3d Computer Animation
Do you remember how did the first cartoons and the first computer games look? Just a couple of moving lines and maybe a a beeping sound for computer games or classical music for cartoons.
Steamboat Willie was the first groundbreaking cartoon made in 1928 with moving pictures and synchronized sound.
The first computer game was made much later, in 1958. A simple tennis game on an oscilloscope screen.
. The relationship between these two different types of entertainment became very close in the computer age, and nowadays both are created with basically the same equipment and software. Games and non-classical cartoons are based on 3D computer animation
While games and animations are made mostly in the same way, there’s a huge difference between them too. Computer animations are compiled into high-resolution high quality video streams, but computer games are interactive, so the 3D animation has to be generated in real-time by the user’s computer. As a consequence all 3D animations related to gameplay have to be able to adept to the specific computer’s hardware. Slower computers will generate low quality graphics while top gaming computers sometimes exceed even the quality of studio-produced 3D animations (cartoons).
The first completely computer generated 3D animation was Toy Story, shown to the public in 1995. It was made by Disney/Pixar, the firm that stands behind the success of Apple Inc. as we know it today. Steve Jobs invested all his money (and more) in the animation firm, made a lot of profit and later could buy his way back into the CEO position at Apple. TV shows like The Simpsons made fun of him recently, calling him “Steve Mobbs, chief imaginative officer at mApple”, but the truth is that he made historical contributions to the entertainment industry (and more) with Pixar animations, and Apple gadgets and computers.
These 3D computer animations with lengths exceeding 1 hour are relatively hard to make. An entire team of computer graphics experts has to work at least 6 months on such a project. The computers they use are incredibly fast. In the beginning they used computers based on Intel processors and a few years later Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple Computers still seemed committed to Intel, he upgraded all Apple computer platforms to Intel Core Duo (later Core 2 Duo, today Core i3, i5 and i7) increasing their speed up to 4x, but the wheels are turning.
AMD will soon launch its new CPU+GPU combo that will have several advantages over Intel’s solution, because Intel refuses to let other manufacturers (like nVidia) make chipsets (with competitive integrated graphics) for the new line of Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. Rumors have been circulating for quite some time about AMD’s secret offers towards Apple to replace the platform of all Apple computers with AMD chipsets, processors, integrated graphics and add-on graphics cards. Another hypothesis would be that Apple could simply buy AMD’s whole operation to maximize its advantage in the mobile market too by replacing iPhone platforms too to AMD chips. A step like this would also mean kicking out Intel-based computers from Pixar and using complete AMD solutions.
AMD’s new Bulldozer platform would be an ideal candidate for Apple computers, which will be launched at the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011. This won’t be a performance upgrade like the one made in 2006 from Apple processors to Intel, but in my opinion this is what any computer manufacturer would want. The most important components would be very well synchronized because they would come from the same manufacturer and let’s not forget that AMD is in a very good place when it comes to GPU performance and efficiency (processors still have to recover in terms of performance).
Written by Karpat Zoltan, date Aug 30, 2010 in Computers
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