Fiat Lux

Kriton Kyrimis kyrimis at alumni.princeton.edu
Tue Sep 20 12:36:56 CEST 2005


BOB:

> with those the crude graphics of the time.

Although that time's computer graphics may appear crude compared to today's 
standards, TRON's graphics were anything but the crude graphics *of the time*. 
Disney's animators used something like 9000 hours of computer time on a Cray 
XMP supercomputer, one of the fastest computers of the time, to produce 
relatively realistic images that had nothing in common with the jaggy, 
low-resolution, 16-color-at-best images that personal computers of the time 
could produce. I remember that my initial reaction to the film was that it did 
not look to me at all like it was computer-generated; I wanted to see jagged 
edges and individual pixels!

However, I feel that the biggest flaw of the movie was summarized by the 
professor teaching a computer graphics course that I took back in 1984 or so: 
they spent most of their budget on buying computer time, instead of a script!

	Kriton.
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"When do I get to meet some monsters?"
"Never, hopefully."
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