Amazing! Any idea how long they had been working on this at the time the film was made? It’s incredible how far along they were in 1972.

Thanks for doing the work to share with the world.

Great post Robby – I can see where your high tech/creative lineage comes from :)

Please tell us what he said about managing creativity!

(nice post)

[...] Ingebretson, a friend of mine from high school, posted this video of the world’s first 3-D computer [...]

Robby, this is amazing. I hope we get a chance to talk at MIX 11 about this and other things.

[...] Desconozco si fue la primera, pero dede luego es muy temprana y se trata del caso más antiguo que conozco hasta el momento. Estamos ante un experimento visual del año 1972 creado por el cofundador y actual presidente de Pixar, Ed Catmull, y sus colaboradores en la Universidad de Utah. Lo más sorprendente es descubrir cómo muchas de las técnicas empleadas muchos años más tarde ya están presentes en este vídeo. Más información: Nerd Plus Art. [...]

[...] with Fred Parke and Robert Ingebretsen. It comes to us via an 8mm reel that has been digitized and shared by Robby Ingebretsen, whose dad worked with Catmull in the early [...]

[...] with Fred Parke and Robert Ingebretsen. It comes to us via an 8mm reel that has been digitized and shared by Robby Ingebretsen, whose dad worked with Catmull in the early [...]

[...] El vídeo no sólo es interesante por el propio renderizado sino por el documento que supone en cuanto al cómo se logró algo que ahora nos parece tan habitual. ─[nerdplusart] [...]

1972, ¿La primera animación digital 3D? [ING]…

Desconozco si fue la primera, pero dede luego es muy temprana y se trata del caso más antiguo que conozco hasta el momento. Estamos ante un experimento visual del año 1972 creado por el cofundador y actual presidente de Pixar, Ed Catmull, y……

Wonderful tale!!!!

[...] of one of the men who helped make this film. You can read the story of the film’s discovery here.  I know it’s a rogue and maverick opinion, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and [...]

[...] the full account at nerdplusart. [nerdplusart] Tagged:3danimationcgiclipsentertainmentpixarspecial [...]

[...] the full account at nerdplusart. [...]

A nice hoax, judging by the number of people who believed it. But in 1972 we already had colour television and the movies from that time look pretty good, so why the purposeful crappy quality of this “historical footage”? It looks more like 1930s than 1970s (including the music)
And Pixar didn’t exist in 1972.
Someone wrote the topology looks exactly like in today’s models. Because it is a today’s model :)

[...] “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments.More Information:nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106I know you will share: No Comments0 ViewsNo Comments Yet Cancel Reply Name (required) Mail [...]

[...] film created in 1972 by Ed Catmull (the founder of Pixar) and Fred Parke. Get some back story here. For deeper inspiration take a look at the Pixar Story that even helps make Steve Jobs look a [...]

Keep going. Charles Csuri has a film like this from 1969. First NSF grant to an artist. Look it up.

Looks like begining of demoscene ;)
Very nice one.

What I love most about this film is how the B&W rendering and the use of intertitles (and added music), gives it the flavor of a silent movie, making it feel even older than it is.

I will back you up on this not being a hoax. The timeline, methodology and filmed results match perfectly with history my mom has related. She was the very rare female graduate student at the U of U in the brand new sub-department of Computer Science, just finishing up an M.S. in 1972. She did her thesis, with advice from Dave Evans and other pioneers, on modeling of human/anatomical movement in graphics. Heady times.

Another breakthrough at the time was figuring out how to hide the parts of 3D models that should be hidden. Can you imagine when that was an unsolved problem? Obviously Ed had mastered that for this film–I love the “fly-through” to the inside of the hand around the 4-minute mark!

3-D animations were made in the 1960′s. At Cornell Aero Lab (CAL, now Calspan) in Buffalo, NY, they shot frame-by-frame animations off a CRT wireframe display. See, for example, http://www.mchenrysoftware.com/SpiralJump.pdf , Figures 7 & 8. The text of the paper dates these from 1968. A later animation of the prediction and reality of the Spiral Jump (car thrill show stunt) made with the same computer & movie camera system can be seen half way down this page, http://www.mchenrysoftware.com/
My father managed the department at CAL where this work was done and I watched many animations (and the actual car tests) when I was in middle school and high school, mid-1960′s on.

I also belong to the “child of” club. In this case, Ivan Sutherland is my father. I have no memory of this particular film, but it fits with everything else that I do remember. The woman’s face is probably that of Henri Gouraud’s wife, Sylvie (I took French lessons from her). I know that they digitized her face and that it was used a lot,

Digitizing a 3-D object took a long time. The machine that is shown in the film must come from later than what I remember, because my memories are all of measuring things by hand. We had a VW bug at the time, and at some point we had a party where lots of graduate students came to our house to hang out and to digitize the bug. They used yellow poster paint to paint dots, and then distances between dots were measured by hand, called out, and recorded. I have a picture of my grandfather (Ivan’s father) helping out with this.

At around this time, Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp (founded in 1968 in SLC, Utah) was making very high end, very specialized computers that could render 3-D graphics in real-time. They were initially used by the Air Force as part of their pilot training simulators for pilots learning to land on air craft carriers. Later on they were also used in simulators for oil tanker pilots and commercial airline pilots. As the technology got less expensive, systems were sold to large engineering and architecture companies for 3-D modeling. But I think that wasn’t until the 1980′s. Not many people are aware of how sophisticated the technology actually was back then, because it was so expensive that only the government or very large corporations could afford it. The capabilities of the E&S systems went more-or-less in lock step with what was happening at the University. The first simulators were only for night-time flight since only points of light had to be simulated. But with the shading/surface smoothing and hidden surface algorithms the E&S systems quickly started to show daylight areas (aircraft carriers, airports, harbors, etc).
My father and brother made a scale model aircraft carrier from a kit. Then the whole family spent several evenings around the coffee table measuring distances between points and calling them out to my mother to record. That became the basis of the carrier in the simulations. In one of the earliest versions, if a pilot missed the deck, little 2-D fishes would appear, but the Air Force didn’t like that so it was removed.

I was too young to understand the significance of most of what was going on, but I vividly recall certain phrases that seemed important to the adults at the time: “Hidden surface algorithm”, “Clipping divider”, “Matrix multiplier”, “Surface Smoothing”.

This is very cool stuff. Thank you for taking the time to digitize the film.

@ 4:56, it’s The Bishop of Battle!

This is great to see in motion. I have certainly seen stills of both Ed’s hand and Fred’s faces while I was working with them at NYIT in ’78, but I’ve never seen the film.

It’s really hard to remember that era, or even to imagine it. Today, any kid (or Ed, for that matter) would take digital photos of the hand, and use photogrammetry to build the 3D model — but things that we have now that they didn’t have then are:

1) digital cameras
2) scanners
3) frame buffers to hold the images
4) computers with enough memory to hold an entire image

and a thousand other things. You really had to make it all up from the whole cloth. That said, the amazing thing about Catmull is that he wanted to make computer graphics movies even back then…even though the possibility of doing that was still more than 20 years into the future.

Oh, I left out an important detail. For the facial animation, it took ~2.5/minutes to render out each B&W frame. That’s on hardware that was probably in the ballpark of $400,000 in 1972 dollars.

[...] Die Pionierarbeit von Ed Catmull in Sachen 3D Rendering und Animation aus dem Jahr 1972. Wer mehr über dieses Experiment, mit dem Ergebnis des ersten 3D Films lesen möchte, klickt hier. [...]

Nice site, man.

Charles Csuri was indeed doing computer art before this, but he wasn’t using 3D surfaces with hidden surfaces removed and he wasn’t using smooth shading at the time this film was made. (Most likely they used Gouraud shading in this film, nto Phong or Blinn shading.) That’s because the techniques shown in this film were being developed at the University of Utah at the time the film was made. Charles Csuri would adopt these and other techniques from the University of Utah (Phong shading, Gouraud shading, texture mapping, hidden surface removal, antialiasing, etc.) along with many other artists in the years to come. Charles Csuri is an important figure in the history of computer graphics, but he’s more of a practitioner than a researcher. That isn’t meant to relegate him to a secondary position, just a different one in the scheme of things.

[...] nerdplusart.com Well it looks like 3D computer graphics predate me by more of a margin than I realised. Reply With Quote     vBulletin.events.SkimlinksActivate.subscribe(function() { YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass('post_722271', 'noskimwords'); }); Not the answer? Register now, its free and fast [...]

[...] with Catmull and Parke.  He gives more background on his [...]

[...] Link bài viết tại nerdplusart [...]

fake.

[...] Nerdplusart has a very interesting write-up about the very first 3D rendered film made by Ed Catmull in 1972. Yes, you read that correctly. 1972. [...]

[...] he and others had developed while working as students in Ivan Sutherland's lab. That film has been digitized and is available. All kinds of modern techniques like Gouraud shading, deformed meshes, and z-buffering are shown [...]

Could you tell me the name of the Brubeck piece? I watched the movie several times but that tune keeps getting stuck in my head!

A little additional clarification about the face animation shown. While Henri Gouraud did in fact digitize his wife’s face – see his PhD thesis – the model for the animation shown in this clip was my wife Vicky Parke. I did this work as my MS thesis in 1972 at the University of Utah – Ivan was on my committee. It it was one of the first uses of what we now refer to a ‘blend shapes.’
A couple of years later in 1974, working with Ivan as my PhD committee chair, this work led to a parameterized 3D face model, whose descendants are still being used in some applications today.

[...] Read more here [...]

[...] The film was uploa&#100&#101&#100 to the web by the son of one of Catmull’s collaborators; he later met Cat&#109&#117&#108l, toured Pixar (Catmull is now the head of Pixar &#97&#110&#100 Walt Disney Animation Studios) and discussed the &#104&#105&#115tory of the film and the entire experience at nerd&#112&#108&#117sart.com. [...]

s/Catmul/Catmull

[...] Working with Fred Parke, Catmull shot A Computer Animated Hand in 1970. The hand makes only a brief appearance — about 20 seconds — and the rest of the film shows you what went into making the hand (and other animated body parts). NerdPlusAlert has more on the animated reel. [...]

Very interesting post and comments! And congratulations to Pawel for making yourself look like a complete imbecile.

Amazing video, but I think you’ll find that George Lucas (Lucasfilm) was the founder of Pixar and he employed Ed for his amazing talent, that is to take nothing away from Ed but facts are facts.

The perils of memory: I thought we digitized the Bug in our driveway, but apparently it was actually on campus. The picture with my grandfather is from digitizing the Volvo wagon later on in our driveway.

When I talked with Ivan, he reminded me of the above. He also said that he didn’t think the face was Sylvie’s. Thanks for the confirmation that I was wrong.

[...] everything, including this digital hand, which was created by founders Ed Catamull and Fred Parke. [nerdplusart via [...]

[...] ago, computer science graduate students Ed Catmull, Fred Parke, and Robert Ingebretsen created this film demonstrating the cutting edge in 3D computer graphics. The film includes a 3D animated rendering of Catmull’s hand, a face created by Parke, and [...]

[...] hoje para renderizar 3D estava sendo inventada, em tempo real, nesse vídeo”, escreveu o designer Robby Ingebretsen, do blog nerd plus art, que tinha esse vídeo nos arquivos da família e o digitalizou. Seu pai era um grande amigo de Ed [...]

[...] 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some [...]

[...] Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vía: Blendernation.com Vía: NerdPlusArt.com Compartelo o [...]

[...] some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106. 18.466334 -66.105722 Advertisement LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", [...]

[...] some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments.Read more at nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106(function(){var [...]

[...] Ich finde es erstaunlich, diese ersten Versuche zu sehen. Klar, irgendwer hat irgendwann den Anfang gemacht. Ich möchte wirklich mal wissen, wie lange das Rendern mit den Rechnern damals gedauert hat. Einen Einblick über die Arbeit von damals gibt auch der Sohn von Robert B. Ingebretsen auf nerdplusart.com. [...]

[...] Renderring, Nerdplusart) Ähnliche Beiträge:Wenn die digitale Leinwand zum Projektor wird – das iPad als [...]

[...] In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106. [...]

[...] contribuindo com seus conhecimentos em som digital, tendo sido um dos pioneiros dessa área. Em seu blog, Robby Ingebretsen, filho do outro Inbretsen (morto em 2003), afirma que essa talvez seja a única [...]

As far as I recall the Evan’s & Sutherland cost them £1,000,000

[...] [NerdplusArt] http://www.vimeo.com/16292363 ← Vorheriger Beitrag Laufen Windows Phone-Apps auch unter Windows 8? /* */ [...]

[...] was posted at Nerdplusart by Robby Ingebretsen, son of Robert B. Ingebretsen who helped create the video in 1972 with [...]

[...] This an invaluable piece of computer graphics history: The first 3D rendered film comprised of Ed Catmull’s left hand created by Catmull and Fred Parke (with audio by Robert Ingebretsen) when they were grad students at the University of Utah in 1972. Eventually this film demo found its way into Futureworld in 1976 (how appropriate). In fact, Ingebretsen’s son, Robby, discovered that his father had a copy of the 8mm reel. After hearing Catmull speak a couple of years ago at his alma mater, Robby and his uncle were invited to take a tour of Pixar, which resulted in Catmull giving his permission for the film to be digitized. Robby made it available earlier in the year on his website, nerd plus art. [...]

[...] have dug up this very cool video of one of, if not the first ever pieces of digital 3D animation.  According to Robby Ingebretsen, who has the original 8mm film he digitized this test from, the above bit of history was created by [...]

[...] found lost Pixar footage shows the origins of the computer animation studio. The discovered footage shows some of the first [...]

[...] The son of digital sound colonize Robert Ingebretson, who worked with Catmull on a film, posted this to a [...]

[...] Aki pedig részletesebb és hosszabb leírásra is kíváncsi a videón kívül látogassa meg a nerdplusart [...]

[...] “In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106.” [...]

[...] some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com. Share this:ShareCorreo electrónicoTwitterLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]

[...] Read up on the film at Robby Ingebretsen’s blog — he talks about the film, its provenance, and how his father was involved with the project. Interesting note from that blog entry: the film was rendered directly to 8mm film stock. [...]

[...] Read up on the film at Robby Ingebretsen’s blog — he talks about the film, its provenance, and how his father was involved with the project. Interesting note from that blog entry: the film was rendered directly to 8mm film stock. [...]

[...] some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/​?p=1106. // | [...]

[...] have dug up this very cool video of one of, if not the first ever pieces of digital 3D animation.  According to Robby Ingebretsen, who has the original 8mm film he digitized this test from, the above bit of history was created by [...]

[...] some more of the back story? Robby Ingrebretsen talks about the film’s history over on his blog (his late father did the titles for the [...]

Definitely not a hoax – I have a 16mm print of this film. When I was at the U of U (1980s) I found a 16mm print of the movie in the dept. library. I thought it was so cool that I borrowed it and made a duplicate print.

I think the original may have actually been shot on 35mm film, but it’s probably lost by now.

[...] Via Veröffentlicht in Dokumentationen am 12. Oktober 2011    ||    Schlagworte:  Edwin Catmull      Fred Parke      Robby Ingebretsen      Robert B. Ingebretsen      Steve Jobs [...]

[...] Nerd plus Art Hasonló bejegyzések:Miben kellene fejlődnie a [...]

Part of what makes this video all the more impressive was there were no graphics chips at the time. Nobody had megabytes of memory, much less gigabytes. There were no off the shelf software packages that created the images. There were probably a dozen schools doing graphic works – UofU seemed to be THE place to be for graphics work.

I was down the valley at the Y taking computer classes 75-77 and we had many guest lectures from the UofU.

The display device used was either a vector display (O-scope like) or a storage scope. A camera was then set up to record the image. To get color, you had three filters (RGB) and rendered the image three times, once for each color. Using the storage scope the line drawn on the surface had an intensity value. Full on put a line on the display that stayed until erased. Light enough and you could play space wars for a while before the display needed to be cleared (wipe away the ghosts). If you watch the OLD Battlestar Galactica shows, the tactical monitors were storage scopes – if you watch, closely, you see the flash (clear the screen) and then the image is drawn.

The VW data point story – as I remember it from a guest lecture – The VW data points were generated using the real bug with data points on it and the points recorded using three video cameras and a laser. The laser hi-lighted a point and the location was computed by where the dot was reported by each video camera. It took a minute or two per point – times several hundred points. Only the left half was done – thank goodness for mirroring.

Lucas created several groups at the Skywalker Ranch to research different things like: what would it take to eliminate physical models (ie 5 sizes were used for the X-wing), what needs to be done to use computers to edit films (eliminate handling all the film stock) and how to make the special effects easier to do. The best known spin off was Pixar.

[...]   More Info [...]

[...] colegas criaram o primeiro filme em 3D do mundo, que foi uma versão animada da mão esquerda Ed. mais… Escrito por: Anakin março 5, 2012Próximo »Comments are closed.Assine nossa [...]

[...] Steckles submitted a link to Robby Ingebretsen’s blog post First Digital 3D Rendered Film (from 1972) and My Visit to Pixar. Katie says, This is possibly the earliest example of a computer animation, and one of its two [...]

[...] http://nerdplusart.com/first-3d-rendered-film-from-1972-and-my-visit-to-pixar [...]

[...] Read more here. [...]

[...] “The math that we take for granted for rendering 3D was being invented, real time, to create this video. (Ed Catmull’s credited for having working out that math to handle things like texture mapping, 3D anti-aliasing and z-buffering.)” … Continue reading → [...]

[...] In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some « making of » footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/?p=1106. [...]

Freya…

nerdplusart.com…