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Pixar Studio Pioneers Received Turing Award and $ 1 Million

Ed Catmool and Pat Hanrahan created computer technology that breathed new life into animation, special effects, virtual reality and artificial intelligence



Ed Catmool and Pat Hanrahan made a huge contribution to the development of computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology.

In the 1980s, Pat Hanrahan was a young student studying biophysics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when he decided to abandon his work with microscopic insects. and join a small group of computer scientists who set out to make a movie.

The team was led by Ed Catmool, a computer graphics pioneer who became CTO of the new Pixar company. The film they decided to make was called Toy Story. It was released in 1995, and became a milestone in the development of animated films.

In March 2020, the Association of Computer Engineering, the oldest and largest international organization in the computer field, has promised to award Hanrahan and Catmool this year with a Turing Prize for their work on 3D computer graphics. This award, often called the Nobel Prize in Computer Science, is accompanied by a cash prize of $ 1 million, which the two CGI pioneers will share.

Their work has changed not only animated films, but also Hollywood special effects, video games and virtual reality.

“Both Pat and Ed have had a profound impact on several industries, both in their technical knowledge and leadership skills,” said David Price, author of Pixar Touch: Building a Company . “Many of the fundamental techniques of three-dimensional computer graphics came about thanks to Ed or his subordinates.”

At the very beginning, young researchers hoped to make a full-length film, the frames of which will be completely created by a computer. Hanrahan did not believe in the feasibility of this goal, but considered that nothing prevents them from even starting.

“I did not think that this would be possible even during my lifetime, but I could spend my whole life working on it,” Hanrahan, who turned 64 years old, said in an interview.

Having joined Pixar in 1986, he began to control the development of the RenderMan software package, which was based on ten years of work by Catmool and others. RenderMan played a key role in the production of Toy Story and many other Pixar films in which the quality of realistic three-dimensional animation is constantly improving. However, the influence of the system went far beyond characters such as Woody or Buzz Lightyear.

In the late 1980s, Hanrahan and Pixar colleagues began selling RenderMan licenses to other companies. They also released RenderMan Shading, a programming language that allowed everyone to change this technology. As a result, technology began to develop much faster.


Computer researchers found the animation in the movie Toy Story revolutionary

even before the release of Toy Story RenderMan was used to create special effects for such influential films as Terminator 2: Judgment Day by James Cameron and Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg. Later, the system participated in the creation of films such as Avatar, Titanic, and The Lord of the Rings.

In the early 1970s, Catmool was a graduate student at the University of Utah, and was headed by one of the founding fathers of computer graphics.Ivan Sutherland . Moving to the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island, and later to Lucasfilm (a Northern California film company that shot Star Wars), he brought along academic responsibility, and encouraged his engineers to share their findings with a wide community of researchers.

“I really enjoyed it in Utah,” said Catmool, who turned 74, in an interview. “I wanted to take many familiar principles with me to apply them in a new place.”

A similar approach has been preserved in Pixar. The company was owned by Steve Jobs, whose obsession with secrecy within the company became known to the world after he created another company, Apple. But despite this, Pixar engineers, including Hanrahan, regularly published scientific papers detailing their activities.

“Almost every project was owned by a community or computer scientist,” said Michael Rubin, author of Droid Creator: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution . “RenderMan was not a product made at Pixar or for Pixar. He belonged to the whole community. ”

All this accelerated the development of programs and equipment, in particular, specialized computer chips required to create three-dimensional images. These graphic processors, GPUs, allowed the development of computer games, the number of which increased significantly in the 1990s and 2000s. Later, they played a major role in the development of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Some of these technologies formed the basis of robomobiles, face recognition systems and talking digital assistants such as Alexa.

A lot of this was made possible thanks to the emergence of new programming languages ​​that allowed everyone to create new programs for these chips - languages ​​similar to the one that underlies RenderMan. The origins of these languages ​​also lead to Hanrahan. Leaving Pixar in 1989, he continued his studies as a professor at Princeton and Stanford, where he and students helped develop these languages.

As a result, Catmool became president of Pixar, and after the Walt Disney Company bought it in 2006, he helped to breathe new life into the animation of the studio, which has existed for nearly 80 years.

“No one has ever had such a deep and extensive impact on computer graphics as Ed Catmool,” said Rubin.

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