COMPUTER - GENERATED THREE-DIMENSIONAL MOVIES
A. Michael Noll, Bell Telephone · 1965
Animated movies for educational presentations of scientific concepts are increasingly interesting a small but dedicated number of scientists, engineers, educators, and animators. The' value of animated movies for presenting complicated concepts has long been recognized. Now a new method for producing animated movies has been devised, and has led to the present renewed interest. Previously, animated movies were made a single frame at a time — a time-consuming and tedious process. Now, how ever, special photo-optic equipment under the control of a high-speed digital computer is being used to generate animated movies. For example, such computer-generated movies have been used at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to demonstrate the effects of different gyroscope constraints on an orbiting satellite.1 Also, an ingenious computer programming language has been devised for producing com puter movies.2 In a previous issue of Computers and Automation, I de scribed a computer technique for the production of threedimensional pictures.3 This technique utilized the same equipment that others had also been using to generate movies. Since a movie is essentially a series of related still pictures, the extension of my previous work to produce threedimensional movies was quite obvious. This extension is described in this article along with a few examples of some computer-generated three-dimensional movies.