by Kevin Walker
1999

I always make notes at conferences, and always mean to write them up later, and never do, so this time, new powerbook in hand, I'm going to send out some notes from the field, in near real-time.

First course, first speaker: very inspritational. F. Kenton Musgrave, creator of Bryce. Despite some impenetrable fractal equations, a good talk because he showed lots of digital terrains, and more importantly, how they were created. He showed a proof-of-concept animation, a continuous fly in to Earth (or an Earth-like planet, with no visible vegetation) from far out, through the atmosphere, right down to the surface, with no aliasing, no texture-swapping, very smooth. He envisions a whole galaxy of places like this that you can visit. He's a true digital artist and hacker, and his experiments sometimes make it into products.

The course shows some of what the new film "The Story of Computer Graphics" skips over. I dare to say that this is more than mere simulation, since it uses real equations to model real physical processes. We can now make water, plants, terrain, gases that are indistinguishable from real.

About the movie: It's a shame they shot it in HD, since all they shot were talking heads. We all agreed that the film itself could have been much better, but the old computer graphics footage and the stories are priceless.