TBS Sports Spinning T - Early Vector Graphics, Ga Tech "Cyber" computer 1982/83

Описание: At Georgia Tech, I spent three semesters with a computer graphics class created especially for me, and in which I was the only student. I had sought out my instructor and talked everyone into this special course - he was Dr. David Prince of Lockheed, who designed many of the heads up cockpit animated displays for military aircraft.

I wrote a huge program in Fortran 5 with hidden surface elimination, shading, and most everything that would have served as a basis for proceeding with a robust 3D computer graphics program. There was no "software" for this at the time, or PC's to run software like this. It was all original code that took many months to debug and refine. I used cubic polynomials for smooth animation curves.

This simple animation is the result of almost one year's work learning and creating everything from start to finish from scratch, then correcting and printing out each of the 150 frames in this vector animation on large sheets of special paper.

With a stack of numbered images finally printed and in hand, videotape op Susan Chance and I spent an evening with me aligning each frame on a camera stand in front of a TK47 studio camera, and with Susan tediously editing each image as a single frame edit on a primitive quad videotape machine. Yes, we'd get confused and go back some frames, but in the end we had every frame in place and this was the result.