Thirty-two years later, computer graphics won the Turing Award, and pixar bosses pushed 3D animation forward

The ACM has honored Two Pixar co-founders and computer graphics experts, Patrick M. Hanrahan and Edwin E. Catmull, with its 2019 Turing Award, the ACM announced yesterday. This is the second time that graphics has won the Turing Prize since IVAN SUTHERLAND in 1988.

Edwin E. Catmull and Patrick M. Hanrahan were founding members of Pixar Animation Studios. Hanrahan is a professor in the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University. Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and was president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, is now retired.

According to ACM’s official announcement, Catmull and Hanrahan are honored for: “Their contributions to conceptual innovations, software and hardware have had a fundamental impact on computer graphics. From Toy Story 25 years ago, this new type of computer-generated storytelling has revolutionized filmmaking.”

The Turing Award was established by the International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1966 to award individuals who have made significant contributions to the computer industry. The Turing Prize is named after Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician and computing pioneer who laid the mathematical foundations of computing and the theory of its limitations.

Catmull and Hanrahan will officially receive the award and the $1 million prize at the ACM Annual Awards Banquet on June 20, 2020 in San Francisco, California.

3D computer-animated films are the most popular genre in today’s $138bn global film industry. The development of 3D computer graphics has played a crucial role in the current popular video game industry and VR, AR and other industries, while Catmull and Hanrahan made pioneering technical contributions in this field, which are still an integral part of the development of CGI graphics. In addition, their insights on gpus have been influential not only in computer graphics, but also in areas as diverse as data center management and artificial intelligence.

ACM President Cherri M. Pancake said: “CGI graphics development has changed the way movies are made and experienced, while also having a profound impact on the broader entertainment industry. We are particularly pleased to be recognized for the work of Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull. Computer graphics is one of the largest and most dynamic areas of research within the ACM Society. Hanrahan’s and Catmull’s contributions show how advances in one particular area of computing can have a profound impact on others in the field. For example, Hanrahan’s work on GPU coloring languages has led to the use of these languages as general-purpose computing engines in a wide range of fields, including my own high-performance computing. ”

Jeff Dean, senior researcher at Google and senior vice president of Google AI, said: “Nowadays, because of the ubiquity of 3D computer graphics, we tend to forget how the field is evolving. It’s like Pong, the video game that simulates two people playing ping-pong. There’s a dot moving between two lines. Technology is advancing all the time, but it is remarkable to admit that Hanrahan and Catmull’s work of decades ago is still standard practice in the field today. “It is important that we recognize the scientific contribution of CGI and educate the public about the impact it will have on AR, VR, data visualization, education, medical imaging and many more in the years to come.”

The originator of 3D animated films

The names of these two scientists may not sound familiar, but you’ve definitely seen the work of their former companies. Pixar, the computer animation division of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic, was bought by Jobs in 1986 for $1,000 and has grown into one of the world’s leading animation studios.

As an animated film company, Pixar ushered in a new era. In 1995, the studio released toy Story, the world’s first 3D animated film. Since then, more and more 3D animated films have been released, igniting a whole new computer animation industry.

Edwin E. Catmul and Patrick Hanrahan are the technical heroes behind 3D animated films.

Catmull was born in 1945 in Parkersburg, Northwest West Virginia, and moved to Utah. His original animation dreams were inspired by Disney films such as Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and he even made his own animated book flips.

Instead, he used his aptitude for mathematics to study physics and computer science at the University of Utah and worked briefly as a programmer for Boeing in Seattle.

Since returning to graduate school in 1970, Catmull has set his goal “to make a computer-animated film”. During that time, Catmull created a new way to represent smooth surfaces by normalizing coarse-grained polygonal meshes. In addition, in his doctoral thesis, Catmull introduced two breakthrough techniques for displaying surface patches instead of polygons: Z-buffering for managing image depth coordinates in computer graphics; Texture Mapping that maps 2D surface textures onto 3D objects. Catmull’s technology has played an important role in developing simulative graphics and eliminating “jagged graphics”.

After leaving the University of Utah, Catmull founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) Computer Graphics Lab, one of the earliest specialized computer graphics LABS in the United States. At that time, Catmull had a dream of making animated films.

When George Lucas, the famed director of the Star Wars films, hired Catmull in 1979, at a time when the field of animated films was still dominated by traditional 2D techniques, Catmull and his colleagues worked to push graphics toward realistic graphics.

After Jobs bought Lucasbusiness in 1986 and renamed it Pixar, Catmull continued as president and was responsible for the creation of classic animated films such as Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Coco and Up.

In 2008, Catmull received the Academy Gordon E. Sawyer Award (one of the Academy’s special awards) for his “contributions to the motion picture industry through outstanding achievements in computer graphics”.

Hanrahan came to Pixar a little later than Catmul.

Hanrahan received his PhD in biophysics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985, followed by a stint at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab. Hanrahan joined Pixar in 1986 as a senior scientist and was one of Catmull’s first hires at the company.

During his time at Pixar, Hanrahan, along with Catmull and others, developed a new graphics system that allowed producers to render curved shapes using realistic material properties and lighting. Named RenderMan, the system was used to design renderings for Toy Story, Harry Potter, Star Wars and many other Pixar films.

RenderMan is certainly a standard tool in the Hollywood industry. It was used in 44 of the 47 films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art and Special Effects. It helps computer-generated visual effects in movies, from simple plastic toy surface textures to more complex physical phenomena such as fur and spray.

Hanrahan also developed Olume Rendering, a technology that allows CGI drafters to render 2D projections of 3D data sets, such as a plume of smoke.

In one of his most frequently cited papers, Hanrahan introduced light field rendering. This technique creates the sensation of flying through a scene, generating new perspectives from arbitrary points without borrowing depth information or feature matching.

Hanrahan also developed techniques to depict skin and hair using subsurface scattering and to render complex lighting effects using Monte Carlo ray tracing.

In 1990, Hanrahan published a research paper on RenderMan in ACM SIGGRAPH. However, computer hardware wasn’t good enough to take full advantage of Hanrahan’s RenderMan system, so it took five years before toy Story, a 3D computer-animated film, was released.

Hanrahan left Pixar in 1989 and later took teaching positions at Princeton and Stanford Universities. In the 1990s, Hanrahan and his students extended the Renderman coloring language to run in real time on gpus that were then just hitting the market. The programming language Hanrahan and his students developed for gpus led to the development of commercial coloring languages (including OpenGL) that revolutionized video game programming.

The ubiquity and diversity of coloring languages on gpus has prompted GPU hardware designers to develop more flexible architectures. These architectures enable gpus to be used in a variety of computing environments, from algorithms for high-performance computing applications to training ML algorithms on massive data sets. Hanrahan and his students also invented Brook, a language for gpus that eventually led indirectly to CUDA.

During his more than 30 years at Pixar, Catmull led dozens of researchers in the lab who developed basic techniques including image synthesis, motion blur, cloth simulation, Hanrahan and Catmull have both received ACM SIGGRAPH and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards for their technical contributions.