A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation

The federal government and industries interested in the developing area of computer graphics saw the value of basic and applications research to obtain new solutions to problems that existed. Funding for these investigations became a priority, and universities around the world responded by supporting students and faculty. Dedicated laboratories were established, and academic programs grew out of these labs. Several of the early labs have already been discussed (Ohio State, University of Utah, Harvard and MIT). Several more can be considered instrumental in moving the discipline in the 1970s to an established industry beginning in the 1980s.

The following Universities and laboratories are represented in this section (MIT, Harvard, Utah and Ohio State were covered in Section 4):

• Cornell University
• New York Institute of Technology (NYIT)
• Computer Graphics Laboratory, Inc.
• University of North Carolina
• University of Toronto
• Cal Tech
• North Carolina State University
• University of Illinois, Chicago Circle
• University of Pennsylvania
• Miscellaneous others
• NSF Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization

Click on the images below to view a larger version (when available).

Cornell University

One of the world's leading laboratories in CG is the Program of Computer Graphics (PCG) at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. Director Donald P. Greenberg has led the program since its founding in 1974. Greenberg, his staff, and students have developed the theoretical basis for many of the practical applications that computer graphics experts and practitioners now use routinely.

Greenberg was educated in architecture and engineering at Cornell and Columbia Universities. As a consulting engineer with Severud Associates, an architecture and engineering firm, he was involved with the design of the St. Louis Arch, Madison Square Garden, and other projects.

During the 1960s, Greenberg became intrigued with the design potential of computers but was impatient with the numeric output provided by engineering applications. His efforts to write software to display results graphically led to the establishment of the multidisciplinary Program of Computer Graphics, with significant funding from the National Science Foundation.

Prior to 1973, much of the research in computer graphics at Cornell was conducted at a GE research facility in Syracuse. Greenberg and students of his would travel to Syracuse to arrive as the normal workday ended, and leave when the machines were needed again the following morning.

The Program of Computer Graphics received its first National Science Foundation grant in the fall of 1973, which enabled Dr. Greenberg to order the first computer graphics equipment. That equipment arrived early in January of 1974, and the first lab was set up in Rand Hall on the Cornell Campus. Greenberg published a paper at SIGGRAPH 77 describing the Cornell Lab.

The Cornell PCG is best known for pioneering work on realistic image synthesis, including the radiosity method for calculating direct and indirect illumination in synthetic scenes. The long-term goal of the lab is to develop physically-based lighting models and  perceptually based rendering procedures to produce images that are visually and measurably indistinguishable from real-world images. Their work has spawned much of the accurate lighting capabilities in commercial software. Roy Hall was instrumental in the development of the Abel Image Research raster system, and contributed to the Wavefront renderer (he also wrote the important book Illumination and Color in Computer Generated Imagery, published by Springer-Verlag in 1989.) The popular renderer Lightscape is also a result of Cornell research.

Since its founding the lab has articulated and refined a framework for global illumination research incorporating light reflection models, energy transport simulation, and visual display algorithms. The current goal is to solve these computationally demanding simulations in real time using an experimental cluster of tightly coupled processors and specialized display hardware. They are achieving this goal by taking advantage of increased on-chip processing power, distributed processing using shared memory resources, and instructional-level parallelism of algorithms. 

The graphics research also involved three-dimensional modeling of very complex environments and new approaches for modeling architectural designs.

In 1991, the Program of Computer Graphics moved to the new Engineering and Theory Center Building across campus, now renamed Rhodes Hall as a tribute to Dr. Frank H.T. Rhodes, the former president of Cornell.

Also in 1991, Cornell became one of five universities participating in the new National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization . This long-term research center was established by Don Greenberg with four distinguished academic colleagues, and he served as the director of the Center from its inception through July of 1995.

Greenberg received the ACM-SIGGRAPH Coons award in 1987 for his lifetime contribution to computer graphics and interactive effects.

Cornell was one of 12 research labs showcased in an exhibition at SIGGRAPH 98 for the 25th anniversary of the conference. (Their portion of the exhibition can be found at http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/siggraph/1998images.html).

Cornell in Perspective

Some of this material was taken from an article in Architecture Week about the graphics program at Cornell, and from the history of the program on Cornell's web site.

Mosaic of Director Don Greenberg made up of images of former students

Scene from Cornell in Perspective

Scene from Cornell in Perspective

Cornell and student Marc Levoy were responsible for the 2D animation production system at Hanna-Barbera. See Note 1 below.

Magritte Studio - Michael Cohen, 1985

The Cornell Box

Global illumination image

Vermeer simulation

HP Workstation - Keith Howie

Fallingwater, modeled at Cornell

Museum, from SIGGRAPH 88 cover

Samovar, a variation on the CG teapot

NYIT

Alex Schure, a wealthy entrepreneur from Westbury New York, was interested in making a feature length movie, and wanted to use computers to do it. In 1974, he made a commitment to the project by establishing the Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL) at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), which he founded and was president of. He put together the most sophisticated studio of the time, employing CGI equipment and state of the art computers, but also top end analogue devices for doing special effects. He also was interested in the top talent, and traveled to the University of Utah to find them. He hired Ed Catmull (then at Applicon) and Malcolm Blanchard to run his facility, who was soon joined by Lance Williams, Fred Parke, Garland Stern, and others from Utah. He also attracted other technology experts and artists, including Ralph Guggenheim, David DeFrancisco, Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Emshwiller.

The staff at NYIT CGL were very prolific in the design of influential software during the period from 1975 to 1979, including the animation program Tween, the paint program Paint, the animation program SoftCel, and others. They also contributed to image techniques involving animation, fractals, morphing, image compositing, texture mapping (the famous Mip-Map approach) and many others.

The NYIT staff, most notably Gene Miller, Lance Williams and  Michael Chou, were responsible for an innovative rendering technique called "reflection mapping", which was used to provide realism to shiny objects in television and the movies (eg, Flight of the Navigator, Terminator, and The Abyss). One of the first such images (shown at right) was done by Chou, showing him standing next to a shiny synthetic robot. NYIT published the technique at SIGGRAPH in 1982 and 1984, and in 1985 used the technique in a short video titled Interface.

Interface

The Paint program was sold to Ampex and became the main components of the Ampex AVA system which was used by artist LeRoy Niemann to do interactive painting during Superbowl 78. The Paint program had a great deal of influence on subsequent systems, including the Paint system at Lucasfilm and the CAPS system developed for Disney by Lucasfilm.

Several videos from NYIT have become quite famous: Sunstone, by Ed Emshwiler, Inside a Quark, by Ned Greene, and The Works, as well as some documentary work by Rebecca Allen. A great deal of effort at NYIT went into the development of the film "The Works", which was written by Lance Williams. For many reasons, including a lack of film-making expertise, it was never completed. Sequences from the work in progress still stand as some of the most astounding animated imagery of the time.

Read a Computer Pictures article on The Works from 1983.

The quality of the imagery, along with the other work at NYIT attracted the attention of George Lucas, who was interested in developing a CGI special effects facility at his company Lucasfilm. He recruited the top talent from NYIT, including Catmull, Smith and Guggenheim to start his division, which eventually spun off as Pixar.

Ed Catmull and Lance Williams received the ACM-SIGGRAPH Coons award in 1993 and 2001 respectively for lifetime contribution to computer graphics and interactive effects. Williams also received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2002 for his influence in the field of computer generated animation and effects for motion pictures. Garland Stern received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2001 for the Cel Paint Software System. Alvy Ray Smith received the ACM-SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement award in 1990 for an outstanding contribution to computer graphics and interactive effects. He also received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1997 for his paint system.

A great compilation of NYIT information can be found at Paul Heckbert's site at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit/. Alvy Ray Smith wrote an article describing the Paint program as part of a survey of activities related to digital ink and paint called Digital Paint Systems, a Microsoft Technical Memo.

Scene from Sunstone, by Ed Emshwiler

Arthur Clokey, the creator of Gumby, works on the E&S graphics display, which was the heart of the NYIT CGL system. to create a digital version of the popular character
Hank Grebe and Dick Lundin, 1984
Click on the image for more information from mediaspin.com

Mondo Condo - Ned Greene

Raspberries of Kyoto - Peter Oppenheimer

Image from Paint

Paint image - Alvy Ray Smith

Curved Shadows - Lance Williams

Compositing images
Michael Chou and Reflection-mapped friend

Mip-mapping texture mapping

Scene from Kraftwerk music video - Rebecca Allen

Scene from Kraftwerk music video - Rebecca Allen

Scene from Will Powers music video - Rebecca Allen

Walpaper - Ned  Greene

Dimetrodon - Dick Lundin

80 Demo 4

Inside a Quark

UNC

Henry Fuchs arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978, after completing his PhD at the University of Utah. He is now the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science and adjunct professor of radiation oncology. He started in computer graphics and image processing in 1969. Prof. Fuchs served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Graphics 1983-88, and was the guest editor of its first issue (January 1982). Fuchs received the 1992 Computer Graphics Achievement Award from ACM/Siggraph and the 1992 National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award. He is also an ACM Fellow.

In 1980, the faculty and students at the Graphics and Image Analysis Research center at UNC began exploring computer architectures for 3D graphics that were significantly faster than traditional architectures for applications that required high performance, such as medical visualization. The project that Fuchs started was called Pixel-Planes, and had an emphasis on scalability and real-time rendering.

The principle techniques used revolved around a plane of processors, each with a few bytes of its own memory, operating in unison. Each pixel (picture element) on the screen was associated with a unique processor. Since each processor knows its x and y screen coordinates, the system sends out the equation for a line and each processor computes which side of the line it is on. Sending the equations for three lines allows for the computing of which processors are inside the lines and how far away from the viewer's perspective each pixel is. The shading and texturing each of the pixels was done in a similar rapid manner.

The first machine built at UNC under the project was Pixel-Planes 2. Its screen resolution was 4x64 pixels, and only 16 bits of memory per pixel, and was only able to display a few polygons per second. Yet, even with those statistics, this early prototype showed the power of the concepts. Pixel-Planes 4 was a machine that had an array of 512x512 processors operating in synchrony. Each pixel processor had 72 bits of memory at its disposal. The video image was produced directly from what is stored in this memory, and a front-end processor based upon a Weitek chip set performed the initial geometry computations, the results of which were fed to the processor array. This machine could draw at the rate of about 40,000 triangles per second. Pixel-Planes 5 solved some of the problems of Pixel-Planes 4, such as the idleness of the processors when computing images comprised of small polygons.

Instead of a single 512x512 array, it had multiple 128x128 arrays (up to about 20 of them). Each of the processors had 208 bits of primary memory available, plus 4096 bits of secondary memory. In addition, instead of a single geometry processor, there were many (up to about 50) Intel i860 processors. Rather than generate the video image from the memory of the processor arrays, the data was sent to a separate frame buffer. This also allowed the use of multiple frame buffers of various types, including a high resolution (1280x1024) model. The net result of the system was a rendering rate of over 2 million triangles per second.

The next generation machine, PixelFlow (PxFl) used pairs of geometry processors and array processors working independently to create screen-sized images based on the subset of the triangles that they have. The partial images were then combined into one by performing a depth-wise sort using a special high-speed image composition network.

Besides Pixel-Planes, the UNC group worked on virtual environments and other related projects. Fred Brooks, who started the Computer Science Department at UNC in 1964 oversaw that work. Brooks' contributions are broad, from computer architecture, to human computer interaction, to virtual environments. He is widely published (he is the author of the excellent book, The Mythical Man Month (1975)). He has received many awards for his activities, including the National Medal of Technology, the A.M. Turing Award from ACM, John Von Neumann Medal from IEEE, and is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. Brooks' research on real-time, three-dimensional computer graphics has propelled that field forward, driven by the goal of creating tools that enable scientists and engineers to tackle problems formerly beyond their reach. The UNC team built the first molecular graphics system on which a new protein structure was solved. They also first proved that haptic displays augmenting visual displays can significantly improve a scientist's understanding of data.

Brooks was assisted on the research for VR and haptics by Mary Whitton and others. They developed several systems, including Grip, Grope and Docker. They connected haptic feedback to the microscope, and have extended it to passive haptics for determing feel such as standing on a ledge.

The ultrasound research group at UNC developed a prototype real-time augmented reality system based on an SGI Onyx workstation equipped with a real-time video capture unit. The camera captured both HMD camera video and ultrasound video. The camera video was displayed in the background; the ultrasound video images were transferred into texture memory and displayed on polygons emitted by the ultrasound probe inside a virtual opening within the scanned patient. This system was used to demonstrate the possibility of using augmented reality to enhance visualization for laparoscopic surgery

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~us/laparo.html

Augmented reality - laparoscopic surgery with virtual tracking

Augmented Reality - 96

Augmented Reality - 94

Toronto

The University of Toronto Dynamics Graphics Project (dgp) was founded in 1967 by Professor Leslie Mezei. He was joined by Professor Ron Baecker in 1972, who coined the name Dynamic Graphics Project in 1974, when they got our first stand-alone machine, a PDP11/45 with a highly-interactive display informally called the Graphic Wonder. The lab's name was intended to imply the spirit of the place, and to encompass both Computer Graphics and Dynamic Interaction Techniques, which was subsumed by the new field of Human Computer Interaction in the early 1980's. Under the leadership of Baecker, Alain Fournier, Bill Buxton, and Eugene Fiume, dgp became a world academic leader in both computer graphics and human-computer interaction. The lab's alumni are now on faculty at top universities throughout the world and at major industrial research labs, and have also won academy awards for their groundbreaking work.

Early work included the Genesys animation system and the Smalltalk animation system SHAZAM. An early animated film done by Baecker called Sorting Out Sorting showed the value of animation in teaching complex concepts. Buxton left Toronto to become a scientist at Alias.

Cal Tech

The Computer Science Department at Cal Tech was started in 1976 by Robert Cannon, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Systems Development and Technology. He organized a search committee to recruit top faculty to the new department, and one of his first recruits was Ivan Sutherland (who was appointed as the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science). Jim Kajiya was recruited by Sutherland in 1979, and they were later joined by Al Barr and Jim Blinn, who with Kajiya formed the core of the Cal Tech research group in computer graphics, which was probably the most mathematically sophisticated computer graphics group in the country.  The group developed fundamental mathematical approaches for computationally simulated physical objects.

Barr’s work in graphics was dedicated to creating a unified mathematical formalism for representing the shape and the behavior of objects. Kajiya was working toward connecting computer graphics principles to the basic equations of electromagnetism that govern the behavior of light. Blinn was recruited to Cal Tech as a half-time research fellow (later lecturer) by Sutherland. His primary interest was in the space program, and Blinn spent the other half of his time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory producing animated simulations of the Voyager missions to Jupiter and Saturn.  

Kajiya had a Utah PhD, but his fields of interest were very high-level programming languages, theoretical computer science, and signal processing.  His interest in computer graphics began in 1981, after he presented a paper at the national SIGGRAPH conference on different ways of manipulating pixels (individual picture elements) to get a sharper image in the display of characters on CRT screens. Kajiya met Al Barr in the summer of 1983, when they were both speakers at the SIGGRAPH seminar on the state of the art in computer graphics.  At that time Barr was senior research scientist at Raster Technologies, Inc. and was finishing his thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He was about to accept a faculty position at MIT, but Kajiya convinced him to come to Cal Tech instead.  

Kajiya was also interested in anisotropic reflection, that is, reflection from surfaces such as cloth, hair, or fur.  They worked on the mathematical methods used for the what Kajiya called the “fuzzy object problem”, the simulation of hair, fire, fabric, and splashing water, as well as simulating the shapes and appearance of plants and animals. The group also produced 4 out of the 19 contributions to the 1985 Omnimax film shown at SIGGRAPH 95. Barr animated a giant school of graceful sperm cells swimming toward a looming, undulating egg cell, and JPL’s Jeff Goldsmith, with software by Kajiya and Blinn, contributed a fly-by of Saturn.  The third film was a sequence based on the constellations, with software written by Blinn.  Kajiya, with computer science grad students Tim Kay and Brian Von Herzen, together with help from Art Center students, contributed a 30 second animation of a flight into a space colony (which just happened to house the Cal Tech campus).

1986, Kajiya introduced the rendering equation as a way of modeling global illumination in an environment arising from the interplay of lights and surfaces. The rendering equation and its various forms have since formed the basis for physically-based rendering, enabling a new level of realism.

Other Cal Tech researchers included Timothy Kay, Andrew Witkin, Brian Von Herzen, David Kirk, Kurt Fleischer, Ronen Barzel, David Laidlaw, John Platt and others. Jim Kajiya received the ACM-SIGGRAPH Graphics Achievement Award in 1991 for an outstanding contribution to computer graphics and interactive effects. He and Tim Kay also received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1996 for their work in generating fur and hair for motion pictures.

A list of publications out of the Cal Tech Graphics group can be found at http://www.gg.caltech.edu/publications.html

Coming soon

Herbert the Bear with 3D textures

Caustics and color bleeding

Generative modeling

Fleischer - Developmental modeling

NCSU

The graphics program at North Carolina State University was relatively short-lived, but the investigations that were conducted there had long term impact on the discipline. Prof. John Staudhammer (now with the Graphics Symbolic and Geometric Computation Program at NSF) created the research group in the Electrical Engineering Department around 1970. Students included Turner Whitted, Nick England, Mary Whitton, Jeff Eastman, Marc Howard, Ed Tripp and others. They had some success with research publications, and developed some lasting hardware configurations.

Eastman, Dave Wooten, and Tripp designed a very fast asynchronous parallel processor for graphics operations, and England designed and built the fore-runner to the Ikonas system, a programmable 32-bit graphics processor (based on AMD 2901) and a frame buffer (512x512x2 or 256x256x8), which was published in a paper at SIGGRAPH 78.

Staudhammer formed a company called Digitec and built the real-time playback run-length encoded frame buffer for the CGRG at Ohio State, and Whitton and England started Ikonas Graphics Systems based on the England's programmable raster display processor.

After receiving his PhD from NCSU in 1978, Turner Whitted left for Bell Labs and proceeded to shake the CGI world with an algorithm that could ray-trace a scene in a reasonable amount of time. His film, The Compleat Angler is one of the most mimicked pieces of CGI work ever, as every student that enters the discipline tries to generate a bouncing ray-traced ball sequence. Whitted was also very instrumental in the development of various scan line algorithms, as well as approaches to organizing geometric data for fast rendering. In 1983, Whitted left Bell Labs to return to North Carolina to establish Numerical Designs, Ltd. (now part of Emergent Game Technologies) in Chapel Hill. NDL was founded with Robert Whitton of Ikonas to develop graphics toolkits for 3D CGI. Key developments of NDL include

• NetImmerse 3D Game Engine
• MAXImmerse 3D Studio MAX Plug-in
• rPLUS Photorealistic Rendering Software

Whitted also had a faculty appointment at UNC, and in 1997 joined the graphics division at Microsoft. He is an ACM Fellow, and received the 1986 SIGGRAPH Graphics Achievment award for his simple and elegant algorithm for ray-tracing. He is now lead contact for the Graphics group and the Hardware Devices group at Microsoft, where he is investigating alternative user interface devices, such as wearable interfaces.

For more information, see Nick England's NCSU page.

Dave Wooten at Adage display at NCSU

Scene from Turner Whitted's ray trace animation

University of Illinois - Chicago Circle

Dan Sandin came to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle from the University of Wisconsin in 1971 and developed the Sandin Image Processor, which could be thought of as the visual counterpart to the MOOG synthesizer. He was joined the next year by Tom DeFanti, who had developed the Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) as part of his PhD work with Chuck Csuri at the CGRG at Ohio State. Together, they organized the Circle Graphics Habitat, which became an environment for experimental computer graphics, video production, and educational materials development.

Some of the most important early work at the Habitat revolved around the Z Box (Z-50 processor) project, which resulted in the development of ZGRASS, which was an early PC-based graphics system for the Bally computer (1981). In the words of Jane Veeder, it provided

"...real time animation and real time sound synthesis accessed by a custom language optimized for interactive artmaking, all wrapped up together like a hot little sports car."

The box had an NTSC video output port, which provided video recording and display capabilities for artists. DeFanti et al attempted to commercialize the product through their company, Real Time Design, Inc.

Later contributions have been in mathematics visualization and virtual reality, including the CAVE environment and the Immersadesk. DeFanti also contributed immensely to the SIGGRAPH organization, as its President and with contributions to their annual conference. DeFanti and the group at Chicago began a project to archive all of the films and videos shown at the SIGGRAPH conference, resulting in the SIGGRAPH Video Review (SVR).

Dan Sandin

Tom DeFanti in the Circle Graphics Habitat

Scene from Spiral 5

Fabricated Zgrass machine

Diagram of the CAVE virtual environment developed at EVL

University of Pennsylvania

Norman Badler received his PhD at the University of Toronto. He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, and started the Computer Graphics Research Laboratory in the Computer and Information Science Department (in 1994 the lab became the Center for Human  Modeling and Simulation). Research focused on his research emphasis on human figure animation, including human figure modeling, manipulation, and animation control, embodied agents, intuitive user interfaces, and computational connections between language and action. An early contribution with Maxine Brown and Steve Smoliar was in the area of Laban Notation scripting for animation. The lab achieved international recognition for its research and specifically for the Jack software (now marketed as a commercial product by Engineering Animation, Inc.).

Jack provides a 3-D interactive environment for controlling articulated figures. With his human-like ability to reach and grasp as well as detect and avoid "collisions" with objects in his virtual environment, Jack can be animated to perform a variety of tasks that engineers can observe and evaluate. Jack features a detailed human model who behaves realistically in various virtual environments. Designers can test the reach, range of motion, and other features of any size human, as he or she would fit within a designed space. For example, engineers would use Jack to determine whether crucial instruments within an aircraft cockpit fall within comfortable reach of the pilot, thus saving time and expense in building prototypes.

Other Penn researchers included Cary Phillips, Dimitri Metaxas and others.

Scene showing Jack interaction

There are quite anumber of other universities that also contributed to the advancement of the discipline at this point. Eihichiro Nakamae and his group at the EML at Hiroshima University in Japan conducted research on lighting and atmospheric scattering of light.

The appointment of Charles Eastman in 1968 to the faculty of what were then the Departments of Architecture and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University initiated a series of research projects that were seminal to the field of computer-aided architectural design. Eastman, at the Institute for Physical Planning at Carnegie Mellon, developing the GLIDE system with Max Henrion and the General Space Planner (GSP) System, a software system for solving space planning problems. Eastman and Kevin Weiler also published a seminal paper on the use of Euler operators for geometric modeling. Subsequent research activities concentrated on a general modeling scheme for buildings.

Andy Van Dam created the program at Brown University, and has over 3 decades of contributions in the area of graphical user interfaces (more information on Brown can be found in the section on GUIs).

Notes:

1. Cornell student Marc Levoy did his Bachelors and Masters work around 2D cartoon animation. His work led to a production system at Hanna Barbera Productions. As Levoy stated in an interview related to the Sands Award given for the best undergraduate research work in 1976:

After the completion of my Master's thesis, Don Greenberg and I tried to convince the Walt Disney's feature animation group to incorporate computer graphics into their production process. Unfortunately, several of the "nine old men", who had worked for Disney since the 1930's, were still active, and they would have none if it. By the mid-1980's, these gentlemen had all retired, and Pixar was able to convince Disney to explore the new technology. The system they co-developed was called CAPS (Computer Animation Production System). It ultimately won them an academy award in 1992 for its use in Beauty and the Beast.

Although we were unsuccessful at Disney, we managed to convince Hanna-Barbara[sic] Productions to employ our system in the television animation market. Hanna-Barbara was on the verge of closing down domestic production due to spiraling labor costs, and they saw our system as a way to forstall doing this. The animator's union didn't believe them, nor did they relish the prospect of computerization, leading to a bitter strike in 1982. In the end, the animators learned to use our system, which remained in production until 1996. At its peak in the late 80's, one third of Hanna-Barbera's yearly domestic production went through our system, including The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and other shows. Ultimately, domestic labor costs become too high even for the computerized production line, and the the system was sold to James Wang Films of Taiwan. It has since been ported to PCs and is currently marketed under the name Animaster. The original technical team at Hanna-Barbera Productions consisted of myself, Bruce Wallace, Chris Odgers, Bennett Leeds, Jim Mahoney, Steve McDaniel, and Tim Victor. Our chief power user from the production side of the company was Ann Tucker. Interestingly, Ann subsequently went to work for Disney, becoming their chief power user as well.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~levoy/sands_award.html

The Cornell implementation of the system at Hanna-Barbera Productions is documented in a 1985 Computer Graphics World article, Behind the Screen at Hanna-Barbera.