THE ARTS: ARTSCENE RADIO TALK SHOW EPISODE 05, JUNE 13TH 2004 (transcript) ____ ____ ____ / //__ __ / //____ / //__ __ _) ___( (__) / (__) __/ (_ barium .---------------------/ \| / / _/ /--------------------. |_ /_ \ _/____/ _/__ _/ _| | \____________________\\_______\ //____\ \\______\____________________/ | | | | t h e A R T S | | . ___/ ___/ ___/ ___/ . | | : _____ ____/ // _ / //_ __________ / //__ _____ / //__ ____ : | | | ____\__ /__ / |_______ / __/_ / __/__ | | | |_ __\ ___ /__) ___ /______) ____/_______)____ /___ _| | | // \ | (_\ | / \ | \ | \\ | | // \| |/ \| \| \\ | | // \ / ' ' \\ | |// \ \ \\| |/ \______________\ \_________________| \| `-------------------------------\______________\------------------------------' The ARTS: The Artscene Radio Talk Show Hosted by RaD Man and Spinsane Episode 05 - Air Date: June 13th, 2004 (Lead-in music plays followed by the ARTS show ID.) RAD MAN: Welcome to episode 5 of the ARTS, the Artscene Radio Talk Show. I'm your host, RaD Man. SPINSANE: And this is the Tuscan Racer. RAD MAN: Today's date is Sunday, June 13th, 2004. For those of you joining us for the very first time, the ARTS is a variety talk show dedicated to the scene; including graphics, demos, tracking and all things in between. So, Spinsane! SPINSANE: Yes? RAD MAN: Welcome back! SPINSANE: Thanks, my brotha'! It's been a long couple weeks and I'm glad to see that you did an episode without me -- and Anthem, props to you because you did good job! RAD MAN: You weren't able to join us in episode 4... What happened? SPINSANE: Well, I've had a lot of things going on in my personal life. I've been committed to a loony bin basically, and I'm about to get medication! Until this all clears I'll be kind of "off the wall"-- RAD MAN: Well that should make for exciting radio! SPINSANE: Yeah, it should! It should be nuts... but... I'm not. I dunno, we'll see. We'll see what happens. RAD MAN: This is a special episode. We're all enjoying our choice beverages tonight. SPINSANE: Yeah, I'm drinking a couple Yuengling Lagers. RAD MAN: "Ying-ling" lagers. SPINSANE: That's correct. RAD MAN: I'm not familiar with that. SPINSANE: It's a local brewery in Tampa, Florida, from the Busch Gardens stable of stuff. Anheiser Busch I guess. RAD MAN: OK -- Every episode we make a point of saying that this isn't something that is regularly scheduled. We really want to drive that message home that we do this as often as we can, we enjoy putting this show together for everybody... Don't even know where I'm going with this but-- SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: If we could do this every day we would, but unfortunately time constraints won't permit that. In this show we have a couple things to discuss: We're going to have Legalize, the main organizer of the Pilgrimage demoparty as a guest on our show. There are many current events going on in the scene. There's some new magazines that have been coming out. SPINSANE: Oh damn. Really? All this information is new to me. Say more, say more! RAD MAN: Well, OK. Before I jump into the current events that we have to cover, I do have a couple emails... We have an email here from Spliff Monk. Basically the synopsis of this is that he really enjoys the show. He particularly enjoyed the interview that we had with Black Jack from Mimic and it really motivated him to get involved more heavily with ASCII art. SPINSANE: That's what I hear. I found Spliff Monk on #ASCII on EFnet or "eff net" as you said and I actually did some PabloDraw drawing with him. Thanks to The ARTS I guess we have more people trying to draw ASCII art which is just great. I enjoy it completely. Again, a lot of the channels where people who draw low resolution or text mode art on EFnet are #ANS, #ANSI (ANSI), #ASCII and it was great to see someone new come into the forum and attempt to draw with me. I really enjoyed it. It was cool. RAD MAN: Did you happen to catch what country Spliff Monk was originating from? SPINSANE: No, I didn't catch what country he was coming from, unfortunately. I'm going to assume the United States; he just seemed like he was from the United States. A lot of times people from Scandinavia or Northern Europe, where a lot of the other ASCII art people come from, have more of a back- ground in it. So I kind of felt like he was from the United States, but that's just a guestimate on my part. But I did draw with him and we completed a piece and I actually have a Spliff Monk ASCII piece coming out in Remorse 54 which should be released very soon. RAD MAN: Very cool. I didn't print off all of our emails that we received but I did print off one other from MadenMann of TAP. He just mentioned that he really enjoys our shows, he's listened to all of our episodes beginning from episode 1 and that he really appreciates the fact that usually we speak fairly clearly and he also mentioned that he really enjoys living in Europe and the fact that he is able to attend so many parties very easily. It looks like he is going to be attending half a dozen parties by the end of this year. SPINSANE: Yeah, I saw that email, you forwarded it to me, and he said he was going to attend like half a dozen -- like you said -- half a dozen demoparties in the near future and I think that's awesome that our radio show in English translates so well to people who English may not be the first language. RAD MAN: Right. SPINSANE: I guess I'm glad our English is solid enough for him to understand it because I know I will not understand Norwegian or another language if it is spoken to me. So-- RAD MAN: And that's why I asked if you happened to, by jointing with Spliff Monk if you happened to catch what country he is originating from because a large chunk of our listenership originates from the Russian Federation and Hungary and not surprisingly Germany but I was kind of surprised at Hungary. France is also fairly high up there. But the number one country right now for The ARTS, this isn't for the entire ACiD site, but for The ARTS in particular; Hungary is the leading non-English speaking country that's listening to our show. SPINSANE: You know what -- what's interesting about that is actually -- I don't know -- I know you're also a fan of the hacker radio internet shows and Binary Revolution also shows their statistics like once a month on their radio show and Hungary ends up being one of the major listeners to that as well. And, I know -- I obviously -- I don't know very much about Hungary but I do know that their scene in Hungary is very relevant to the rest of the scene if you know what I'm talking about. RAD MAN: Right. SPINSANE: [Spinsane fabricates a cough to emphasize his point.] Excuse me. Hungary is very important to the rest of the European / North American scene, and the world wide scene, so it's kind of interesting that they're all listening to our radio shows. I found that very fortunate. It's cool. Does that make any sense to you? Hungary, let me just say -- Hungary has "sites", if you will. RAD MAN: OK sure. I SEE -- I see the direction that you're going. SPINSANE: Yeah, OK. There you go. That's all I need to say. The routing is good. RAD MAN: Yes. You've opened up my eyes. Thank you. (laughs.) In the magazine news, a new issue of Grapevine Magazine has been released. Grapevine was originally a legendary Amiga diskmag which has since been revived and brought to the web. So when we say issue 2, I think that's referring to issue 2 on the web. As I understand they've put out probably 20 or 30 issues when they were doing the Amiga diskmag coded and so now they've moved on to the web-based magazine. SPINSANE: And what's their -- what's the URL for that? RAD MAN: The Grapevine issues can be found at WWW.ELLESDEE.ORG and that is spelled E-L-L-E-S-D-E-E dot O-R-G. So there you will find issues 1 and 2 for now and 3 is under way. SPINSANE: Yeah. RAD MAN: There was a very interesting article that I think anybody, even if you're not involved in the Amiga scene would find interesting and that is from Phoenix of Hornet. Phoenix of Hornet wrote an article regarding the upcoming MindCandy Volume 2-- SPINSANE: Oh yeah? RAD MAN: --which is on track to be released by the end of this year. SPINSANE: What exactly is MindCandy 2? RAD MAN: MindCandy Volume 2, well, as probably everybody knows, MindCandy Volume 1 was a compilation of some of the best oldschool and newschool demos on the IBM PC and to follow up with that they're going to be releasing volume 2 hopefully by the end of this year which is going to focus on the Amiga demos. I believe they've actually published a list of the demos that they're actually going to be featuring and they're looking to make contact with coders to get rights clearances to put certain demos that they want to have and the public wants to see on this release. SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: So definitely check this out, you can check it out with any web browser, and you can check out that article and you can see who they're looking to contact, and if you can help these folks out I'm sure that everybody will be pretty happy to see these particular demos featured on the DVD. Just as Phoenix said in his own article; now that MindCandy 1 has come out it has kind of invigorated the PC scene and it's kind of bringing awareness to the scene. It's making it easy enough that anybody with a DVD player and a projection screen and a sound system can just go anywhere and start showing demos without having to recreate the specific hardware requirements that were necessary at the time to view the demo properly. SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: And so now you can go to galleries and computer conferences and art shows and different types of shows and what have you and people can just show off MindCandy. And so that same effect will happen, I'm sure, with volume 2. SPINSANE: OK. RAD MAN: So what else is going on? There's some new releases in the ASCII scene or the textmode scene. SPINSANE: Yes, there have been quite a few since the last time we spoke. I don't think that ARTS episode 4 really touched on that subject. I do know that there's been a few releases since then. Mimic of course released their June pack. Actually, I think it was their May pack. RAD MAN: Right, it was a little bit -- released a little bit late. SPINSANE: Yeah, unfortunately it was -- like, Blackjack seemed to have caught The ARTS number 3 curse. Well, not the number 3 but the number 2, which he was featured in, curse and they were not able to release on time, which is rare for them. But that's OK because Mimic did release an ASCII pack. They did get a new member, Haliphax. RAD MAN: OK, yeah. Haliphax. SPINSANE: Yeah, Haliphax is good. He draws some oldschool style ASCII and he's actually trying to create his new magazine which is called Kitchen Sink. RAD MAN: Kitchen Sink -- now is that going to be a coded magazine or is that going to be a straight ASCII magazine? SPINSANE: I believe it is going to be a straight ASCII magazine. I don't have much information about it right now but I do have the URL if anyone is interested -- it's WWW.ODDBOY.SERVERPRO3.COM/ks/. RAD MAN: What kind of URL is that? SPINSANE: It's obviously one that he hosts himself and is trying to make stuff go with. It's-- RAD MAN: I'm checking it out right now and it looks like it is in fact going to be a coded magazine with variable font sets, so it's going to support Amiga fonts, PC fonts, and -- as well as EGA 80x43 and 80x50, 50-line mode fonts as well. SPINSANE: That should be coming out soon. RAD MAN: Very cool. SPINSANE: Another group that's making waves supposedly is Ricky Martin, who has emailed us previously on the show, he was also previously in Mimic and Remorse, which is my group and your group as well; he's formed his own group, PENIS. So they should be releasing soon. Let me check my notes here... 27 Inch, which is an ANSI group-- RAD MAN: Now wait. You just went from PENIS to 27 INCH? SPINSANE: Yeah, umm. Does that seem kind of... weird? Does it scare you? (Laugh.) I don't know. But 27 Inch is -- has been an ANSI group that has been around for four years now. They have only put out a few packs; they're not bi-monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly or anything, but they did just put out a new pack. They also have a new ASCII division in their group which is called SARS, as in the disease, which includes Knocturnal, Spear, I think Aesthetic released some. I was talking to them tonight about the new release of SARS. I guess SARS is going to be attempting to take over the ASCII scene from Mimic and Remorse but we'll see what happens-- RAD MAN: I know this sounds-- SPINSANE: Huh? Go ahead... RAD MAN: Well, I was saying -- I know it sounds kind of hypocritical coming from the guy who has an ASCII group that is a subsidiary of what was originally an ANSI group -- but at this point in time I really don't understand why an ANSI group needs to have an ASCII group subdivision or vice-versa because there are so many similarities and the difference is so negligible, it's so minimal. SPINSANE: Well I especially agree with you there RaD Man because especially with 27 Inch which isn't one of the bigger groups in the ANSI scene. Admittedly they do have some of the better artists. They do release a good pack; they do have most of the good artists, but they release it like once every 3 to 4 months, if not more. Where they get off doing an ASCII sub group? I don't understand at all. Especially since there are -- I mean not even just Mimic and Remorse; there is Impure, there is a couple of Russian ASCII groups that I can't remember the name off the top of my head. But it seems like a weird, kind of narcissistic thing to do. But whatever, I'm going to kick their ass. RAD MAN: OK, well I'm taking a look right now at 27 Inch pack number 7. It's pretty cool. I see one of the better ANSIs was, I believe, jointed in the last TNT pack, right? The one with Enzo, the Spiderman and-- SPINSANE: Tell you what. Let me go look at it. Which ANSI was it? RAD MAN: This is the one with Enzo and Aesthetic. SPINSANE: Was it the Spiderman one? RAD MAN: Yes. SPINSANE: OK, yeah. RAD MAN: Well, that's pretty much, I think, the best -- No no no. This is Sense and 27 Inch. I'm taking a look at it now... Is that right? Yeah. SPINSANE: It was, it was the Aesthetic and the Enzo piece. It was the one that Aesthetic got pissed off at you because you didn't recognize him for drawing it. RAD MAN: That's a great picture dude. SPINSANE: Yes, it is. RAD MAN: And then I'm also looking at another really killer piece here. What is this, 911? SPINSANE: I'm looking as well. OK, that's Avenging Angel -- 911. RAD MAN: The shading style really reminds me of Eerie. SPINSANE: It kind of reminds me of Iodine, but that's just me. RAD MAN: Iodine huh? You know, it's reminiscent of Eerie. It's not like directly Eerie but if Eerie were to try to do this style as far as the picture goes -- I mean he never was really much of a comic book ripper, but, man this is a really great-- SPINSANE: The picture looks like Eerie. RAD MAN: Exactly. SPINSANE: But the shading and the shaping and the coloring and stuff kind of reminds me of Iodine. What do I know, I'm an ASCII artist. RAD MAN: It's a great piece, regardless, right? SPINSANE: Yeah, it's good. It was a good pack. RAD MAN: In other news, Lord Scarlet, the coder of the Idle Dreams archive which is pretty much the only ANSI archive online that's very comprehensive; it has a search engine which you can search by file name or artist. It goes through and does keyword searches for any ANSI that's been released ever. SPINSANE: That's right! RAD MAN: It has the entire Dark Domain DVD integrated into its archives so it basically has, at your fingertips, ANSIs that go back to 1987 up until present day. And they've since moved over to SIXTEENCOLORS.NET. They're changing names -- they're changing their name and getting a face lift. SPINSANE: Yeah. I don't know why they're -- I don't know why he's switching the domain name but I give him props for it. I've checked it out and it's coming along nicely. If anyone wants to actually donate, you can do that at SIXTEENCOLORS.NET. It's spelled out, there's no numbers in that. He's really doing a very good job, especially since the Idle Dreams days. Seems like he's making the site much more searchable, et cetera. RAD MAN: Right. From what I understand, what he's looking to do -- the reason that there is now SIXTEENCOLORS.NET and formerly Idle Dreams is (that he) is he's looking to have some sort of a separation between Idle Dreams and SIXTEENCOLORS.NET, so that Sixteen Colors is the ANSI library, the ANSI archive and then Idle Dreams is more like a personal blog or some sort of a more or less a personal site for himself. SPINSANE: OK. I wasn't aware of that, so-- RAD MAN: And it looks like he's taken off the registration, forced registration. You remember when he first put it up you had to register your name? SPINSANE: Yeah, when he first put up the website you had to register to search for ANSI on it -- but he took that off recently. He still needs donations. I donated $5 to him. That was a long time ago but he's doing a good thing for the scene. RAD MAN: Right. Like we said, he's the ONLY site like this. He's running the only site of this kind for the ANSI scene and the ASCII scene. So if you appreciate this site and you have the means available to donate then absolutely help support this site and-- SPINSANE: I guess you're not running a site any more? RAD MAN: Not at this time. SPINSANE: Back in the day, there were like 3 or 4 sites that did this, but-- RAD MAN: Right. SPINSANE: --not exactly like this, like you couldn't search -- the difference between his site and ARTPACKS.ACID.ORG was in this one you can search for specific artists in specific years and stuff, and find packs, whereas ARTPACKS.ACID.ORG -- RAD MAN: You could only search by file name-- SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: --and this is a much more comprehensive search engine where you can just drill down to the artist -- SPINSANE: I hope he gets it working. OK RAD MAN: Yeah it's a great site. And there it is, if you go there you can just scroll right down and PayPal donate right away. SPINSANE: Right, right. RAD MAN: I'm getting a message from Legalize right now. SPINSANE: Oh yeah? RAD MAN: Yes, from Pilgrimage, and he wants us to add him in so we can go ahead and do that. SPINSANE: OK, let's do it. RAD MAN: Alright... There it is. (Phone rings...) RAD MAN: We have Legalize on the phone, he is the Pilgrimage organizer, he is organizing this years Pilgrimage demoparty which is taking place in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been organizing this for -- this is going to be the second year running. We were speaking earlier before he joined the show regarding some of the historical events that took place locally, in his own town, that are used today in present day demo coding; such as Gouraud shading and Phong shading and several other techniques that we see used today, in demos today. I was just wondering if you could explain some of the effects that you see today used in current day demos and how they -- where they got started. SPINSANE: Hey. Why don't you, yeah. Explain them and how they're um uh... relevant to the -- to the present... Like, you know. Those effects that RaD Man was talking about... What the fuck?! Fuck you! RAD MAN: (Laughs.) SPINSANE: Dude! You just pull out effects like "gerund shading" or whatever the fuck and it's like, no one knows what that is. RAD MAN: Everybody knows what that is that's listening to that part. SPINSANE: I know all the demo coders know what that is man. I'm talking to ASCII kids. OK, I'll shut my mouth. RAD MAN: No, you're right. You're right. LEGALIZE: Do you want me to explain it more? RAD MAN: Spinsane's absolutely right, not everybody knows what Gouraud shading is, so for the people who are perhaps in a scene that is not directly demo coding, maybe give a lay explanation and then expand from there. LEGALIZE: OK, so: Rendering 101. You start with a mathematical description of what it is you want to draw. RAD MAN AND SPINSANE: (Laughs.) LEGALIZE: Somehow you have to compute the light that is going to be shown on the screen. The simplest thing you can do is just give every surface a single color, but what you end up with is no shadows, no light effects. It's just a big blob that's say orange. So the next step up is you've got so-called "flat shading", where you look at the angle between the surface and the light -- if it's a flat surface we're talking just triangles here, right? So they're all just planar polygons, it's not anything too fancy. The flat shading, at least you can distinguish now the different sides of an object made out of triangles, but because it's flat it doesn't look very interesting -- it's all just -- everything looks like it's just carved out of plastic and it's just sitting there and there's no shadows, there's no subtle lighting or anything like that. So Henri Gouraud, who did his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in the early 70s, I think he got his in like maybe '73 or something. He said, "Well instead of just computing a single reflected light color for the entire triangle; what we'll do is we'll compute 3 reflected light colors at the 3 vertices of the triangle, and then for the interior of the triangle we will linearly interpolate between the 3 computed reflected intensities." That's Gouraud shading. It's just simple linear interpolation. It's not anything that fancy but it just brings an extra level of realism to plain, flat shading. Now Bui Tui Phong, who was here at the same time, also got his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, said "Hey we can go even better than that. Instead of computing 3 colors and then interpolating between those 3 colors, what we can do to get a more accurate representation of the reflect light off a curved surface like a sphere, is we can interpolate vectors between the 3 vertices and then compute the light between from their interpolated vectors." Now if you interpolate 3 colors, that's less work, per pixel, than it is to compute these interpolated vectors and then compute the light at each pixel from the interpolated vectors. So that's why Phong shading is more expensive than Gouraud shading, and Gouraud shading in turn is more expensive than flat shading because for flat shading you just compute one color for the entire triangle and it's just like floodsville. You don't have to do any more computation per pixel, it's computation per triangle. Now on top of all that stuff that was going on at the University of Utah in the early 70s, you had James Blinn getting his Ph.D. He was the first guy to do texture mapping, where you take an image and you interpolate along the triangle coordinates that index the image -- these are the texture coordinates -- so then you're -- you've got a few more numbers that you're interpolating across this triangle, and you use those numbers basically to do a table lookup into an image, and then that applies the texture onto the image. It's like taking wallpaper and wrapping it around an object. So he did that and then he said "Hey, you know, we can not only use these textures to look up color, but we can look up any parameter we want to map onto the surface of some kind of polygonal object." So we can use those texture maps, instead of them being textures, they can be surface normals. Now, a surface normal is a vector that is perpendicular to the surface of an object. So normally what you do is you just have surface normals at the vertices and then for the interior of the triangle you have to come up with some sort of mathematical approximation to figure out what the surface normal will be on the interior of the triangle. And you have to remember now -- you have to kind of visualize that the triangle really isn't the real object. The real object is some smoothly varying object like a sphere, or a Volkswagen, or something like that. It's not really made up out of triangles. The triangles are just what we do to model the object to approximate it. It's really some kind of smoothly varying thing. So the better you can come up with a representation mathematically that models that smoothness, then the more realistic you can make pictures of smooth objects. So Blinn came up with this idea saying "Yeah, you want smooth objects, but if you look at an orange... It's kind of a sphere, but it's not really a sphere because you've got all these small surface indentations on the skin of the orange." And he said "Hey, you know what we can do is we can take a sphere and then we can model that bumpiness on the surface of the skin by using what's called a normal map" where instead of looking up textures -- or looking up colors from a texture map you're looking up normals from a normal map. And so he did the first bump mapping. And he made some pictures of an orange and a strawberry, if I remember correctly. Those were the first two bump mapped objects that were ever rendered were some pieces of fruit. And along with those guys doing their stuff, there were other guys doing things that were important contributions at the same time. For instance, there is one thing that comes up when you start indexing textures and smacking images onto objects is that there is a big sampling problem in there; that how do you -- if you have an image that has a lot of fine detail in it -- if you don't do the right things, that fine detail ends up turning into all kinds of aliasing and moray patterns, in the final rendering. This guy Lance Williams, who was also here in the 70s, got his Ph.D., he wrote a great paper. Lance Williams, I've met him and talked with him, he now works for Disney Imagineering. He's not really like a hard core computer scientist or a hard core mathematician. So Lance wrote this paper on parametal parametrics. And this is the origin of mip-mapping. Mip-mapping is a rendering technique that combines textures with the necessary mathematical know-how so that when you magnify or compress a texture it doesn't result in all kinds of aliasing or moray artifacts or other kind of rendering artifacts that are undesirable. All of these techniques that I have mentioned: Gouraud shading, developed by Henri Gouraud; Phong shading, used by -- created by Bui Tui Phong; texture mapping, bump mapping, Jim Blinn also contributed a lighting model which is the mathematical model of how surfaces reflect light -- and most of the ones that we use in computer graphics are absolutely not based on physics, they're based on "what can we compute in the time that we have", they're approximations to reality. And there is a famous Jim Blinn quote that says that "The image doesn't have to be real, it has to look -- it has to look real." And that's the art of demo making right there! You've got real-time constraints, you've got to do things fast; you don't have time to go off and ray trace something forever and a day to make it look beautiful. You've got to do what you need to do in the time you need to do it and you've got no more time than that. It's the art of cheating the eye, making something that looks interesting without, you know, really -- when you decompose it under the covers it has to be simple because it has to be rendered so fast. But that's the art of computer graphics right there, man. It's just making an image that looks interesting or looks believable even though it's based on a pack of lies when it comes down to it. It's not computed from the-- SPINSANE: Right. LEGALIZE: --from the first rules of physics and you know, deriving all the whole light reflection stuff. There are people who do that, and there is a lot more of that coming into computer graphics as the hardware gets more powerful, but we still cheat all the time; we approximate stuff, we pretend that objects only consist of surfaces that face us and the ones that don't face us we don't draw them because that's just a waste of the computer's time to draw something that isn't visible. RAD MAN: It's a pretty bold claim to say that Salt Lake City, Utah is the birthplace of computer graphics -- but is Salt Lake City alone in this? Is it pretty much THE birthplace of the computer graphics scene, or are there other places that are developing similar technologies at the same time-- LEGALIZE: It's not like we're the -- it's not Salt Lake City or University of Utah -- it's really University of Utah -- it's not like the University of Utah is the only place that ever did anything of note-- RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: --but it is the place, man. RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: It's the place where everything came together. David Evans was recruited to form, to head up the Computer Science department at the University of Utah and he was specifically given the mission of saying "You need to do something that is world class that is going to bring recognition to the University of Utah." And he recruited Ivan Sutherland, who had gotten his Ph.D. at MIT, and had gotten his Ph.D. for a project called Sketchpad. Sketchpad was done in 1963, it was the first interactive computer graphics modeling system ever created. It is, you know, the core -- all of the ideas in Sketchpad are the core ideas that we still do today; we just do them with fancier computers that are more powerful, able to handle larger models. They don't have to be wire frame any more like Sketchpad was; they can be solid objects that we interactively manipulate. But all of the core ideas in every modeling package that exists in the world today originates in Sketchpad. And he was recruited to be a driving force at the department in the University of Utah. And with those two guys steering the show, they recruited all these people that became the graduate students that invented all the technology that we use today, at the core of it. Now it's not to say that after those guys went on to other things after the mid '70s or so, it's not like nobody else ever did anything significant. But if you just go back and look at the core papers of -- that are considered to be the seminal papers of computer graphics -- you will find that like 60 to 70 percent of them are coming from people who got their graduate degree at, you know, Ph.D.s, Masters Degree, at the University of Utah, late '60s early '70s, or they have some sort of connection to the University of Utah. RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: There are other places that have a significant role in computer in the development of computer graphics, New York Institute of Technology was one of them. But NYIT also had a strong connection to the University of Utah. NYIT's original work, where they were experimenting with the first renderings of color images with a frame buffer, where they were attempting to make a short film; that frame buffer was an Evans and Sutherland frame buffer, they were the first company to market a frame buffer ever. RAD MAN: For the people that are listening right now that don't necessarily understand what a frame buffer is, can you explain that? SPINSANE: Yes, please! LEGALIZE: So the vector displays were like an oscilloscope where you had an electron beam that was controlled in the X/Y plane; so you applied voltages and you deflected this electron beam and that was how you drew on the screen. But once your models get to a certain level of complexity, you get a lot of flicker on the screen because you can't draw the electron beam fast enough. So they created the frame buffer which is basically a big chunk of memory and you index the memory for the X/Y position of a particular pixel and you write in to the memory a number that represents the intensity. And initially they just had black and white intensities and the frame buffers were very low resolution. Every PC today has a frame buffer in the video card. RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: Everybody's got -- you know we're so used to bitmapped graphics now that everybody just kind of takes it for granted, but there was a time before anybody had frame buffers. So Evans and Sutherland had made a frame buffer; it was a gray scale frame buffer, I think the resolution 512 by 512. And it cost like fifteen-thousand dollars ($15,000.00 USD). And NYIT bought three of them and hooked them up to the red, green and blue channels of the CRT. And that's how they got the first color frame buffer. And it was, you know like -- something now that you can buy at a PC swap market for five bucks. You can buy a 2D-only video card with a frame buffer that has higher resolution than this thing. And this thing, we're talking it was like fifty-thousand dollars ($50,000.00 USD) and it had its own custom controller which was a mini computer -- I believe it was a PDP-8, or it could have been a PDP-11 -- it had its own dedicated computer that was assigned to the task of updating and refreshing the video display from this big memory bank. And you've got to remember these -- in those days you had only small density memory chips. So we're probably talking like, for a single frame buffer it was probably like six or eight cards in a rack and each of the cards was probably like, you know, the size of an old LP record. It was probably a big honking piece of a s-- of equipment when you had it all together. RAD MAN: (Laughs.) I was reading a little big about the history of the Utah teapot, which is pretty much one of the most famous models that is included as a default package in almost every 3D modeling, like 3D Studio, 3DS Max and everything like that-- LEGALIZE: You had mentioned modeling and modeling and rendering -- I had talked a little bit about rendering with all the different shading techniques. RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: And that's the, you know, one part of computer graphics, but the other part is modeling. You can't -- you can't have an interesting scene unless you have some interesting models in it. At the University of Utah there was just as much work done in modeling as there was done in rendering. The first parametrically based face model was done at the University of Utah for facial animation. And what I mean by "parametrically" is that they would have a slider that say went from zero to one and this controlled how much of the -- how much of the mouth was making a smile or a frown or something like that. So they could control the facial expression by manipulating parameters instead of having to go and individually move the vertices around manually. That was a major step forward. Procedural modeling; the first procedural modeling was done here. Procedural modeling -- manual modeling is very labor intensive; it takes a lot of time to get a 3D digitizer out, record the positions in space of all the points on the surface of an object in a fine enough detail in to be able to resolve the important features of that object. Procedural modeling is where you write a piece of code and the code generates the model directly from executing the code. Sort of the way PostScript renders a page by executing a bunch of code that as a side effect results in a printed page. So the first procedural modeling was done at the University of Utah, it was a procedurally modeled chess set. The first attempt to model smooth surfaces with so called "spline equations", that was also done -- a lot of that work was also done at the University of Utah. And the very first attempt at modeling real world objects, such as the Utah teapot, which Martin Newell also had sitting on his desk -- and he said, you know, "Hey this is just kind of a nice looking teapot, it's got a smoothly varying surface to it. It's not just like a cylinder with a handle stuck on it and a spout rammed on the end. It's got a nice aesthetic to it." And so he captured that aesthetic of the teapot into some spline patches; each patch representing like a kind of rectangular chunk of the teapot. And he joined all these patches together and that's the original teapot data set. In addition to that, Ivan Sutherland took his class out in the parking lot and they taped up his Volkswagen bug with a bunch of electrical tape I believe it was, and they marked out physical patches on his Volkswagen bug and then they recorded the positions of the different patches that covered the surface and produced a surface model of his Volkswagen. That model is also floating around on the internet, it's been around for a really long time. So there was a lot of work that went in to modeling as well as rendering. RAD MAN: At the time that this was being done, what was the clock speed of these computers and how were they generating these graphics? Were they generating them on screen, or through a plotter, or some other output device? LEGALIZE: Early on they probably were using vector based displays, as I was mentioning the first product of Evans and Sutherland was a product called the Line Drawing System 1 or the LDS1 which is kind of an in-joke for the people who live here because the Mormon church also goes by the name of the Church of the Latter Day Saints or LDS, right. RAD MAN: (Laugh.) Yeah. LEGALIZE: So it's kind of -- kind of funny that they named it the LDS1. And this was a line drawing system, it used a vector display; it had a display list where you described your object as a bunch of vectors and then you handed it off to the display processor and then it would traverse that display list and refresh the image periodically from that display list. So early work was done using these vector based displays and then once they started to get the first frame buffers in -- which pretty much coincided with the introduction of color, because it's just very difficult to get any kind significant color with a vector based display -- they started doing frame buffer renderings and then from there, you know, you can get an output, a hard copy -- most of the hard copy was obtained by taking photographs of the screen in a controlled environment with a professional photographer. The department had a full time professional photographer whose job it was was to record the output that people generated -- usually as still images, sometimes motion pictures; and these still images would be, you know, that had the frame printed up and then it would be literally glued into their thesis. RAD MAN: Wow. So that's old school screen capturing for you basically. LEGALIZE: Yeah. There was no -- I mean before you had a frame buffer, there wasn't anything you could actually capture as data. You had to take a picture of it or you had to print it out on a plotter by using a pen-based plotter. So people did that as well; in fact there was a guy, Ron Resch is his name, and he's more on the artist side of computer graphics rather than the technology side -- which is what I always find interesting about computer graphics is that it brings the artists and the technologists together in a common vocabulary, common goals, common desires -- Ron is more of an artist and he made the world's largest Ukrainian Easter Egg. It's about 70 feet in diameter and it's like 180 feet long and it's up in Canada, mounted on a pedestal. It's a polygonal surface and the surface triangles are different colors because you just anodize these aluminum plates with different anodization processes and you get different colors out of different shapes. And the reason I bring that up is that -- that the triangular panels themselves were actually manufactured on a modified plotter where they took the plotting pen and replaced it with a scoring instrument and they scored these sheets of anodized aluminum with the plotter by writing a program that would like trace the triangle out like over and over and over to score the metal and then they would manually break the trim off to get the remaining piece. And then they hauled all these up to a town in Canada, where there is a bunch of Ukrainian immigrants, and assembled it on site and they didn't even know -- they hadn't even ever tested, assembled it, you know, before they got there. So it was kind of a risky thing but-- RAD MAN: Right. LEGALIZE: --they pulled it all together. If you search the -- if you google for "World's Largest Ukrainian Easter Egg" you can find pictures of that. SPINSANE: (Laughs.) I'm going to get right on that. LEGALIZE: That might have been done like in '68 or something. That was done quite some time ago. Ron Resch is really an interesting character. SPINSANE: Cool! RAD MAN: Spinsane has had a couple beers tonight, so-- SPINSANE: What -- What do you mean? RAD MAN: The clanking of beer bottles! SPINSANE: Sorry! RAD MAN: It's alright man. SPINSANE: I was listening-- LEGALIZE: He had to make room to get to the keyboard so he could google for that. RAD MAN: Yeah! SPINSANE: I was googling for Pilgrimage the whole time. RAD MAN: So tickets for Pilgrimage 2004 will be going on sale tomorrow, June 14th, Monday. And pay for those via PayPal they'll be $20 per person, up until -- when is the early bird deadline for ticket sales? LEGALIZE: August 14th. RAD MAN: Legalize, thank you very much for being a part of the ARTS radio show. I appreciate you taking time out of your personal life to share this history of the computer graphics origins with us, it was very enlightening. LEGALIZE: My pleasure. RAD MAN: Have a good evening dude. Take care. LEGALIZE: OK, bye. (Legalize is disconnected from the call.) RAD MAN: Once again that was Legalize, organizer of the Pilgrimage demoparty, speaking in paragraph form on the history of 3D computer graphics. For more information on the Pilgrimage demoparty you can find that on their website at PILGRIMAGE.SCENE.ORG. ...Were they beer bottles? SPINSANE: No, they were Coke bottles. RAD MAN: Right... Right... SPINSANE: Yeah... Yeah... RAD MAN: So what else has been going on with you? You've taken a little vacation from the ARTS, what have you been doing, what else have you been up to? You're working on the Remorse 54 pack, or? SPINSANE: Yeah, I'm getting the Remorse 54 pack ready. Dealing with the ASCII/ANSI scene, which you don't have to deal with because you're "retired". RAD MAN: That's right, I'm quote-unquote "retired". SPINSANE: We got a new member in Remorse, Speed Devil fucking submitted 19 pieces, man. That's a lot, and I've got 10 or 11 myself, so-- RAD MAN: I just purchased my tickets to Finland, just recently, last Tuesday. SPINSANE: I heard this on the Remorse, uh -- well -- on some kind of anonymous email list and I asked you how much they cost, and? The verdict is? RAD MAN: The verdict was that I paid $1,100 -- actually I paid $1,143 per ticket, not including tax and whatever other fees that they include per ticket. What I learned from that is don't always take, you know the price you find on Orbitz and Priceline at face value. The reason that I purchased my tickets sooner rather than later was, as everybody knows, at least here in the U.S., gas prices have been skyrocketing, it's constantly on the news, it always happens every summer anyhow, but -- they're extraordinarily high right now, at least for us, and there has been rumor that this is going to -- if gas prices are rising for us then that is surely going to be impacting the cost of jet fuel and then that will filter down to us and affect the airfare prices, right. SPINSANE: Well yeah. I've been checking the business section of the local paper at work. I guess a lot of the airplane franchises are trying to raise the price of tickets because of the gasoline prices, but fortunately it doesn't seem like the other airplane companies have been raising the prices. RAD MAN: I've been monitoring the prices of the airline tickets for several months because I've been planning this event, we're going to have the ACiD Reunion there, the ACiD European Reunion there -- SPINSANE: In Finland, right? RAD MAN: Yes, so I've been monitoring prices actually for about two years. Just recently I was able to do specific pricing to the specific date that I have in mind. They've gone up a little bit, not too much, but the point that I was making was: don't take the cost that you are seeing on the discount brokers, such as Orbitz and Priceline, at face value because Priceline was quoting me something in order of like $1,500 and Orbitz was popping up with different varying prices. It just kind of depended on how I performed the search. Oddly enough, the more specific of a search that I would make, sometimes I would find a cheaper price than if I were to make a more generalized search for the same date. SPINSANE: Word. RAD MAN: Which, kind of, well that struck me as odd, but -- When I actually contacted the airline that I had in mind to fly on and asked them what kind of price they could provide me with, they also quoted me a high price in the -- she said "Please hold while I find the lowest fare for you" and she quoted me some price for $1,400. And I said, "You know, I am able to obtain this for a much lower price on Orbitz". And I gave her the flight numbers, and she wasn't able to book all of the flight numbers for me personally so we had to switch to some alternate airlines. When she did that, using some of the original flight numbers that I provided her with, we actually wound up with a flight that was lower than what was on Orbitz. SPINSANE: That's interesting. RAD MAN: That is very interesting. I find a couple things interesting about that. One is that you can't just take the person on the other phone, you can't just take their word that they're finding you the lowest fare because she is on the phone typing away for like five minutes PLUS, entering all my flight data and saying "Here is the lowest fare I can find for you" and then we're able to beat it by several hundred dollars. So-- (Background sounds of Spinsane clearing "Coke bottles" from his desk.) SPINSANE: How's is going for the Pilgrimage flight, is that-- RAD MAN: Pilgrimage airfare is very reasonable here because I'm on the West Coast. So you should be able to fly out of pretty much any airport for around two bills (~USD $200.00). SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: So it's not a problem. SPINSANE: But flying internationally is proving to be a little bit more of a problem? RAD MAN: It is much more pricey since I'm on the West Coast. If I was on the East Coast it would be substantially cheaper and if it was during an off peak month, unfortunately June, July, August are considered the peak travel months for Europe. I had a -- let's see. Just today actually I got to meet former ACiD member and musician, I believe he was, well he's in Chill right now, Chill Productions. In Tense, formerly known as Sonic. I mean really, personally, in my own personal opinion, second to JED, he is one of the best. Sonic is quite infamous for his renderings of Force Ten. He made several Force Ten ANSI animations. So anyways, I got to meet him today, we got to hang out and have a barbeque. He has recently moved out from Manhattan to the West Side. SPINSANE: Cool! RAD MAN: I'm glad to have him over here. SPINSANE: Oh shit! I know you're talking about your boys who are coming back and stuff, but -- other radio shows! RAD MAN: Definitely, other radio shows. SPINSANE: You wanted to talk about those. RAD MAN: Yeah, we're not alone in this. We may have mentioned this in a previous episode that we are not the only radio show out there. There is several other internet radio shows that are being broadcast all the time. Notably there is BinRev, Binary Revolution. What are some of the other radio shows that you find yourself listening to these days? SPINSANE: Well, my friend, like you this radio show started from me listening to other radio shows. The first one was Radio FreeK America-- RAD MAN: Right, RFA. SPINSANE: Yeah, which is gone. Which is dead. RAD MAN: They released what, a hundred or 99 episodes? SPINSANE: Ninety-nine. That was OLDSKOOLPHREAK.COM. School is spelled S-K-O-O-L. The other show I have been listening to recently that is pretty good -- I've been listening to a lot actually like Uberleeto, DTMF.ORG, you don't need us to find their links. But a show that has been good is Default Radio. That was hot. The most important show, we're just listing off shows that we both listen to at this point, but the most important one that I've listened to recently is the Afternow, Tales from the Afternow. RAD MAN: Tales from the Afternow, I haven't heard that yet but you've been talking a lot about it. SPINSANE: It's very good dude, you should really listen to it. RAD MAN: What kind of subjects does it focus on? SPINSANE: It's almost like -- all of these shows that we've discussed, including our show, all these shows we've discussed up until this point are reality shows basically where you talk about hacking, phreaking, logical stuff that happens. But the Afternow what it is, it's kind of like a cyberpunk/ liberal arts show. RAD MAN: Right. SPINSANE: You've read the book Neuromancer, have you not? RAD MAN: Right, of course. SPINSANE: It's kind of like Neuromancer but updated for the 21st century, because the technology in Neuromancer, which I read years ago, is kind of outdated. Basically it's like a Neuromancer that is written and read radio dramatic without all the problems in Neuromancer coming through. So it's basically like a real live version of a cyberpunk novel. RAD MAN: So it's a story telling radio show? I'm sorry-- SPINSANE: Yes it is. RAD MAN: So it's not necessarily like -- most of the other shows that we've previously mentioned are talk radio shows. SPINSANE: It's not like any of those and I wouldn't give it props if I didn't find it as important as I found it. RAD MAN: OK, so it's something you enjoy. I'll have to check it out. SPINSANE: Yep. RAD MAN: You've definitely been raving about it recently. All of the shows that we have mentioned, they can be downloaded at AUDIO.TEXTFILES.COM. Jason Scott hosts an archive of all of these shows that we have mentioned, as well as if you want to keep tabs on when these are coming out and make comments to the people who are hosting these shows you can go to the BinRev forums at WWW.BINREV.COM/forums/. SPINSANE: Yeah. RAD MAN: And they have, one of their areas, one of their message areas there is "Hack Radio/TV" and that's basically where people post notes about the latest episodes that are coming out and you can keep tabs on all of that-- SPINSANE: Yeah, they're good people. RAD MAN: I think that's all I have, we're running out of time here. We're going to close out the show with music by Mellow-D of Five Musicians. SPINSANE: I was waiting for that man. RAD MAN: Yes! From the Blur Green musicdisk. SPINSANE: Oh, I'm gonna' rave out! RAD MAN: Alright buddy. SPINSANE: Alright, peace. RAD MAN: Well have a good night. SPINSANE: Alright, you too. (Lead out music plays followed by the abbreviated ARTS station ID.) Speech transcribed to ASCII by Ghost Rider (a!p) on June 13th, 2004