The making of Tron's CGI (1982). - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:09:09 am
content: Among the earliest of motion picture CGI.(CGI portion):No animation tools. The animators actually wrote down a set of coordinate/angle/pitch/yaw numbers on graph paper and sent it the render house to produce the motion of the objects in the different frames. The computer were too slow to even produce visual wire frames in any reasonable amount of speed.The Motion Picture Academe refused to nominate Tron for special effects because they said using computers is cheating.(Full Documentary *** Includes the above 20min video clip)):

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:45:12 am
content: The making of Tron Legacy (2010)

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 27, 2025, 09:29:36 pm
content: Here is how the analog film portion of Tron was blended with the computer graphics of the time:

author: vidarr
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2025, 01:54:22 pm
content: Trying to do architectural "walk-thrus" of buildings, even in the 90's, was incredibly time consuming. I would build the model, add the camera, draw the path for the camera to travel. A walk-thru of a large house would take about 24 hours, but up to 2-3 days to render, and that is for a very basic, monotone (grayscale usually) model. If you made the windows transparent, it might not even render, so we often didn't draw/build the glass, just left it open with only a frame.Now, I can do a walk-thru live without even rendering and it is very realistic (materials, shadows, colors, etc). A render still takes some time, but we are talking a few hours at most.I love Tron.

author: lokin4areason
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2025, 04:53:52 pm
content: The Tron: Ares ( third film in the series ) release date has been confirmed as October 10, 2025.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 28, 2025, 08:40:00 pm
content: I saw Tron when it first came out in 1982. The next day, I bought a TI99/4A computer, and within a year had bought a Kaypro II. I didn't really do anything like what was in the movie, but I had to have a way to express the energy it inspired. I had just graduated from college and was working in a new city, and whiled away hours writing sprite programming in Basic on that TI toy. It was a lot more fun the the Amdahl I had worked on in college, or the Wilbur terminals that communicated with it, or the Dual Cyber mainframes in grad school from a few months later.My how the times do change.(By the way, I was in architecture school in the 70's, and my secret power was photographic expertise with models. I see the documentary on Tron and they are talking about Kodaliths. Kodalith was ultra-contrasty film for making lithographic negatives for offset printing. I bet not many reading this thread knew what all that was about even in 1981, but I had partly funded college making black-background super-graphical and very fancy report covers by overlaying with precise registration transparencies with Kodalith-photographed letterpress for research reports by professors. And other architecture students would pay me to photograph their models and put real people in them. Fun stuff. I'd spend a day doing what I can do in 90 seconds now in Photoshop--or even Word--and even by the late 80's we had tools like Ventura Publisher that could do that sort of frame compositing in the computer. Anybody remember Gem Desktop that ran inside Windows?)Rick "now just a dumb engineer" Denney

author: shakalnokturn
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2025, 01:53:18 am
content: Quote from: rdenney on March 28, 2025, 08:40:00 pmI remember that, not that I used it much...Basic GUI, liked it for being light-weight and getting the common tasks done better than Windows would. That and the Norton Commander were of my favourites of the time.

author: vidarr
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2025, 02:43:47 am
content: Quote from: rdenney on March 28, 2025, 08:40:00 pmI started architecture school at Univ of Mich in 1998. But, before that I worked in a few offices. There would be an entire office of 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, but there was always just ONE guy that did CAD and it was always some loner guy. Now, nothing is drafted by hand ----Nothing.Because I was young and with no degree back then, I made blueprints half of the day (there was also something done with sepia prints, something... I don't remember what it was, or how I did it). I haven't seen a blueprint machine in 25 years. Lining up sheets and feeding them was such a crap job.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2025, 07:29:08 pm
content: How the TRON Music was made.Wendy Carlos demonstrates how to make a Xylophone sound on the DKI/Crunmar Synergy GDS machine which was used on Tron.Hal Alles phase accumulator based FM additive machine Bell Labs 1977 that was the base for the DKI/Crumar Synergy GDS used in the Tron movie.