A History of CGRG/ACCAD at
The Ohio State University

In the late 1970s, the focus of the work turned in the direction of increased complexity of modeling and animation and visual accuracy.

Ron Hackathorn and Rick Parent developed the next generation animation system, called ANTSS, which was one of the first systems that combined motion specification and rendering in the same system. As mentioned earlier, Parent received his PhD degree in 1977, which focused on a modeling system called DG, which was likened to a tool for sculpting clay in the computer environment. Parent was appointed the Associate Director of the lab after his graduation.

Wayne Carlson worked with Rodger Wilson and Bob Marshall to expand the procedural animation capabilities introduced by Martin Newell of the University of Utah, and also developed an expanded surface modeling environment that used higher order curves and surfaces, such as Bezier and b-splines, as part of his PhD research. Carlson also investigated points as a display primitive that could be used to efficiently compute and display "fuzzy" objects, ie those with no "solid" 3-D structure (eg, smoke, fire, water, etc.) He applied this research to generate an image of a smokestack and he recalculated the interacting galaxies sequences first produced by Reynolds, increasing the geometry from several hundred geometric primitives (stars) to over 30,000 in each galaxy.

Complex Models
Carlson's DG system expanded the modeling work of Rick Parent, and was a system for modeling geometry that included points as a geometric primitive (what would later become known as particle systems), boolean operators on surface patches, and a unified approach to sweep operators.

Frank Crow, a PhD student of Ivan Sutherland at Utah,was recruited from the University of Texas and worked with approaches to increased scene description and rendering capabilities and continued his work with shadows and antialiasing that were started at the University of Utah. At CGRG he investigated multi-processing approaches to image synthesis and other algorithmic solutions for complex images. He later went to Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, Interval Research, and then to NVIDIA.

During Crow's tenure at OSU, the PDP-11/45 was replaced with one of the earliest VAX 11/780 models on the market, and the FORTRAN and assembly language code was translated to the C language in the Unix environment.

Crow's Scene Composition film

Image Scene Composition
Frank Crow created an approach to the efficient modeling and control of complex scenes, creating a system called scn_assembler

A new computing environment
Under Crow's guidance the CGRG computing environment moved to a new generation, with the Vax 11/780 and Unix

Dave Zeltzer (Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics) developed goal-directed motion description capabilities for skeletal and creature animation (the Skeletal Animation System - SAS). His system and the underlying theories are some of the most significant contributions to the area of autonomous legged motion description in the discipline.

Don Stredney (the Ohio Supercomputer Center) pushed the limits of the modeling systems of Carlson and Parent to develop complex anatomical models, including the skeleton"George" used by Zeltzer in his research. George became a graphics "cult" figure, and the geometric model was distributed widely throughout the field.

Mark Howard (Sun Microsystems) moved from Staudhammer's NC State program and designed and built a controllable 512x512 frame buffer that allowed real-time playback of animation tests. This frame buffer and later versions of the design were the mainstay of the image creation and representation capabilities at CGRG and later at Cranston/Csuri Productions.

Julian Gomez (Sun Microsystems) developed TWIXT, a track-based keyframe animation system. This system allowed for the specification of key-framed motion for independent objects that moved over the same time interval. It had real time playback, with shape morphing, and was device independent.

Other important work done during this period included films Snoot and Muttly by Susan Van Baerle (LambSoft) and Doug Kingsbury (Lamb & Co.), Trash by John Donkin (Blue Sky), Tuber's Two-Step by Academy award winner Chris Wedge (one of the founders of Blue Sky), Vision Obious by Ruedy Leeman (Alpine View Images), early character animation by Michael Girard and George Karl, and animations by Susan Amkraut, Marsha McDevitt, Thuy Tran, Kevin Reagh, Anne Seidman, Tom Hutchinson (ILM), Bill Sadler and others.

A powerful frame buffer
Marc Howard designed and built a powerful and flexible frame buffer that could be used for realtime motion playback.

Motion Tests
George Karl and Michael Girard created complex motions using their ideas for creature motion definition, coupled with the flexible dynamics work of Dave Haumann.

Snoot and Muttly
This groundbreaking character animation was done by Susan Van Baerle and Doug Kingsbury. It was one of the first animations in which believable emotions were imparted to the CG characters.