“Tron” The first full-scale CG movie in history, the long road to birth (Part 2)

MAGI's area of ​​responsibility

MAGI's part is the middle part of the story, where mecha such as the light cycle, electronic tank, and recognizer are the main characters.

MAGI is a company founded in 1966 by physicist and mathematician Philip Mittelmann. Here, he devised a rendering technique called the ray filing algorithm (*3), which applied radiation tracing technology to light rays. This differs from the scanline algorithm used by Triple Eye, as it calculates the intersection of the line of sight and the object pixel by pixel, resulting in the problem of long calculation times. However, MAGI chooses this algorithm because the solution is very beautiful.

However, it is unsuitable for handling wireframes and polygons, so we create primitives (basic shapes) such as spheres, ellipsoids, cylinders, cones, paraboloids, prisms, pyramids, and toruses using equations, and then use set theory to We adopted a method called CSG (Spatial Domain Construction Method) , which performs modeling by adding and subtracting using Boolean operations.

As early as 1972, he established a CG production company called MAGI/SynthaVision, and worked on commercials and scientific videos. He is also active in film, competing with Triple Eye in the competition for `` Close Encounters of the Third Kind '' (1977), and co-participating with the University of Utah Graduate School in `` Demon Seed '' (1977).

“Demon Seed” preview

However, there are limits to the shapes that can be expressed with CSG, and it was impossible to create complex mechanisms or organic forms. As a result, Syd Mead narrowed down the shape of the mecha by having MAGI reach a point where they thought it was possible. A typical example is the light cycle. The original Mead design was the idea that Tron(Bruce Boxleitner)'s body would transform and become a light cycle. However, it was impossible to create a human-like shape using CSG, so a method of expressing the transformation process using animation was chosen.

*3 In 1979, Turner Whitted of AT&T Bell Laboratories developed a "Ray tracing algorithm'', and this name is currently used.

MAGI and Disney collaboration

However, there was another problem that plagued MAGI. There is a shortage of human resources. Although the technical staff was greatly strengthened for this work, Bo Gehring, who had led the MAGI/SynthaVision team from its inception in the creative field, became independent. He was filled by Larry Ellin , and talented newcomers like Chris Wedge were also hired, but they lacked animation skills.

So Lisberger suggested asking Kreuer at Disney for help. In other words, his role is that of a choreographer, directly instructing the timing of movements such as light cycles.

But there were also problems with that method. MAGI is located in Elmsford, New York, and Disney Studios is in Burbank, California, so they can't travel frequently by plane. A dedicated network was established between the two companies to exchange low-resolution black and white images, and finally a high-resolution color image was sent using an acoustic coupler. Today, this problem can be easily solved using the Internet, but in this era, we had to start by building the infrastructure.

Responsible for digital effects