Computer Graphics - Game Direction Chapter 1 Overview of Computer Graphics

foreword

The original link of the course https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1yA411C75t/
https://space.bilibili.com/1268065381

Chapter 1 Overview of Computer Graphics

1. Why do design majors need to study computer graphics?

Modern games are applications of computer graphics.
Modern power is the application of computer graphics.
Computer graphics is the application of physics.
Computer graphics is an application of physiology.
Computer graphics is an extension of art.

The relationship between computer graphics and computer vision and other fields

Basic self-study system of computer graphics

Basic principles: GAMES101
development reference: openGL or DirectX tutorial
High-end research:

2. Discrimination and Analysis of Computer Graphics

3. The development history of computer graphics (science)

1951：Nimrod on display at Festival of Britain

The British Festival was designed to showcase British art, technology and culture across the country in the aftermath of the widespread devastation of the Second World War. As part of the festivities, computer company Ferranti provided a showcase for the South Kensington (London) Film Festival event. John Bennett, an Australian employee living in the UK, suggested building a machine to play NIM, a simple game in which players take turns removing matches from a pile in an attempt to be the last to remove them. An electromechanical device for playing the game was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams turned Bennet's design into a real machine, which debuted at the festival on April 12, 1951. Ferranti brought the Nimrod to the Berlin International Exhibition later in 1951, but it was subsequently dismantled.

1952: Alexander Douglas writes OxO for EDSAC

Alexander Douglas was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge when he designed one of the first computer games, Tic Tac Toe (known as "Naughts and Crosses" in the UK), known as OXO. Played on Cambridge's EDSAC computer, OXO allows the player to choose to start or let the machine make its first move. Using the rotary phone dial to enter their moves, EDSAC will display the game board on a 35 x 15 dot cathode ray tube. Very few people outside of Cambridge have played OXO.

1957: First computer scanned image on SEAC

One of the earliest applications of computers for image creation and processing began with Russell Kirsch's work on the Standard Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) in 1957. Working with the SEAC team, Kirsch designed a drum scanner that would allow him to digitize images of his young son Walden. The image is a 5x5 cm black and white photo, the first to be scanned into the computer. In 2003, Life magazine listed it as one of the "100 Photos That Changed the World."

1958: Higinbotham develops Tennis-For-Two at Brookhaven National Labs

Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, hosts its annual Visitor's Day for families and area residents. William Higinbotham was looking for a way to entertain visitors and conceived a simple video game that could be played using the lab's Donner Model 30 analog computer connected to an oscilloscope monitor. In collaboration with David Porter, Higinbotham's creation allows two players to play a game of "tennis" on an oscilloscope screen, with the ball having simple physics and even making a sound whenever it comes into contact with the ball.
The Tennis-for-Two was only used for two years before being recycled for parts. It only became widely known after Higinbotham testified in the trial of the video game Pong.

Two Viewpoints of Visual Data Modeling

(Data Model) Grid Pie VS Formula Pie

1962:Spacewar! debuts

MIT received a DEC PDP-1 computer in the fall of 1961. While there were some demos, Steve "Frogger" Russell felt that the game would have made a better demo. Along with Martin "Shag" Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, he designed a space combat game called Spacewar based on the Lensman series of novels by EE "Doc" Smith! Two ships, one called "Wedge" and the other called For the "Needle", will fly in the background of the starry sky. Peter Samson provides a program called "Expensive Planetarium" that produces accurate starry backgrounds. The game will then be distributed through the Digital Equipment Corporation user group DECUS to ensure its wide distribution in the technical and collegiate computing communities.

1963:BEFLIX developed at Bell Labs

In the early 1960s, Bell Labs was at the forefront of computer art and graphics research. Using the lab's IBM 7094 mainframe computer, researcher Ken Knowlton developed a special language for computer animation called BEFLIX. The language allowed Knowlton and collaborators, such as Stan Vanderbeek and Lillian Schwartz, to create 252 × 184-pixel images and animations using 8 shades of gray that could be captured with a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Some of these films are considered landmark works, such as Man and His World, which was screened at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair.

1959：DAC-1 computer aided design program is released

In 1959, General Motors Research Laboratories appointed a dedicated research group to investigate the use of computers in automobile design. In 1960, IBM joined the project, producing the first commercially available computer-aided design program, called DAC-1. This project resulted in the IBM 2250 display terminal, as well as many advances in computer time-sharing, and the use of a single processor for two or more terminals.

1966: Ralph Baer designs the Brown Box

In the summer of 1966, Ralph Baer, ​​a television engineer at Sanders Associates, began experimenting with using a television to play games. His first design, called the Brown Box, allowed users to play a number of different games, including the game of ping-pong (heralding Atari's Pong), on a standard television, without the need for a computer, microprocessor or software. The brown box also has a light gun accessory for shooting games.

1969: SIGGRAPH is founded

Founded by Andy Van Dam in 1969, the Special Interest Group in Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) has become one of the most influential groups in computing. Beginning in 1974, the annual SIGGRAPH conference has attracted graphics professionals and provided an important meeting place for discussing and presenting state-of-the-art technologies, with many companies and researchers launching new versions or techniques. It continues to attract computer graphics professionals from around the world to its annual conference.

1971: Computer Space is released

The success of Steve Russell's Space Wars! and other early space combat games led Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney to design Computer Space, one of the first electronic arcade games. Using no microprocessor, RAM, or ROM, Computer Space is a simple technical design that still allows for complex gameplay, so complex that many have noticed the steep learning curve involved in the game. While "Computer Space" didn't sell well, it was featured in movies like "Jaws" and "Soylent Green."

1972: Pong is released

Californian entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell hired young engineer Al Alcorn to design a car driving game, but when that seemed too ambitious at the time, he asked Alcorn to design a version of Ping Pong. The game was tested at bars in Grass Valley and Sunnyvale, California, and it proved to be very popular. Pong would revolutionize the arcade industry and usher in the modern era of video games.

1974: The Hunger (Hunger) debut

An international figure in animation since the 1950s, filmmaker Peter Folders began working with the National Research Council of Canada in 1969. Folders teamed up with computer scientist Nestor Burtnyk to direct the ten-minute film about the concept of food inequality. Using the animation concept of keyframe animation, where an animator would make the most important frames, and an assistant would fill in the gaps, Burtnyk devised a program in which a computer would fill in the gaps, producing a way that made images appear to flow from one to the other. La Faim would win many international awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination.

1977: Star Wars (Death Star Briefing)

Set in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars combines old-fashioned sci-fi storytelling with cutting-edge special effects courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. One effect was the Death Star briefing, showing a wireframe version of the space station, one of the first use of wireframe animation in a major movie.

1972: superPaint is completed

SuperPaint was probably the first digital computer drawing system to use a frame buffer (a special kind of high-speed memory), and is the ancestor of all modern painting programs. It can create complex animations in up to 16.7 million colors, has adjustable brushes, video magnification, and uses a graphics tablet for drawing. It was designed by Richard Shoup and others at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Its designers won an Academy of Technology Award in 1998 for their invention.

1977: Atari launches the Video ComputerSystem game console

Atari releases its Video Computer System (vCS), later renamed the Atari 2600. The vcS was the first widely successful video game system, with over 20 million units sold in the 1980s. The vcS uses an 8-bit MOS6507 microprocessor and is designed to connect to a home TV. By the time Atari's last 8-bit console came out in 1990, more than 900 games had been released.

Layer is the core object of computer graphics

1981: Arnie Katz, Joyce Worley-Katz, and Bil1Kunkle form first video game magazine,Electronic Games

In 1981, Joyce Worley Katz, Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel co-founded Electronic Games, America's first electronic game magazine. Originally intended as an annual publication, early success led to it becoming a monthly publication within a year of the first issue. The 1983 video game debacle caused Electronic Games to change its name to Computer Entertainment, which eventually ceased publication with the May 1985 issue.

1982: Lucasfilm produces the Genesis Effectfor Star Trek ll: The Wrath of Khan

The main movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was one of the first fully computer-generated cinematic image (CGI) sequences in a feature film. The sequence known as the Genesis Effect shows the rebirth of a desolate planet, with computer-generated "rings of life" sweeping across the planet's surface, creating an atmosphere and life within the planet.

The series was created by Lucasfilm's computer graphics team, who were heavily inspired by Jim Blinn's simulations of flybys of Jupiter and Saturn for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. The Lucasfilm team, directed by Alvy Ray Smith, created the effect using two of Lucasfilm's DEC VAX computers, two lkonas color frame buffers and an Evans and Sutherland Picture System vector display. The sequence, now considered a classic in computer animation and filmmaking, lasted just over a minute and took two man-years to complete.

1983: Lucasfilm produces The Road to Point Reyes

One of the most important still images in the history of computer graphics, The Road to Point Reyes was one of Lucasfilm's most important early projects. Beginning in 1983, Rob Cook directed the images and conceived the scenes, while Alvy Ray Smith, Loren Carpenter, Tom Porter, Bill Reeves and David Salesin contributed elements including shadows, hidden surface routines and fractals. The image, described by Smith as a "single-frame movie," took a month to render and was finally on display at Boston's Computing Museum.

1985: Nintendo releases the NintendoEntertainment system (NES) in the U.S.

The U.S. video game market has been in the doldrums since 1983 due to an oversupply of underperforming games and consoles. That same year, Nintendo released its Famicom gaming system in Japan. Renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) when the NES was released in North America, the NES began to turn the fortunes of the American gaming industry around. The system launched with 18 available games and was largely responsible for turning Mario the Plumber into one of the most enduring characters in video game history.

1986: Pixar is founded

Pixar was originally known as Lucasfilm's Special Effects Computer Group (founded in 1979). The group created computer-animated segments for films such as Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Young Holmes. In 1986, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm Group for $10 million and renamed it Pixar. Over the next decade, Pixar produced wildly successful (and Oscar-winning) animated films. Acquired by Disney in 2006.

The pioneer behind the uncanny valley-Pixar