Computer Graphics

<body BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#1010A0"> <P ALIGN=CENTER> <IMG SRC=big_ball.jpg ALT="Glass Ball" width=276 height=165> </P> <H1 ALIGN=CENTER>Computer Graphics</H1> <hr width=90% size=2 noshade> <table align=center width=90%> <tr><td align=left><h2>History</h2></td></tr> <tr><td> <p align=justify> I first got interested in Computer Graphics way back in the early '80s, seeing the fantastic voyager fly-by simulations of Jim Blinn and the movie TRON. This was the first full length feature film composed almost entirely of computer generated images. The actors were still real and were composited in over the top of the computer generated action. Now, TRON seems very dated, but back then - though it was a commercial flop - it caused quite a stir.<br><br> I was further encouraged when I got my first PC - an Ohio Scientific C1P. This machine had a 6502 8-bit microprocessor running at 1MHz and 8kbytes of 500ns RAM. These statistics seem unbelievable now but it is amazing what programs you can write in BASIC with only 8k available. For instance, when my parents decided to put an extension on the house - 3 teenage children were rapidly overwhelming the existing resources - I thought it would be a neat idea to write a program that would draw my house as a 3D wire-frame image. The program would draw the house with and without the extension from any angle, any field of view with proper perspective. This was in 1982.<br><br> It would be a few years before I re-kindled my earlier interest in the subject. When at college, I went to an exhibition in the Natural History Museum in London. There I saw fantastic pictures of entirely natural looking swirls and vortices that were alegedly computer generated. At first, I simply could not understand how these beautiful works of art could be related to the flat-shaded blocky computer graphics I had encountered up to that point. This was my introduction to the Mandelbrot Set and the world of Fractals. It wasn't long before I was generating not only Mandelbrot Set images, but also Julia Sets and randomly generated landscapes with hills, valleys lakes and snow. I gave a lecture to the academic staff at Imperial College on Fractals and got the nick-name "Slatybartfast" after the character in the book <cite>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy</cite> who "<cite>designed the fiddly bits round Norway</cite>".<br><br> With all this background in Compter Graphics, it will come as no surprise to learn that when it came time to choose a final year project for my degree, I shunned the standard project list and came up with my own idea. I wanted to design and build a computer graphics accelerator card that would plug into an IBM PC and display 3D perspective mapped images in 'real-time'. Such things existed in the world of high end graphics workstations, but nothing existed that would alow a PC to generate such images. Don't forget, in those days, a PC had an 8-bit 8080 running at 6MHz. The thing that really made it work was the novel coupling of emerging Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology and 2D graphics drawing engines on a chip.<br><br> My 3D Graphics Engine consisted of a Texas Instruments TMS32010 DSP and a Hitachi HD63484 Advanced CRT Controller. It not only won the Electronics Engineering Department Prize for best individual project, it also won the National BRAHMA competion held by Texas Instruments, beating stiff competition from all the other major Universities in the UK. You can read an extract of the project report <a href=report.htm>here</a>. </p> </td></tr> </table> <hr width=50% size=2 noshade> <P ALIGN=CENTER> <A HREF=index.htm> <IMG SRC=small_back.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Back to index page" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=ganimede.htm> <IMG SRC=small_gan.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Ganimede page" width=57 height=60></A> <IMG SRC=grey_ball.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Computer Graphics page" width=57 height=60> <A HREF=ballooning.htm> <IMG SRC=small_bbac.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Hot Air Ballooning" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=quake.htm> <IMG SRC=small_q.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="QUAKE!" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=unreal.htm> <IMG SRC=small_unreal.gif align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Unreal" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=cat7.htm> <IMG SRC=small_7_logo.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="My dream car" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=mars.htm> <IMG SRC=small_mars.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="Mars page" width=57 height=60></A> <A HREF=profile.htm> <IMG SRC=small_prof.jpg align=center BORDER=0 ALT="About me" width=57 height=60></A> </P> <hr width=50% size=2 noshade> <P ALIGN=CENTER> &copy 2008 Wayne Young. All Rights Reserved. Maintenance of these pages is attempted by <A HREF=mailto:webmaster@ganimede.demon.co.uk><i>webmaster@ganimede.demon.co.uk</i> </A> </body>