Toy Story Launched

The appearance of reality

Today in 1995, Toy Story opened in U.S. theaters, the first feature-film to be made entirely with computer-generated imagery (CGI).

The November 2010 issue of ACM’s Queue magazine featured a conversation between Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation Studios, and Stanford computer graphics professor Pat Hanrahan, a former Pixar employee who worked with Catmull on Pixar’s acclaimed RenderMan rendering software, for which they shared a Scientific and Engineering Oscar. Catmull told Hanrahan that “We believed that achieving the appearance of reality was a great technical goal—not because we were trying to emulate reality, but because doing it is so hard that it would help drive us forward.”

This is similar to the way Moore’s “Law” provided microprocessor engineers a clear objective and a road map for improving the technology.

Catmull continued: “We were trying to match the physics of the real world, and in doing that we finally reached the point where we can create convincingly realistic images. Reality was a great goal for a while. Now we have non-photorealistic rendering goals and other things like that that have supplemented it. For a number of years, animation and matching reality were very useful goals, but I never thought of them as the ultimate goal.”

What’s the ultimate goal for shrinking the size and increasing the performance of microprocessors?