TRON Legacy: Oh how far we've come in computer rendering

source: TRON: The Official Site

On Friday, December 17, many Autodesk employees went to see the new movie TRON Legacy. As computer scientists, we were enthralled by the original TRON in terms of the advances it fostered in computer graphics. As Autodesk employees, we wanted to see the latest creation from one of our biggest Media and Entertainment software customers - Disney Studios. So we all headed over to the IMAX theater at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco.

Prior to the showing of the movie itself, Brian Mathews, VP of Autodesk Labs, gave a presentation on the history of the original TRON, and how incredible it was to have been made given the state of computers and filmmaking of the time. Brian's presentation had some illuminating facts:

1. Both AutoCAD and TRON made their debuts in 1982, so it was fun to consider how both AutoCAD 2011 and TRON Legacy have advanced.
   source: Brian Mathews

2. In 1982 a CRAY mainframe computer had 8MB of memory at a cost of $7,000,000. For TRON, each rendering required 18MB of memory, so even on a CRAY, the animators could not have viewed a single frame. So for whatever computer they used, they had to render one scan line at a time, and could not see the results of their efforts until the scan lines were combined on to film.
   CRAY Computer - source: Central Computing Annual Report Excerpt 1986

3. With an expanding and contracting array of rendering servers at one's beck and call, rendering solutions like Project Neon offer 100,000 times more processing power than the CRAY at a cost of a few cents.
   

4. With limited computer processing power, the TRON motorcycles were made from mathematical geometric primitives like cylinders, cones, tori, etc. The predecessor to ray tracing was used, Ray Casting, to intersect an eye-ray from each pixel into the scene of primitives. This allowed smooth surfaces to be rendered without having to tessellate into memory consuming triangles.
   source: Wikipedia

5. With advances in computing power and photorealistic rendering capabilities, these limitations no longer exist for the TRON Legacy motorcycles. Even complications like having the light from one motorcycle be cast on another when two motorcycles are in proximity are no problem for today's rendering software.
   source: TRON: The Official Site

Since I was working the lights and sound for Brian's presentation, I got to go into the control room for the IMAX theater. Because the Metreon is still in the process of converting to full digital, there were the TRON Legacy movie reels in all their glory. Each reel was about 7 feet wide and weighed 500 pounds. There were two of them - one with a yellow tint, and another with a blue tint. The projector itself was about the size of a vending machine. The reels of 4 inch wide tape are played synchronously and wearing the special glasses by the audience produces the 3D effect. Sadly I was not allowed to take pictures of the equipment, but I still found it very fascinating.

Appreciating computer science history is alive in the lab.