Greg Bear - The Machineries of Joy

VIP免费

2024-11-19 0 0 40.72KB 13 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm

THE MACHINERIES OF JOY

Introduction:

In October of 1983, I traveled from San Diego to Los Angeles and San Francisco, researching a proposed

article for OMNI Magazine. What I saw astonished me.... and influenced me heavily when I went on to

write the novel-length Blood Music and Eon. Here was not the beginning of the computer graphics

revolution, which had occurred decades earlier, but the beginning of the flowering of that revolution. I

could hardly restrain my enthusiasm. I suspect the last few pages of this piece will date badly as time

goes by, but they show my frame of mind. And the frames of mind of dozens of other authors, as well;

the information age has taken science fiction by storm.

OMNI never used this piece, although they paid me for it. Nor did they use the hundreds of pictures I

gathered, a selection from which would have accompanied it. Many people gave generously of their time,

yet never saw their names or ideas in print. I hope this publication pays them back in some small

measure.

The circumstances described below have, of course, changed considerably. Digital Productions has

changed hands and management; Robert Abel and Associates is no longer an independent company. The

revolution has become even more stimulating and promising. Its effects are everywhere.

This article was completed in early 1984.

THE MACHINERIES OF JOY

"Dinosaurs!" The artist spreads his arms as if to embrace them. "I need the exact specifications--gridwork

layouts of bones, muscles, scale patterns." The artist's office is covered with drawings of spaceships and

alien beings, strange landscapes and mechanical diagrams. "If I have those, I can put them into the

computer. We can program each muscle, make the skin ripple over the muscles. Tell the computer how

they took a step, how they fought..."

And once again, dinosaurs will walk and fight. The artist is living a childhood daydream: he has the

power to bring dead creatures to life. Even more remarkable, he has the power-- with the aid of dozens of

technicians, programmers and fellow artists--to film objects that have never existed in any material form

and make them interact with live actors.

But dinosaurs are a future project. The matter immediately at hand is a space battle. At night, within a

stark white-walled enclave, the artist, director and technician sit before a video monitor, examining the

progressive stages of a nonexistent spaceship's destruction. Highly detailed ships-- complete with crew--

are dueling to the finish. One spaceship is destined not to survive; its hull is disassembled in the first of

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm (1 of 13) [2/14/2004 12:20:51 AM]

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm

six boxes on the monitor. The early stages of an expanding blast are overlaid in subsequent boxes.

The artist describes an explosion in space. "I'd like the whole screen to flash white for one frame. Next

we see an opaque fireball--fuzzy at the edges--surrounding the debris." He demonstrates an expanding

sphere with hand gestures. "Then we ramp it down to transparency as the fireball grows." (To "ramp" is

to smoothly increase or decrease any function.) "When the shockwave passes, all the little stuff--gases

and tiny fragments- -fly past and then we see the big scraps, a little slower, not as much energy." His grin

is gleeful now. The director nods in agreement; this is, indeed, an explosion in space, not your usual

smoke-and-fireworks exhibit.

The stages of the explosion are being fed into powerful computers, isolated beyond glass walls at the

opposite end of the studio in a pristine white-floored environment. Artist, director and technician are

playing god games in an unreal universe.

Ultimately, it is all numbers, points charted in a space of three dimensions within a computer. Each

number represents part of the position of a pixel, or picture element, millions of which go together to

form a shape. It is the computer's duty to keep track of the numbers, and the shapes they represent.

Perspective, color, shadow, motion, must all be processed with scrupulous accuracy or the apparent

reality will collapse.

The numbers are then converted to signals which can be displayed on a monitor. The pixels assemble, and

a spaceship is destroyed, frame by frame. When the result is printed onto film, it will be indistinguishable

from very high-grade special effects accomplished with painstaking model work.

It will look as real as anything else in the finished motion picture. The artist, director and technician are,

of course, fictitious, and the scenario is a technological fantasy, not to be realized for years, perhaps

decades to come--

And if you believe that, you haven't been keeping track of recent advances in the incredible field of

computer graphics.

It is happening now.

The artist is veteran production designer Ron Cobb, (ALIEN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN); the director

is Nick Castle (TAG, SKATETOWN U.S.A.) and the motion picture is THE LAST STARFIGHTER, a

joint Universal-Lorimar production. Under the auspices of Los Angeles-based Digital Productions,

headed by John Whitney Jr., all of the special effects for THE LAST STARFIGHTER are being done by

digital scene simulation--computer graphics designed to match reality. Using two powerful Cray super-

computers and a phalanx of other machines, Digital Productions is taking a gamble--some say a big

gamble--by committing itself wholeheartedly to the future.

The future of computer graphics will be extraordinary. Most of the experts in the field--the best can still

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm (2 of 13) [2/14/2004 12:20:51 AM]

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm

be numbered on two hands--agree that we are on the verge of a revolution perhaps more basic and

disruptive than Gutenberg's movable type. Communications and education will be fundamentally

reshaped. The entertainment industry will experience changes far more drastic than the transition from

silent movies to talkies, and talkies to TV.

The power that presently resides in the hands of a knowledgable few, will soon be available to all.

But first, back to the numbers.

The world of the computer is a very simple one. Everything is broken down into bits, a bit being the

information required to answer any question with yes or no; in binary, yes equals 1, and no equals 0.

Binary numbers consist of chains of ones and zeros. (In binary, 01 equals one, but 10 equals two.) More

elaborate codes have been created to relate letters and symbols to certain numbers--thus allowing

computers to display both numbers and text. Other codes relate the positions of glowing dots on a video

screen using coordinates much like those on a map. A picture can be "digitized"--broken down into these

numbered positions--and put into a computer, which can then manipulate the picture in a wide variety of

ways.

A picture can also be formed within the computer by charting key elements on a graph, feeding the

computer coordinates and instructing it to draw lines or curves between the points. Mathematical

equations which determine fixed geometric figures or curves can simplify the process; the computer can

be instructed to draw a circle of a certain diameter around a point, or an ellipse; to trace out a square and

expand it into a cube, and so on.

In fact, a "space" is determined within the computer, having three or more dimensions, and any object can

be described within that space, given sufficiently detailed coordinates. If the object is simple, like a cone,

a "lathe" program can rotate a triangle around an axis to form a cone, or a circle can be turned around any

diameter to create a sphere, much as a shape is spun from a block of wood on a lathe. More complex,

irregular shapes take more complicated instructions, and much more time. Once the object is constructed

in a simple line drawing, or "wireframe," additional programs can add a light source to give it highlight

and cast a shadow. Colors and textures can be "mapped" on its surface. A point of view can be

established, and what is not seen from that point of view--the back of the object--can be clipped, making

it appear opaque and solid.

The process seems simple enough, but in reality the work involved in creating real-seeming objects on

today's machines is extensive. The most complicated methods of creating objects in a computer--such as a

technique called "ray tracing"-- can take weeks of computer time. Simpler techniques can reduce the time

to fractions of a second, but with a corresponding loss of color, shadow and detail.

Once the object's numbers have been fed into the computer, the computer knows what the object looks

like from all sides, at any distance, in relation to any other object or perspective within the machine's

memory. A nonexistent spaceship can be made to zoom past a simulated planet, approach a much larger

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm (3 of 13) [2/14/2004 12:20:51 AM]

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm

"mother ship" and dock inside a highly detailed landing bay, all in perfect perspective.

The computer can then display the objects in two dimensions on a video screen, or send signals to a

printer to transfer images to film. Since the object has actually been mapped in more than two

dimensions, the computer can be instructed to project two points of view, creating a parallax similar to

that between our two eyes. The slightly separated images can be combined stereoscopically for a realistic

feeling of depth.

If the film image needs to be "squeezed" anamorphically onto 35mm stock for later projection on a wide

screen, the computer can do that, as well. Any required lens can be simulated within the machine. In the

1950s, artists and programmers began to pioneer the techniques still being elaborated upon today. John

Whitney Sr. was among the earliest, starting in the late 1940s. He later received the first IBM grant to

study computer graphics in detail, and was installed in a ground-floor corner window of the IBM building

in New York, displaying images for passers-by.

Bill Fetter began exploring the possibilities of wireframe animation at Boeing in the late l950s, and

assembled the first computer generated commercial in the late 1960s.

In the early seventies, Ken Knowlton and Michael Noll came on the scene--Knowlton working for Bell

Labs, and Noll arranging for the first gallery showing of computer art. Noll's specialty was simulating

"clay paintings"--made with plasticine-- using computer images. Many viewers couldn't tell which were

pictures of real clay paintings, and which were simulated.

In the last ten years, the progress has been astonishing; around the world, computers are helping to create

images for scientific research, education, fine art and entertainment.

Sometimes the divisions between these categories are erased; the enchanting beauty of a moving

computer image can turn a prosaic enterprise--such as stress analysis of pipe joins--into art. The most

extensive use of computer animation has been in advertising. Already familiar to TV viewers are the

plethora of "neon"-look commercials for banks, airlines and automobile manufacturers. Generically,

computer animation relying on line graphics is known as "vector" animation. Using various animation

techniques--inside and outside the computer--the lines of these "wireframe" drawings can be made to

glow like neon tubes. This look has become so widespread that within the industry it is becoming a

cliche, to be avoided if possible. Filling in a wireframe object with color, shadow and texture is called

"raster graphics" or "raster" animation. This requires a more powerful computer, such as the Evans and

Sutherland, or the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX machines commonly found in commercial

studios. Some interesting effects can be obtained by fudging (not a technical term). The surface of an

object to be vector- animated can be covered with "cross-thatching," using more lines instead of full

raster graphics. This is known as "psuedo-raster" animation and can be charming, even though it falls in a

middle range likely to be used less often as equipment and programming improve.

Crude raster graphics can be judged by "aliasing"--the appearance of the "jaggies" along an object's

file:///G|/rah/Greg%20Bear%20-%20The%20Machineries%20of%20Joy.htm (4 of 13) [2/14/2004 12:20:52 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

收起<<

Greg Bear - The Machineries of Joy.pdf

共13页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Greg Bear - The Machineries of Joy

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: