CGI MILESTONES IN MOVIES
1967
Hummingbird
10 min animated line drawing of a hummingbird with over 30,000 images containing 25 motion sequences generated by computer.
1982
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
First use of fractal- generated landscape in a film. A 60 second sequence showing the “Genesis effect” was created by ILM. Real-time line drawing was used with texture map compositing to illustrate the effect, and a new graphics technique called “Particle Systems” developed.
Part of the division that worked on the sequence would later become Pixar Animation Studios.
1982
Tron
First extensive use of 3D CGI in a movie. (15-20mins of CGI footage was shown.) The graphics were made on a computer with only 2MB of RAM and 330MB of storage.
1991
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
First realistic human movements on a CGI character. First partially computer-generated main character and first blockbuster move to feature multiple morphing effects. Also, first use of a personal computer to create major movie 3D effects.
1995
Toy Story
First CGI feature- length animation. The film took three years to complete, almost 30 artists to animate, and about 800 computers to work on.
1999
The Matrix
First use of CG interpolation in Bullet Time effects, where the actors were surrounded by still cameras all taking pictures in succession with a fraction of a second delay between each shot. Each camera contributed just one frame to the video sequence, and when put together, the footage simulated a camera running at 12,000 frames per second.
2001
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
First feature- length digital film to be made based on photorealism and live-action principles. First theatrically- released film to utilize motion capture for all its actors’ actions.
2002
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
First virtual actor to win an award ( Critics’ Choice Movie Awards by Andy Serkis playing Gollum), in the newly created category Best Digital Acting Performance
2003 The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions
First use of “Universal Capture”, combining motion capture, texture capture and optical flow of pixels from a 7 camera set- up, leading to the introduction of realistic digital lookalikes.
2007
Transformers
12.5 million polygons, 34,215 texture maps, 144,341 and over 20 Terabytes of storage were used for the production of this live-action film, with vehicles and aircraft loaned from General Motors and the u.S military to add realism.
2009
Avatar
First full- length movie using performance- capture to create photo- realistic 3D characters in a fully CG 3D photo- realistic world. Only 25- 40% of the film was traditional live- action, with the effects taking over a year to complete and a Petabyte (1000TB) of information to render.
2014
Mr Peabody & Sherman
More than 800 million data files were created resulting in 200 Terabytes of storage.
118,000 individual computer-generated frames and 250 billion pixels used to create the 82- minute film.
70 million render hours with the servers processing an average of 500,000 render jobs per day.
15 percent of the animation was rendered using the cloud.