Early CGI Was Horrifying

CGI it's a term I'm willing to bet you've heard before because it's everywhere this worm this purple man everything in between is the work of computer-generated images regardless of the benefits or the faults CGI has found itself as an essential unanimous parts of media production which is kind of funny because just a few decades ago this technology was unnoticed by most of the general public it was time consuming highly Technical and Niche I mean think about it even the most powerful super computers of the 60s 70s and 80s couldn't hold a candle next to this smart fridge and while most researchers were using these to make math go faster CGI could just make funny looking pictures the value it would have was not easily apparent and the skills you would need to get into all this in the first place was not for the faints of Hearts now I don't want to talk too much about the live-action CGI stuff here just the pure good CGI demos and shorts leading up to let's say Toy Story I mean that if I point at this particular point and tell a computer to move that point by another push button command it will move not only that point but all three lines are attached to it and the delay between it's doing what if you wanted to uh is um because it's Computing all these changes that's correct CGI has actually been around for quite a while in the 50s analog computers could graph out patterns and lines by the 60s we would have wireframe demos morphing of images but it's not quite what we think of as true CGI today this decade has a lot of important Milestones sure but a lot of them look like this for the more conventional works we would have to go into the 1970s one of the most significant demos here was 1972's aptly named computer animated hand you can see some of the earliest full meshes shading and even a human face sure it's slightly uncanny but I'd argue by this point it was almost more cartoonish than creepy following up on this was 1974's faces and body parts which expanded on the human face and added the elements of speech how happy is the little stone that Rambles in the road alone and never cares about careers and exigencies never fears these early tests were groundbreaking sure but in the process found themselves Deep In The Uncanny Valley not all CGI was being done for research though there was a small commercial element to all this even in the early 1970s namely in advertising and station breaks you can find several companies putting out demo reels showing any ads they've produced along with the tech demos they've created these demos could bring in more clients and potentially more employees interested in working with what was at the time a very Niche segment of the computer industry one of my favorites is Maggie synthavision's 1974 reel hi guess where I came from a computer me and my hat and everything everything else you're going to see in this film there's certainly limitations in the CGI of the era that's apparent but this is actually one of the most advanced demos I've found [Music] simple polygonal shapes flat colors without texture cityscapes and cars were quite popular in 80s CGI but for the 70s this is astounding it's a very empty space you can tell where the world begins and ends but that's par for the course in most early CGI by the late 70s we would start to see the earliest short films using three-dimensional polygons here is 1978's on and off at the circus [Music] foreign that was disturbing the circus the clown the way this bear floats around Computing physics in an animation like this wasn't going to happen a lot of these researchers weren't traditional animators they came from computer backgrounds and this was a fun way to show off The Cutting Edge Tech at the time complex backgrounds of anything more than a simple color would be pretty unrealistic to expect this is 1970s CGI after all [Music] released the same year Voyager 2 encounters Jupiter has aged much better having a background of stars was ideal in early CGI you don't need to worry about rendering more objects it gives much needed spatial context and you don't have a black void also having a setting of space makes the lighting a bit more realistic since you only need to account for one light source the sun even with slightly janky animations the camera moves well and this is a top tier demo for the 70s by the end of the decade in 1978 the first Ray tracing demo was produced the complete Angler it's a bona fide classic you could call this the birth of vaporwave look at those refractions and Reflections at the end we get this camera movement into the courtyard and we get water things were moving pretty fast at least the way I'm describing them the gap between the early 70s CGI in the late 70s was pretty big but the 80s well it just had a lot more going on there's a particular fascination with landscapes in the early 80s take peak in early fractal demo it's a mountain sitting on a plane in a void fractals allowed you to create these models without actually modeling every individual surface which made it ideal for mountainous terrain vile liba is another demo from the same year and I prefer this not just because it has a Utah teapot at the beginning there's an amazing sense of scale here and if you really squint your eyes and shake your head around a lot it looks like real mountains a lot of landscapes in these early 80 shorts take Carla's Island from 81 we get this approximation of water and weather systems two islands on an empty sea the waves move in a very mathematical fashion the clouds aren't quite transparent but the reflections are pretty convincing at first glance and look how the lighting changes it's wonderful you'll notice a trend of a lot of cities being rendered in this time especially in advertising generally these would have a low polygon City filled with skyscrapers and streets devoid of any background Landscapes and cities could be represented by simple polygonal shapes they don't need to move around so you don't need to animate parts of a character so a lot of this is aged decently well [Music] thank you early 80s demos would generally avoid Shadows you might notice these shadowed gradients on objects but it always looks really harsh one of my favorites and one of the most unsettling shorts is 1981's Adam Powers the juggler [Music] as he keeps juggling he warps reality and he keeps juggling and then he warps reality and then he disappears The Music doesn't help ease the tension in the air this feels like it defines a lot of the early 80s CGI overly saturated colors set in space most objects don't cast Shadows but when they do oh they sure do 1982 was a big year for CGI because we got Tron you remember Tron look at it go we also got the Genesis effect in Star Trek 2 using some of those fractal landscape techniques we saw earlier and just one year later we'd be blessed with the short demo when mandrills ruled Heaven it has raid tracing and a monkey a lot of these dunnos have a real nightmare Dreamscape Vibe here's a skeleton man who uses his eye to play Billiards I do appreciate the bouncing of the balls though physics simulations are appreciated because well this was the alternative as far as skeletons go though I think this 1983 Ohio State demo does it best it's just a Hopping happy Skeleton Man walking through empty rooms with no ceiling it's quite an aesthetic less appealing is this [Music] thank you [Music] the Music Choice the xylophone floor the Bears it's so dense every single image has so many things going on in 1984 we get one of my favorite short films of the early CGI era High Fidelity it's about shapes doing fun things on a fun polygonal Island what I love so much about this is how it works within the limitations of CGI at the time our protagonists aren't humanoids they're just shapes the background is covered in Lush polygonal foliage the camera appears to be Ray traced bouncing Rays from a camera to the camera it's funny two-dimensional dog I imagine the Skybox has a texture and it works sure you don't have self-shadowing but I can easily suspend my disbelief on the other hand we have snoot and Muttley made the same year the first frame the very first frame were greeted with this weird smooth lighting the bizarre texture on the flat plane the simple polygons and complete Black void in the background I can't see any Shadows here but the main focus is on these two birds with human eyes it was a Showcase of how emotion could be shown in these CGI characters and sure it succeeds in that but at what cost this may or may not be the original music but it's something just because I feel like mentioning it here's 1984's first flight [Music] what catches me off guard is the transparency effects of the clouds the bird animation is it's very bird-like I get real PlayStation 1 cutscene Vibes here not a lot to say but yeah that's neat here's Maggie sent the vision's demo from 1984 a decade after we first looked at them oh this will be fun come on inside here how about going on a nice little ride rather than starting with the happy hat man we get dismembered clown we get the more traditional smooth polygons and baked lighting effects you've seen it's a very specific early CGI Vibe I'm sure you've all appreciated before in the ray tracing that's improved as well this Pac-Man cereal ad that's something and at the end we get a much more convincing water demo that I've seen yet here's a fun one it's botco get all your fusion and fishing needs at botco the number one name in High Energy Fuels matter antimatter it doesn't matter at botco it's a fake ad created by Pacific data images and it has all the tropes of traditional CGI the void of a background seemingly empty spaces but at least there's some hills now and clouds and shadows I like it don't pay those expensive re-entry fees we'll bring the widest variety of particles subparticle and theoretical Energy Fuels Factory Direct to you now here's something I've always questioned when it comes to older CGI demos generally we only have access to the low quality rips and it's hard to rule out whether the low resolution in film grain makes it seem a little bit more creepy I don't necessarily think that's the case but the VHS quality demos do have a certain nostalgic appeal but luckily we have a high quality rip of the famous Brilliance advert as you can see it stars sexy robot Lady it's set in space who would have guessed and while the robot herself isn't that shiny the table sure is I'm pretty sure I used this on a song thumbnail once looking at the behind the scenes footage the original concept art was amazing it's also pretty funny that they refer to this as photorealistic it has to be something where you really can't tell if she's real or if she's computerized her movements are very human and she's very sexy but very strong the definition of photorealism changes constantly and I think as we're exposed to more advanced CGI our definition shifts as well it's like the owl from the beginning of Labyrinth that was photorealistic back in 86 but today not so much I don't know maybe it feels in 480p it'd look better let's try that sure yeah that's great by the mid 80s we have the start of the oh so famous Pixar shorts not really though Pixar at this point was technically a division of lucasfilms 1984's The Adventures of Andre and Wally B unlike many of the prior Tech demos this had an ulterior motive for its creation not just as a technical Marvel which it was but as an artistic work to show off the potential of CGI as a a medium for animation sure that's been done before but you know they really lean into it here the story is simple a blue thing finds a bee runs away from the bee the bee stings blue thing blue thing throws the Hat Pixar is generally a step ahead throughout all these demos they always bring something new to the table and show truly state-of-the-art technology but with that being said I don't I don't like this one I understand it has big technical achievements such as the jiggly soft bodies and the motion blur look at that motion blur but there's so many other things that bother me it's this use of real textures on these low poly surfaces the lighting in the background feels so off but the trees use realistic textures those tree models are also way better than you expect for 1984 but still this was all due to limitations of early CGI it's why it looks the way it does and it works well within its own restraints but you know I'm still gonna complain there is a background there are things behind the focus of the animation but it's like a parallel world where things don't look like the things they're supposed to character animations are better than what you'd expect though but it is a far cry from replicating that hand-drawn animation style everything looks smooth it moves smooth it's too smooth a good general rule is that any human that has a polygon count equivalent to that of a Kazooie is gonna have those select visual distinctions the use of emotion in the face is pretty great for the time I'll give it that but the scary French man playing piano with laughing masks it's that was a decision as he plays it starts to get a bit weirder and a bit weirder and eventually it devolves into this hello at the end I guess it's like in Dr Stone when all the people Turn to Stone and yeah getting humans to work in CGI even by this point was an issue with this in mind I gotta bring up the Dire Straits Money for Nothing music video and I love it like it's it's not pushing too many it's not doing it's not too wacky but the CGI work I still think is phenomenal there's a lot of used space in which it has the limitations of basic Shader colors and tile floors and it works well that's what I'm trying to say sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish whether demos are trying to be stylized or realistic take one of my favorites 1985's chromosaurus look at it look at the dinosaurs Chrome dinosaurs I don't really see a texture on the ground but a few cracks here and there maybe that's a texture a few mountains look at those mountains and some clouds instant classic there's a consistency in the themes here there's a lot of rigid bodies shiny surfaces leaning into the 80s computer Zeitgeist of the era however some short films took a very different direction [Music] foreign [Music] look at this thing it it's great it's also it's kind of creepy I don't know I don't know exactly what's going on all the time Quest from 85 as well shows some Peak aesthetic with some new ideas we follow a thing that travels through things it has some nice water effects for the time and the world feels alive more complex than what we'd normally get [Music] foreign I really like this one it's got some good Reflections and refractions and things a lot of weird things 1986 saw the release of what may be the most single famous shorts of the early CGI era it's Luxo Jr there he is this Pixar classic receives such a good response at siggraph you reportedly couldn't hear the music or sound effects over all the cheering and yeah it's still great animation quality has a huge upgrade from Wally B the lighting and self Shadows revolutionary one thing that's always felt a bit weird to me is uh the background it's just nothing it doesn't exist the camera doesn't move either and both of these are technical limitations it would take too much time to render feels a little creepy right is that just me it's probably just me another Pixar short released around the same time as one of my favorites it's beach chair it has a chair and it touches water and it leaves it's 18 seconds long but look at that water it was around this point you could also find some more complex physics simulations going around another OSU demo from 87 shows off rigid body simulations and a black void on a plane one of the key aspects that makes computer animation of today possible is the automation of certain tasks calculating physics that look as realistic as possible you could do it by hand but if the computer does it hey it's going to save a lot of time I love these soccer balls here look they even bounce and I suppose this is a good time to explain why the checkerboards and black voids are so prevalent in all these demos a checkerboard gives depth more so than a basic colored surface and having a background is useless unless you just want to show the things that are right there why make it harder and longer to render just for this aesthetically pleasing nonsense the quality of ads was improving at an astounding rate around this time just two years after Brilliance we got this Hawaiian Punch ad [Music] thank you that music slaps even if it is just knock off Trent rezner but there's so much detail in some of these models far more than I'd expect it's also a lot longer than Brilliance the backgrounds are yeah and still kind of a black void over there but still whatever in 1987 we get my favorite Pixar short film volume visualization on image computer we get volume visualizations which in this case I guess means clouds fluffy good honest clouds that's what I'm talking about a lot of physics stuff around this point fabricated Rhythm a cloth demo was a cloth demo I mean it's not all that incredible on the surface the cloth yeah it looks like a good cloth but listen to this original soundtrack in original song set to go alongside what is let me remind you a tech demo of cloth physics [Music] rhythm is breaking my heart fabricated rhythms put your face [Music] is this video gonna get claimed now Stanley and Stella in breaking the ice is a fairly popular CGI short film it's set in a sphere it's got some weird Birds I don't like that bird there's the fish from Shark Tale I'm sorry those eyes ruin it for me it's all technical achievement aside just get rid of the human eyes on birds who do snoot and Muttley was such a trendsetter one of my favorite demos of this year is mental images intended to be an abstract short film which it is it's it's a little weird but it's got some atmospheric moments a sense of scale the lighting it's all good these Reflections at the end they're really good I mean really good and we have another Pixar short Red's dream I have some mixed feelings about this one as well I think the outside setting and lighting here is exceptional the reflections are amazing the LED dying the rain it's all great the lighting on the bikes here bothers me a bit but whatever it's a bit plasticky a lot of the lighting in this for the Whole Decade is a bit plasticky the real creepy part is when we get inside the dream of the unicycle and we find this rubbery-faced clown with the eyes of one Carl wieser clowns they don't work in CGI let's quit it with the clowns I'm assuming there was a lot of work going into the animations and soft body mesh of this guy because we're back into the black void in 1988 we would get the biggest Leap Forward in computer Graphics I present to you dinosaur stuff do [Music] many of the tech demos during this era still wouldn't have shadows usually it was to show off new physics or dynamic polygon movements but still I I would like Shadows the tree from 1988's natural phenomenon that's a good looking tree probably the best tree I've ever seen ever also in 1988 particle dream shows off some truly stunning and startling effects it's a bit weird it only gets weirder though with possibly the most terrifying CGI demo of the 1980s 1988's polygon it's just every nightmare rolled into one isn't it you got a void of a background simple lighting and this this thing for all the creepy stuff I gotta ask is this a post like the first post because it feels like it it's so far removed from everything else released in this time there's very obviously clipping issues and animation problems throughout foreign [Music] the same year we get another CGI work that spawned this lifelong fear of early CGI in me it's another Pixar shorts and a famous one at that tin toy on a technical level again very impressive but I hate it we aren't in a void anymore but it's a single empty room very liminal spaces here the textures are almost realistic but nothing looks quite real the worst part is that baby this is one of the most horrifying things I can imagine seeing in the 1980s or the 90s or ever I don't care about the technical accomplishments of this at this point it's just disturbing I've never been a fan of the short but it is possibly the best example of creepy 1980 CGI but I do like those background characters they look how I feel even as polygon counts increased realistic textures stretch across the floor it only makes things more off-putting we're past the shadowless worlds and Money for Nothing cartoonish humans as things look better in some ways they kind of look worse and I think part of this reason is lighting seeing the real world photons are emitted from a surface and they hit an object and they're either bounced off or absorbed almost everything you see reflects some light casting subtle colors on what aren't necessarily shiny surfaces in modern Computing you can take all this light and just calculate it with path tracing of what's that going to look like oh that looks great you can't do that here you can't do that for a long time so instead they have to approximate what we get is something that looks almost real but light doesn't work as it should it's like an uncanny valley but instead of measuring how human something looks it's how real does it look and this is close to reality but something important that element of lighting is off it's also why Lighting in shaded areas like under the couch look so flat that's why everything looks so flat there's no indirect lighting from other objects well to get away from some of this realism Let's uh let's look at Jab jablish and I don't like jab jab land Chris wedge of OSU the creator of this masterpiece had some other interesting shorts including balloon guy I gotta say I love those jiggly physics on display and the dog what a dog another unsettling work is The Little Death from 89. a lot wrong here for me first off the dog that's supposed to be a dog the landscape is devoid of Life the dancing figures short it's Locomotion it's just a train a moving train a moving train I like how the train squishes and squashes that's that's that's kind of fun I don't love the trees and grass textures but everything is so cartoony it gets a pass you know not all early CGI needs to instill fear in Your Heart Take This PD meets the dragon I mean just look at it it's a fun bouncy dinosaur and then he meets the dragon and then [Music] foreign was a demo showing off crowds and it does this well this weird void of a landscape the desert with Lakes it has scale it's just ominous the lighting on the blocks is very simplistic giving a pretty flat feel but the characters themselves they look pretty good I must say but yeah this demo is all about having a lot of characters on screen at once and look at those crowds don't touch me with a groundbreaking motion capture demo with a realistic human but remember this is still the late 80s so this is what it looks like Tipsy Turvy is a bit of a surprise you have these animated kettles and cups but they have soft bodies and jiggly physics and then it sneezes and it breaks that that looks that's a bit sad one of my personal favorites of all time is knick knack you might notice a trend in Pixar's choice of characters this time around it's plastic plastic is good at showing reflections of light without having to reflect much of the detail in the scene visually it's Peak early CGI the lighting is Flats objects don't seem to cast Shadows upon themselves but it works well in this particular aesthetic and the music never forget the music great particle effects awesome motion blur and while there's a certain Oddity in all of this I mean the room still feels pretty empty I still think it feels more fleshed out than Red's dream in Sunny Egypt look at him he's perfect if you've ever seen the short on the Finding Nemo DVD it was likely the censored version Can you spot the difference between the two I'm definitely biased towards this one I imagine this particular short spread fear in many a child because I know I found it off-putting and it probably was but by the 1990s CGI was starting to grow up but technology became more commercially viable more money was invested and seemed to have a compounding effect I mean just look at some of this early 90s CGI look how good it looks by 1993 we started seeing CGI on television but both with Veggie Tails and the incredible crash dummies I'm sure a lot of you have some heavy nostalgic feelings towards CGI in the 90s but it still can look a little creepy I think it's that flat lighting there is an acceptable level of quality though at some point this stuff looked fine enough it could be rendered fast enough and it could be justified in big Blockbuster films I take this 1994 Alias demo at siggraph of a moving hand man 20 years sure makes a difference in tandem transparency and lighting effects were catching up we're well past tin toy here while many of these things aren't photorealistic today you can at least see how somebody might perceive it as such in the 90s no you know what's common once Toy Story is released in 95 the CGI animation scene is never the same for decades prior there had been attempts to get a full-length CGI motion picture made but generally the amount of time it would take between making the film and rendering it it would all look outdated by the time it released which makes Toy Story interesting it's such a far leap above everything else we've seen and I'm sure to many it holds up well today and I might get a lot of for this but I think there's some elements that are off-putting to me now I never noticed it as a kid but looking at this 20 years since I've seen the film yeah it's it still kind of looks like early 90s CGI it doesn't have the issues of sitting in a void and the animations are great but there's certain elements that still bother me like take foliage look at the density of that grass creating different polygonal models for each blade was not gonna work so we have this displacement Shader and it looks almost real but not quite there's a lot of realistic Textures in this movie and it makes that baked lighting more apparent certain scenes have definitely aged better like inside Sid's room that looks great that window there it's a great window and the human models though yeah that's it's better than what tintoy had but no I'm not I'm not gonna on this that much for the technology of the time it's truly astonishing what was achieved here and CGI finally got the attention it deserved there's something unique about these early years of CGI something almost akin to liminal spaces very stylized very nostalgic and this sense that something might be off and I think that's part of the charm a lot of these demos they push the boundaries of CGI further than ever before and occasionally they went a bit too far [Music]

Channel: KnowledgeHusk

Views: 2,958,523

Keywords: early CGI, Computer Graphics Images, N64, Low poly, horror, lost media, 80s cgi, 90s cgi, 70s cgi, toy story, pixar, cgi before pixar, blender, 3d animation, 3d, ray tracing, global illumination, path tracing, creepy, weird, bizarre, animation, media, media history, knowledgehub, rasterized, graphics, retro, nostalgia, nostalgic, vaporwave, synthwave, liminal spaces, liminal, backrooms, psone, playstation

Id: XyGfxCxnZW0

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022