 70s
Racially diverse to boot!
@@loreleievans8155 Are you saying the 70's were bad??
😛😝😜🤪
@Sharisha Malkova and 1972 was in fact a year in the 1970s.......
That hand honestly looks way better than I expected for being the first ever animation
Yeah whoever did this was rlly talented
@@srwarrior134 I mean, he did go on to found Pixar.
@@--CHARLIE-- oh I had no idea. That is cool
The first ever 3D animation lol. Not to be that guy but animation has been around way longer
It's better than any hand I've ever 3D modeled before so far, that's for sure :')
We all thought Pong was the shit in the early 70's, and somebody was doing this? I understand this probably took weeks or months to render and Pong was in real time, but this is still incredibly impressive.
The war between console and computers with massive graphics cards is not a new one
@@andrewrife6253 yep. Pc will always have more raw horsepower on tap for stuff like this. The advantage of console is ease of use for the buyer and its way easier developing for one set of hardware than the endless combinations available on pc. If you look at the golden age of consoles they used every little trick they could pull with the hardware they had.
@@noahpaulette1490 What you're saying about console vs computer is right. But, Pong (the original one) was not a console, it didn't had a cpu, it didn't ran any game software. It was basically just an electronic circuit made up of a bunch of logic gates put together to make one game. The only similarity with a computer is that it had a clock which made the circuit run at a set speed.
@@noahpaulette1490 Very true, but the thing is that is entirely dependent on how much of an investment you wanna put into that. Not to mention knowing how to put it together properly. The only people who can brag about it are those who can afford to have that much horsepower, hence why there’s still many who are just fine with console
@@hubguy Not necessarily many people overcomplicate the building of a computer it's basically legos at this point. You can also build many console killer pcs for around the same price is most consoles. It really comes down to preference and there both great depending on how you want to game.
The beauty about PC is you can emulate most game consoles and use controllers for any console.
They didn't even start with something simple like a cube. They went straight for an animated model of a goddamn hand. This makes me incredibly jealous lol. I'm pretty sure most 3D artists can agree that good looking hands are a nightmare to model and animate properly, and these guys did it without the comfy user interfaces we're all so used to today.
Nutt007 It's Pixar, what did you expect.
Granted, they cheated a bit by using a physical hand, mapping out the polygons on it, and then using a machine to scan the points into the software.
I am 100% sure they were testing around ALOT with different, simple shapes first
There's no cheating there whatsoever.
" It's Pixar, what did you expect." - Pixar wasn't founded until 1979...
Considering that the hands of characters in modern games contain about as many polygons as the one pictured here, this was truly ahead of its time.
If they did not do this then ..we will never reach where we are here now ..
I didn't even think graphics cards existed back then... Who programmed this, how did they model it without a program...
Well,there are about 38 polygons on each finger in this video.
38x5=190 polygons.
Now off to the knuckles and base,let's be generous.
The palm contains roughly 75 polygons.
The back contains even less,about 50 polygons.
That all together this hand is,and take this with a grain of salt,305 polygons.
This was a breakthrough in graphics,right,then let's take the '07/2010 equivalent.
Well,the hand is seamless in this nameless game,so 'bout 700 polygons.
And yes,i am talking about a character model,or else we would already have these hands in 1998 (Half-Life).
Plus,another improvement is that the modern hands don't-
call you out for loser! ( 3:00 )
This is off-topic, but... I wrote a reply to this thread about 2 weeks ago, a day or so before Sypadizer, and now it completely disappeared. I noticed because I still got a follow-up notification when ***** posted. This is not the first time this happened either. Anyone know if this is a known UA-cam bug?
This kinda pisses me off, because it always happened whenever I had a meaningful contribution to make >_>
as12df12 UA-cam's comments sections have been really fucked up for awhile now, who knows what that's about!
The way they "model" is crazy. Build the actual thing, draw the polygons on it, use a weird measuring device to tell the computer where all the vertices are in real space.
They still use machines like that (look up "ROMER arm"), although laser scanning is an alternative. If you know all the angles of the joints for the arm, you can calculate the exact 3D coordinates using a process called "forward kinematics".
They still did that for Terminator 2 in 1990.
it seems they did that a lot back then
it was easier i guess
This is nearly half a century old now
Shit. So am I.
it is exactly half a century old now as of 2022.
This finished rendering an hour before this video was posted 9 years ago.
Funnily enough, a slightly older spec machine might've actually take that long
Lol!
@@partake7591 slightly older spec?
@@benr8071 a computer from a little bit before the animation was made. The animation was made 50 years ago, a computer from 60 years ago might have taken the 60 years to render this. Computers have come a long way...
I wonder how much time it took him to render it
Ed: “I just created the first 3D hand model in history.” Wife: “Ok, honey, come to bed.” Ed: “Nah, I think I’ll invent inverse kinematics first.”
yeah his wife was a braindead fuck true
@@monkeyrobotsinc.9875 really?
Me in 1972: 10 Print "Larry" 20 Go to 10
Actually inverse kinematics was invented by NASA for controlling robot arms.
And texture mapping, and metal shading, and Catmull shading, and...
Wait hold up, I never seen more of this besides only the one hand animation, this is amazing
Hey I know you.
Yeah this is really cool stuff.
amogus youtubor
It’s is good seeing the full video
Seriously. From art to science, hell even memes, graphics and animation is and always will be a beautiful thing to behold, and it's amazing how far we've come in 50 years.
Didn’t expect to see you here! Guess we all got this recommended out of the blue haha
Really impressive work for its time for sure. Seeing faces and hands being 3D computer animated in a time when said computers still operated through reel to reel tape and arrays of metal switches is genuinely impressive. We really have it easy nowadays, thanks to this pioneering work
I think the 1920s silent film aesthetic (complete with jazz in the background) in describing what was at the time ridiculously revolutionary... absolutely takes the cake.
agreed wholly. the contrast and clash between the past and future is remarkable
This is the level of quality that comes with pouring your heart and soul into something
I pour my heart and soul when I poop
@@NJ-wb1cz go to a doctor then. Don't write your bs here
@@jaishreeram8045 why not?
@@jaishreeram8045 Wow you're no fun. Fucking asshole!
@@jaishreeram8045 chill
The university computer that did this probably had 64K of memory, that's one millionth the memory of a new home computer
It must have taken months to render this stuff.
More like 1/250,000th. Only workstations, servers and very high end computers come with 64GB of ram. 32GB is even considered high-end for most tasks. 8GB (64KB=1/125,000th) and 16GB (64KB=1/250,000th) are still very much the norm in home computers.
@@KayJay01 32 gig is commonplace for gaming machines. Yes, that's only one half-millionth but that lacks the emotional impact of "one millionth". Thanks for the lesson in math that I already knew :-)
Would a computer from 1972 even have 64k? That seems overkill for back then
@@kimgkomg the PDP-11 at the time had 56K and was popular as a university computer, 64K is close :-)
Makes me imagine an alternate history where computers had taken off much sooner and there were computer animated movies made with the style and sensibilities of movies from the 50s and 60s.
Call it "Art Techo"
That's a brilliant idea, no cap
Imagine if they’d had instant messaging back then. Certainly wouldn’t be anything like what it is today
Imagine an alternative universe where computers took off 20 years later.
Ah yes I see it now. Gollywags, sexism, and old timey racism in color 3D lmao
"What shall be the first ever 3D rendered object?"
"Hand"
Lola... Bunny..
Technically it was the text at the beginning
I like to think there was a cube the did first as a proof of concept. Prehistoric default cude.
@@ThatGuyNamedJoe they did the title after.
"Yes King Shark. That is your hand."
The fact that they also explained how they did it too just makes it even better
back then they would have had to, the idea of something that advanced coming out of a computer was still a foreign concept to people, at the time computers were still mostly limited to exactly that, computing numbers with some text based stuff thrown in, 1972, this was a year before the first proper computer monitor and as a consequence it was also before the idea of a gui
I need a documentary about how this was done.
@Tim P. I'm sorry for being soo lazy so I'm asking, is it available for UK netflix users ? I truly hope you are having an ,at least, okay day
It can never happen. Something is wrong in this claim.
@@josepalacid what?
Catmull also wrote a cool book detailing the history of all this called Creativity, Inc. It doesn't go into the technical aspects, but it does detail the ramifications of having done it.
@@wrenwoodard1077 I just checked and was able to play it on Netflix US. Might watch later.
Thank you all for appreciating this video. I am happy that everyone has their on take on it. It's really awesome the different perspectives of you all. All the good emotions I feel when reading the comments. You all are really awesome folks. The idea is to understand from where we were and what we have become. To be grateful to all positive advancements that help humanity.
What is this wonderful music in the video, the clarinet playing is on-point. Thank you.
@@monkeytennis7477 stardust by Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond (someone mentioned it in a comment further below, apologies if you already found it ☀️)
@@annieothername Thank you! :)
:D!
Karens: “They faked the moon landing! It was CGI!”
CGI in 1969: *N O T H I N G*
Crazy how they had to physically draw on the polygons before they took it into the computer
Shame they still don't do it. I mean, 3d modeled heads are atrocious to look at when they move their lips. in 1972, they even had better teeth!
@@lonewretch realistic heads nowadays are photoscanned then retopologize, so basically like drawing lines on a 3d surface.
@@randomcommenter6734 and still suck.
@@lonewretch yeah because it's really hard to make a head since you have to take into account all muscles movements and skin sliding and skin stretching, added on top of that is the complex process of animating the face
And how they had to scan it in with like a reverse 3D-printer
Funny how everyone is just talking about the hand when at the end of the video, a part clearly not everyone reached, they are showing they animated a literal face, which looks better than games up till year 2000
That face was done by Fred Parke of his wife and was originally a separate film from Ed Catmull's piece "Hand"
the faces were hella creeps tho' i am sure a few people put the mental image right in the bin(also hands are a lot harder to manage than faces and are easy to use as a way to make skill and cpu power)
Heck it looks better than whatever mask they slapped on Mass Effect Andromeda’s characters.
Looks like sub rosa
Literally better than Fallout 3 facial animations
"produced in 1972"
Music is Dave Brubeck in 1952.
I thought that was Paul Desmond. Do you know the name of the tune?
@@mlorthio you are half correct! It is Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond! The name of the track is Stardust.
@@bolognabong Cool! Thanks.
Uhh do you mean it was done in the 50s? So catmull did that with 15 y.o.? Such a chad.
This is the comment I was looking for and it confirms my suspicions.
I think it was Desmond's playing that clued me in as to who it was.
That's the good stuff!
Can't believe a computer from the 1970s runs 3D graphics better than Cyberpunk 2077
Crazy to think that the first 3d animation not only contained clipping, but actively explored the inside of the model. It's exactly what you see in games when you move the camera to an odd position, you just see inside the model. Sometimes it's filled on on the inside, sometimes it's transparent.
Rendering the invisible side of a polygon is a waste of time and processing power. When you want to render in real time everything that in not required must be skipped
Backface culling
Ikr, I love doing that!!
How come no one today considers exploring the insides of 3D models? I think it's pretty cool, and hilarious at times.
Thought they were always hollow?
@@fastertrackcreative I meant textured
... When a video from 9 years ago pops up in your feed. 40 years old? It's almost 50 years old now. Wow. Woody and Buzz would be proud.
I'm sure they don't have the data to recreate the original hand, it would have been nice if they'd been able to use them on something in Toy Story :)
This hand model is better than the one I spent two hours in in blender
No duh, they spent years on it.
@@extrapathos was joke.
I'd say this is on par with something an amateur could make in an hour on blender. which is not even a bad thing.
The faces have the same quality as stuff from new Sims games or tf2, but all this was done 50 years ago so I'm just shitting myself trying to contemplate the amount of work that went into this
"Out of a real hand" Is that a decapitated hand?
The guy who has it must have a fetish for them
@@th-bt6fn Kira yoshikage
why are you here
it's a cameo appearance of Thing form Addams Family
Hands don't have heads to decapitate
So this was made when the godfather and deliverance came out. It looks way too advanced for its time.
i still wonder what all things might have already been invented now, but blind to the public eye, we are still talking about it like science fiction ..and one day we hear in the news that its real :) ...like the new jetpack that a person can actually fly in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_pack
If you keep an eye on science news, though, you can see it long before it comes along. A futurist Richard Thieme once said in a talk, "All you need to do to be a futurist is pay attention to what's going on now, and talk about it. You do that, people will call you a futurist."
I started doing that instinctively decades ago, and my long-time friend has marveled at the predictions I've made. She has been most impressed by when I told her that some day computers and TVs would merge into one thing, so you couldn't tell the difference between them. You'd watch shows on your computer, and surf the net on the TV. I said that in the late 90s, and she refused to believe me. Now she can't stop talking about how right I was. ;) All I did was look at the current 90s technologies (some of which were available to consumers and some of which weren't), and realized that as bandwidth increased, and devices got smaller ... well I just put it together.
I read a thing about DVDs about 5-6 years before they became available to consumers. I read about OLEDS about, I dunno, 15 years ago? And watch as OLEDs and similar "flat" display tech slowly comes into consumer use (tho the use of OLEDs as solar panels did catch me by surprise.. I heard about that just the other day). Just check up on science and tech news now and then, and you get enough to piece it all together.
Well, in the 90's there were VESA/PCI tv-tuner cards.
I remember seeing it in 1976 when Futureworld was released.
@ghadiman2plays roblox the music is Stardust The Dave Brubeck Quartet Featuring Paul Desmond
The fact that these were done nearly 50 years ago is mind boggling! There is no wonder there would be a (future) Pixar founder involved!
I can't stop looking at how one of the fingers is a bit crooked. There's so much personality in that.
Looks like a hand model straight out of Half-Life 2. That's impressive.
even the face looks a bit like alyx
@Anka Paszkiewicz ok
it does! i thought it looked kinda source-y when i saw it.
Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took an hour to render each of those frames
All i know from the info available on the internet was that the facial animation took 2.5 minutes to render each frame on hardware .. and that was equal to a ballpark of $400,000 in 1972 dollars
it takes 400000$ to play this animation for 12 seconds....
/tf2 reference
Estlib Anon hi heavy :)
Which is about $2.5 million in 2021 dollars. That will get you a LOT of 3090 cards!
And to think they paid that much for a frame rate of 0.0067 frames per second. No global illumination, no ray-tracing or path tracing, no physics, just plain smooth shading, on what?, a couple hundred triangles.
Yeah, we have come quite far in 49 years.
@@peterbelanger4094 any of ray tracing/path tracing/ global illumination would destroy this pc lol
@@Estlib No fair, I wanted to make that!
I've noticed that lots of the comments on this video are amazed by how advanced some of the techniques and details of this animation are for being the first rendered computer animation that exists today...but bear in mind this technology had already been slowly advancing for over a decade by 1972. GM was already using primitive CAD in 1959-60, Sketchpad was doing wireframe 3D graphics in 1963, both of which are unbelievably impressive and huge steps towards what we are seeing here. Not saying that this exact film was already possible in the early 60s, but the groundwork was already very well laid out by 1972, so there was lots of advancement, experimentation and research that had already happened at this point. It wasn't like they started developed CG technology a week earlier and then produced this or something...this was already a result of YEARS of computer graphic development. Not saying it's not insanely impressive though, I absolutely love this film and it still blows me away that this is going to be 50 years old next year...I can only imagine the time it took to render each frame. This WAS state of the art at the time, for sure. Surreal seeing it on film, too.
man this is awesome
What is truly amazing that they have not even written their own 3D software, but also invented the mathematics for it.
_“THE MOON LANDING WAS FAKED WITH CGI”_
CGI in 1972:
Edit: *guys I was making a joke*
Edit 2: *oh god i started a war*
Edit 3: *I don’t believe the moon landings were real, I KNOW they were real*
Edit 4: *welp, we reached 500 replies*
Never saw anybody say it was CGI, only in memes
My pp so large no woman is willing to take it
Edit:wtf how did this unrelated comment get so much likes???? It's not even about the topic
Mythbusters proved that the moon landing was true.
Greetings from Buenos Aires, Argentina
@@siphobrisloks8133 it’s spelled “cesspool.”
@@ophello wdym????
Think about this.
This 3D model was made the same year the film "The Godfather" was released.
It's earlier than Star Wars too.
Just 3 years after the moon landing, too. It's half a century old
@@pelicanoe Absolutely stunning
your year counting skills are impressive!
@MrGriff305 it's ironic that once we get there, people will choose not to make it indistinguishable. retro nostalgia will become a norm. there is something about constraints that yields better values out of humans.
@MrGriff305 In the '80s, CGI evolved very quickly, from Tron (1982), to The Last Starfighter (1984), Flight of the Navigator (1986). . .one reason I liked this movie so much, was how metallic the ship looked; I wiki'd that it's the first (alleged) time CGI utilizing image-based lighting was used in a film. Anyway, you posted some good examples, and I grew up mainly in the '80s, so I also remember how CGI got better and better.
First cgi ever. And they chose the hardest thing thing ever.
"How the hell did they DO that!?"
- CD Projekt Red, Dec. 10, 2020
L. M. A. O.
This one got me laughing lmao
It’s better now
I really hope these old models and animation files have been archived. This blows my mind on how ahead of it's time it was!
Try and find a 9 track (or maybe even 7 track) tape player to read the files.
yup you’re looking at the archive
@@AA-gl1dr Exactly.
Makes the first ever CG hand.
Doesn't flip us off. Shame.
Don't worry, I bet it was one of the first idea that came into their minds, but never made it into the test.
@@verticalflyingb737 i guarantee they tested it first with a middle finger, once they knew it worked, they changed it and just rerendered the last part of the hand animation.
Try rendering anything half as complicated as this if you think it’s so simple, dumbass
@@chaptap8376 jfc, lighten up. i never said it was simple, you dolt.
that's my fetish
Ten years later:
UA-cam: it’s time
So now this is 50 years old, wow
I'm just glad the comments aren't just memes and shit
@@imrustyokay It's pretty great. It gets tiring when people can't just unironically appreciate something. I think it's cool to see so many positive and insightful comments.
I swear you could put 4k textures on that hand and be good to go today, nobody would say "That hand's pushing 50 years old".
too low poly bud
I love how the 3D faces get impressed when they look at each other. It's like they're impressed by the fact they existed in 1972!
The faces look less creepy then some more recent tries to make realistic faces XD
It wasn't in the uncanny valley yet. It still looks unrealistic enough to not creep us out.
it’s because of the uncanny valley, if something is clearly fake it tells your brain it’s fake and doesn’t confuse it but if something is incredibly realistic but off by a tiny bit it fucks with your head and your brain can’t tell if it’s real or not
It's the non detailed shading
Wdym those faces are the stuff of nightmares!
@@kenopsia9013 That was my reaction to Max Headroom when I was a kid. I realize the majority of that character was a real person in a mask and heavy makeup, paired with stop-motion animation and a funky background, but it was convincing enough to me at the time to not only look computer-generated, but extremely creepy. I had a nightmare about something related to that character after seeing that movie.
I can’t imagine how hard this was, considering they didn’t have any of the modern software that streamlines the entire process. It’s honestly pretty impressive how good the models look.
As simple and completely unremarkable as this may seem now, at the time it must've been eerie or even unsettling to some people, kinda like when we saw Big Dog get kicked over and catch itself for the first time.
What's Big Dog?
@@Legoluigi26 www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/09/385061116/watch-a-robot-that-just-wont-quit-even-when-its-kicked
@@Legoluigi26BigDog, the robot from Boston Dynamics
I thought Tron was an amazing achievement, can't believe this was made 10 years before, in 1972. Rendered on a computer with all the processing power of a potato, this is simply incredible. Side note, 5:32 resembles a retro Nicki Minaj video..
Tron is still important tho, it was the first movie to use 3d animations and mix them with real scenarios and actors
@@matgrill9085 bro I think you're 5 years late to the conversation...
@@alexanderbriese7561 I replied to people looking for a song on 9 yo comments, they didn't reply but I feel like I must reply anyway
@@matgrill9085 I know the feeling haha
@@alexanderbriese7561 u understand then
First 3D animation: has smooth shading
Me on a dinosaur of a computer: no smooth shading for minecraft
It’s all about optimization
To be fair, Minecraft is having to render thousands of assets in real time all the time.
@@W3Rn1ckz and the fact that renders have no time limit to them
I mean, Minecraft has to render 30 images minimum in real time every single second, while an animation has the time to render every frame to a final file. Put Minecraft in this hardware in the video and it probably would take a while to render a single second. But anyways, the wonders of technology xd
@Shapto Adjie Wahyu Nugroho but 30 fps are usually used as a standard for gaming stability, although some can play some games fine at 20. However, even your PC renders more frames in a second that this computer in the video probably did in hours.
Because it's very old, and such.
I wonder what was the first 3D logo?
Coca Cola /probably/ funded the first 3D one but happy to stand corrected.
Halftone Animation?
@@twobob nice, idk, I wish I knew
Tron
Maybe ABC network.
I was expecting to see an animated Utah Teapot. It turns out that this was 3 years before the Utah Teapot was created.
I wonder if they realized where this would take them eventually.
it was 3D hentai
More than likely since one of them is at the head of Disney. You don't do things like this without money in mind.
@@JALETRATOR VR hentai games to be specific
those are probably a thing right?
@@cyanimation1605 probably
And we didn't even have games that looked like that until the 90's. This is wild.
Because this is a single model in 1972 and games usually have dozens of models simulatied and animated at the same time
Games (models) didn't look this good until the 2000's
@@azekia I bet it had a lot to do with time and processing power. A game using these sophisticated models probably wouldnt have been able to run on any consoles of that time. Just worth the time or money to improve anything If the console couldn't run it.
Games are rendered in real time. This hand is the equivalent of pre-rendered scenes in video games, and yes, we had pre-rendered scenes that looked this good in the 90s. This hands probably took weeks to render. I don't know about this particular clip, but even in the 80s, CGI animations took weeks to render. On a mega-expensive university super computer.
This wasn’t rendered in real time like video game graphics have to be, cgi in movies will be generally better than video game cgi
This is insanely enlightening to watch. You'd think that 3d animating in the early 70s would look primitive and terrible like most things do before they're refined but I was shocked! All of these are so smooth and impressive, given the fact that there was very little in terms of equipment. Honestly, no wonder that this guy went to establish Pixar ❤
Love how they didn't just tell themselves "let's animate a moving cube" or something like that. They started with a fucking hand and a human face.
The mainframe that could do this in 72... absolute monster
THIS IS BEAUTIFUL THIS FILMS ARE THE GODS OF 3D ANIMATION
Yes but it’s a hand
@@maeam yes but hands
JustACringyJokerFangirl53 ahande Sandh. SDNAH
@@justacringymakotoyukifangi8825 so it's hand of midas
@@apang1831
More like Mona Lisa’s hand.
And now we can animate movies so well that you can see every individual hair of a passing side character. Cool stuff.
That "digitizing" technique is nuts. It's just a dude painstakingly locating each and every dot in xyz space, by freaking hand. And I thought laser scanning sucked.
wow the animation isnt bad at all!
IKR
Because it's made with linear interpolation. i.e, you set two points and then the computer slowly transitions between point A to point B.
@@captainoblivious_yt well yeah, but it's still hard, even in today's programs, trust me :') especially when you just start with 3d
@@wiktoriatluvi Oh i know that. I've been working with various 3D softwares since 2013. Of course it's difficult at first, but like anything, the more you do it, the better you become at it and the more you can utilize the software's full potential.
The interesting takeaway for me is the fact that the technology to make good 3D graphics has been around for a long time, but to make them *efficiently* is the real hurdle. This film probably took them months of work to create. You can even see how they have to manually digitize each and every vertex of the hand mesh. The tools to build the future are always right there in front of us, but the eternal challenge is figuring out how to do use them in a way that's cheap enough to make money.
The man who discovered radio waves thought they were useless. The scientists who discovered electricity thought it was only good for parlor tricks. Schematics for the first steam-powered wheels go all the way back to the *ancient greeks*. The technology of tomorrow is here today, we just don't know what to do with it yet.
Salient point. Well said.
VR headsets, anyone?
I can think of so many technologies that I feel certain will have a big future, which all are bound to the advancement of computer technology.
I consider myself privileged to have met Fred Parke in person and get to hear him talk about his work with Ed. He showed us this when he visited our university animation department along with some other long lost stuff. Truly a legendary team of people pioneering a whole new industry
To think about how far technology has gone and how much it has advanced and evolved in just 50 years is absolutely mind boggling. To think that something as simple as this was a technological feat just 50 years ago, and now just about anyone can do it with just a laptop and the right software. It’s insane!
Better animations than in Mass Effect Andromeda
Better CGI than Justice League.
Better texture quality than Watch Dogs.
This probably took days or even weeks to render
That face look 2.5 minutes to render a single frame
im actually not sure how they did render it, it must have been a standalone program or something since computers didnt hit the point where graphics as we understand them were a standard feature till the following year with the alto which still took awhile for the others to catch on
@@nickolaswilcox425 i think they said Ed wrote his own program and interface to make it possible, nothing existed to do this before.
@@nickolaswilcox425 They just used the CPU. It's software rendering. Take the vertices, process a primitive, rasterize it, process the fragments and then tell fill a buffer and the CPU to use it to light the corresponding pixels (also making sure that only the top-most fragment in the hierarchy, out of many on the same pixel, gets displayed). It's the same process, except that it's not parallelized and not done on dedicated hardware... which means (taking in consideration the hardware at the time) that rendering one frame must've taken ages.
According to his book, Creativity Inc., it took Ed Catmull over 60,000 minutes (>41 days) to make the 4 minutes of footage for "Hand" (the face part wasn't done by him)
Me while watching this: Wow! Look at how ancient this is!!
Me 30 seconds later, when I realize I'm OLDER than this film: 😥
Legend has it Marvel used this model for Ironman's final snap in Avengers: Endgame
My boss who worked at Boeing throughout the 70's and up until recently, he always told me about how the crazy technology that we thought was out only recently was around since when he was there. It blows my mind that we've been doing so called advanced stuff like this, but it's been out since forever. Absolutely mind boggling.
This is weird, but I'm so glad they took the camera inside the hand
5:16 Man even in 1972 character models looked better than most Bethesda titles
I’m struck by how “high poly” this all looks compared to a lot of stuff film or games used all through the 80’s and even into the 90’s.
Video games have to render in real time
You possibly recognize name Ed Catmull from Catmull-Clarke mesh subdivision algorithm common in all modern 3D software
I was *wondering* if this was that Catmull. That's neat!
I was thinking about that
This looks just like late 90s 3D, actually better honestly
yeah it´s kinda like the quality of resident evil 1 cut scenes
Each frame of this film probably took a long time to render.
@@KtanKtanKtan And it took hell of processing power (for the time)
Watching the polygons fail to figure out whether to render in front of r behind each other is funny, still happens today in some cases.
you know, it is crazy how life-like the hand is for 1972.
The model is quite complex, the fingers bend realistically, and the hand has some shading. How come the first 3D animation ever was not a simple polygon moving, with no shading? There must have been some tries before this, even if they were not made public.
If there's no shading how could you tell it was 3D?
Dude, those heads, THAT is impressive
Yeah, a bit clickbait title, but still impressive.
Because it is fake
@@bswierko You also claim on another comment that this is fake. Care to elaborate?
Almost a year away from being 50 years ago...
Yeah, and?
Yeah, and?
Yeah, and?
Just pointing out that it took 9 years to get recommended.
@@davincent98 you ruined it davincent98
I love how from the start, we have always wanted to just look inside 3d models
They made the hand model better than people that made hands for the first time
I can’t even imagine how expensive the computers were to render these in 1972 (Cray?).
What would be child’s play in 2021, let alone the 80’s & 90’s, would be extraordinarily expensive in 1972.
It’s impossible to overstate how innovative this demo is. On par with ARPAnet, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC & Stanford Research Institute’s incredible contributions to computer science.
It wasn't done in reatime. The Cray-I didn't exist yet. They had a Univac 1108 and a DEC 10 among others; I'm not sure which system was used to render this. I took out the raised floor of the computer room where all this was done, it made me sad.
@@christophers.8553 Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
The University of Utah used to be a veritable powerhouse of computer graphics research. Ridiculous amounts of formative graphics work happened there, such as Gouraud shading, Phong shading, and Phong illumination -- Henri Gouraud and Bui Tuong Phong were researchers there. And of course it's why the Utah teapot is named that, as that's where Martin Newell was doing his work as well.
Many other vital if lesser-known computer graphics things were developed there at that time, as well, such as the Cohen-Sutherland culling algorithm, and of course David Evans (who worked closely with Ivan Sutherland) was another pioneer.
Bro, I just read Ed Catmull and went to the comments to know if it had anything to do with Cadmull-Clark subdivision algorithm, and you just assault me with information?
@@RodrigoTakehara Clark was also at the University of Utah, yes.
This was made at a university... Someone surely must have animated the hand flipping the bird at some point 😛
Incredible. Very proud my Uni pioneered this! I can only imagine how wild it was to actually see this on screen.
And to think this was made before the "Genesis Demonstration" Particle Effects Sequence made for Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan
But done by the same team.
By a whole decade
Another incredible-looking early cgi sequence~
The hand literally looks like a thing I’d make in blender. Incredible given the tech
i cant even make a hand in blender and i have 6 years of experience
ironically, it's pretty easy now to just photoscan a hand in then clean it up afterwards.
To think that this would have been rendered on a super-computer that measured RAM in kilobytes, had no hard drive or drive of any sort, a CPU with a clock speed measured with a sundial and the whole lot would have been enclosed in an environmentally controlled room bigger than a tennis court. It would also have taken days to enter the data and even longer to render the video. Computer graphics have come a long way in the last 50 years.
Little did they know, almost 50 years on, jaded and disaffected consumers of multimedia would rage across reddit and youtube over all the stupid and gratuitous Hollywood CGI special effects extravaganzas.