LO 5: first 3D animation

The first 3D animation was created in 1972 by Edwin Catmull and Frederic Parke, students(!) at the University of Utah. The film shows the process of creating a mold of a hand, tracing the mold with precise polygons, and translating this data via an analog computer.

I admire the commitment and precision of this tedious process because we now take for granted the power of 3D computation for countless purposes. These techniques may seem dated, but they are the process upon which our sophisticated 3D animation is based now (Edwin Catmull is a co-founder of Pixar…)

This is more of a “Looking Backwards” report, but I feel it essential to learn about the backstory of the tools we depend on and to understand how absolutely mathematical and physics-based it is.