Robert Abel and Associates
Robert Abel and Associates ( RA & A ) was one of Robert Abel founded production company for television advertising and for computer-animated visual effects in Hollywood , California .
history
Robert Abel & Associates was founded in 1971 by Robert Abel and his friend and work partner Con Pederson , a former employee of the special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull , initially as a pure advertising film production company.
While the company's work was initially limited to the production of TV commercials with then modern but "conventional" non-computer-generated visual effects, the company switched to using computer animations initially for mere planning and then to create the visual effects of their commercials , after which entire sequences for movies and television series were produced.
The company soon made a name for itself as a producer of the most modern and particularly unusual visual effects. In the first few years, these were created using methods that were modern at the time, but not computer-animated. Elaborate effect sequences were created using motion control photography and motion control photography combined with slitscan photography . Through his work under Douglas Trumbull on the visual effects for the cult film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Con Pederson had already gained experience with the then most modern production processes for visual effects, above all motion control and slitscan photography.
Entry into computer animation
The purchase of a special graphics computer terminal from the manufacturer Evans & Sutherland in the mid-1970s heralded Robert Abel & Associates' entry into the production of computer animation: An Evans & Sutherland Picture System II , which was connected to a mainframe computer from the manufacturer DEC , was the first Hardware foundation for Robert Abel & Associates' computer animation work.
Robert Abel & Associates' Evans & Sutherland system was not actually intended for the production of computer animation. Originally procured and initially used, the new hardware was purely a preview and planning tool for the motion control effect sequences, which enabled employees to control wire mesh elements as a kind of moving sketch until a desired choreography of the elements was achieved. The data of this finished choreography could be read into the control computer of the motion control cameras so that the cameras could exactly replicate the movements conceived on the computer when filming the physical elements.
The trained architect Bill Kovacs played a key role in the idea of using the newly purchased computer hardware to create effect sequences instead of planning and thus for Robert Abel & Associates' change from a production company for classic visual effects to a computer animation company . The later founder of Wavefront Technologies and Oscar winner Kovacs quickly advanced to become the leading specialist in software and technical issues at Robert Abel & Associates . Sitting alone in front of the screen of the Picture System II , Kovacs became aware of the potential of computer-generated images and came up with the idea of using the computer animations that had been created up to then for preview and planning himself as effect sequences for the final film:
“All of a sudden I saw a high-contrast work of art in it. We had already set up a camera in front of the screen to film our movement tests, so all we needed to create colored graphics was a computer-controlled color filter wheel in front of the camera. "
The Picture System II
The Picture System II was a "smart" terminal that could display and move vector graphics in the form of wire-frame models in a three-dimensional space and was intended for use in industry for CAD applications or in science for the visualization of large molecules. This meant that in order to create computer animations for film and television, RA & A's employees had to use hardware developed for computer graphics applications in engineering and science , such as the Picture System II, for something they were not designed for and, moreover, almost all of them had to write the necessary software themselves.
The possibilities of the graphic design, in particular the surface design of the computer-animated objects, were limited by the vector graphics. Current techniques for simulating surface properties of objects such as shading or texture mapping are only possible to a limited extent or not at all for pure vector graphics systems. But the Picture System II was actually not capable of displaying (non-shaded) uniform color surfaces and solid objects . However, Robert Abel & Associates' technical team managed to overcome this deficiency with a method they called Vector-Fill : Vector-Fill used millions of lines that were positioned directly on top of each other to overcome the wireframe appearance and make it solid Create objects with continuous colored surfaces. This technology, which was not intended by the manufacturer, was first used in advertising films for Canon and AT&T (1980), for which Robert Abel & Associates was each awarded a Clio Award .
The computer animations that RA&A contributed to Disney's Tron also fell into the company's vector graphics era and consisted entirely of vector graphics that had been filmed from the Picture System II monitor .
Work for Tron in 1981
One of RA & A's most important works was working on the feature film Tron, produced by Disney Studios between 1981 and 1982. Tron was the first full-length film to contain longer computer-animated sequences.
Previously, RA&A had already produced commercials and the opening sequence for the Disney production The Black Hole (1979). RA&A, along with three other computer animation companies, was hired by Disney to produce the computer-animated sequences for the film. RA&A produced the opening sequence of the film for Tron and the scene in which the main character of the film Kevin Flynn ( Jeff Bridges ) is scanned into the computer world.
Computer animation with raster graphics from 1981/82
Although Robert Abel & Associates set new standards for vector graphics-based computer modeling and animation with their vector fill technique, among other things , they reached the limits of what could be achieved on the basis of vector graphics. In 1981 Robert Abel entered the field of raster graphics , initially by programming their own rendering program for their existing computer system. The Evans & Sutherland Picture System II was initially used for the preview and animation of the objects.
The complete switch to raster graphics took place in 1982 with the acquisition of Robert Abels & Associates' first IRIS graphics terminals from Silicon Graphics . With these terminals, the animation and choreography of the objects as well as virtual camera movements, which were previously done with the Evans & Sutherland system, were realized, as well as the rendering of the final raster graphics programmed using specially created rendering software.
It is true that the entry into raster graphics was quite late compared to the other contemporary computer animation companies - the other companies involved in the production of Tron from 1981 to 1982 had been working exclusively with raster graphics for a long time - nevertheless Robert Abel & Associates was also capable of raster graphics To do pioneering work. These pioneering achievements include the development and first commercial use of the motion capture process in computer graphics in 1985.
First commercial application of motion capture in 1985
In 1985, Robert Abel & Associates produced the advertising film Brilliance (also known as Sexy Robot ), a film in which the movements of a computer-animated human-like figure were transmitted using motion capture for the first time. The company thus succeeded in developing as well as the first commercial application of a digital motion capture process.
At the end of 1984, Robert Abel was commissioned to produce a commercial for the National Canned Food Information Council , an association of canned food producing companies, in which an erotic, female humanoid robot made of chrome was to be shown. The commercial was scheduled to air during prime time during the 1985 Super Bowl .
As often before, Abel had accepted the order without his company having all of the production techniques available. Of the many challenges associated with the project - including simulating realistic facial expressions, the hair, and the chrome skin - simulating realistic human motion was the biggest unsolved problem. Robert Abel and his team set themselves a deadline. Abel and seven of his employees decided to lock themselves in the production rooms and not to leave the company building until Monday morning (Abel had accepted the order on Friday). If no solution is found by this deadline, they would give up the lucrative project. Building on their previous analog work with physical models and the motion control camera, the team concluded that the solution to their problem must be to capture the movement, in this case the movement of a human body. An actress should be recorded from different angles and based on this image material, movement algorithms should be created. The weekend worked on the exact implementation of the procedure:
“Some of us stripped down to our underwear. We obtained black stick-on dots and attached them to the body. We photographed each other with Polaroid cameras and laid out these Polaroids side by side so that we could see how they changed from angle to angle. "
For the process ultimately used, Abel and his team hired an actress who had worked as a dancer and model and was therefore able to move gracefully. Eighteen joint points were attached to the actress's body and her movements were photographed from different camera angles. The position data of the articulation points were entered into the iris terminals. With the aid of the graphics terminals, the difference between a pair of articulation points could then be calculated for each of the camera angles, and a series of movement algorithms for a three-dimensional figure could be calculated from this difference data. The process had to be carried out anew for each individual image and was therefore very time-consuming. All in all, the realization of the sequence of movements took a period of 4½ weeks.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tom Sito : Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation . MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2013, ISBN 978-0-262-01909-5 , pp. 173 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b c d e f Ellen Wolff: The First Wave: The Origins of Wavefront Software. In: digitialcontentproducer.com. NewBay Media LLC, January 11, 1998, accessed June 20, 2014 .
- ↑ a b Jeff lenburg: Who's Who in Animated Cartoons: An International Guide to Film & Television's Award-Winning and Legendary Animators: An International Guide to Film and TV Award Winning and Legendary Animators . Applause Theater Books, Winona, Minnesota 2006, ISBN 978-1-55783-671-7 , pp. 381 .
- ↑ Alberto Maneche : Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation . Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington, MA 2010, ISBN 978-0-12-381496-8 , pp. 3–5 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b c d e Rick Parent, David S. Ebert, David AD Gould: Computer Animation Complete: All-in-One: Learn Motion Capture, Characteristic, Point-Based, and Maya Winning Technique . Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington, MA 2009, ISBN 978-0-12-375078-5 , pp. 73–75 ( limited preview in Google Book search).