Teapots and Perlin and Trek 2, Oh My

March 26, 2022 3:16 PM

Vol Libre, by Loren Carpenter: "I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each."
posted by cortex (17 comments total)

Reminds me of 2001's trippy sequence.
posted by doctornemo at 3:30 PM on March 26, 2022

Aww, teapot.

(Should have replaced the apple in Tron.)
posted by clew at 3:38 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tangentially related, here's the story behind the "Identify for retina scan" scene: How this tech whiz became William Shatner’s eyeball double in ‘Star Trek II’ (WaPo, archive)
posted by peeedro at 3:39 PM on March 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Make sure you stay for the "fin".
posted by credulous at 3:45 PM on March 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

20-40 mins for each frame on a supercomputer.

How many of these could be generated on the fly in real time to input on an iphone?
How many in a BROWSER using an interpreted language on an iphone?

Ow never mind, 2006 called, 10,000 fold improvement in raw power, (1.2 seconds per frame) excluding algorithmic improvement/multicore stuff which probably gives you 1-2 orders of magnitude more...... Moore's law is a helluva thing.
posted by lalochezia at 3:53 PM on March 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, there is no profit in bodily confronting the compression of time from 40 years ago in computing to today. It's time that can be better contemplated as a steady iteration of ideas and ambitions, rather than orders of magnitude of flops: the way in which folks have, every year, said "what can we get away with" compositionally is much more grounded in human experience than what we could get out of transistor packing in CPU fabrication.

Part of what I find charming about this film is how relatable it as as a "doing what you can with what you've got" thing than it is as a tech demo per se. Teapot, mountain, flying around, shark joke: that's a throughline that carries us through decades of history in an understandable way. It might be a shitpost today instead of weeks-long render, but the human spirit's the same.
posted by cortex at 4:00 PM on March 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

See also Loren's Rescue on Fractalus for real-time 3d and fractals
posted by hexatron at 4:17 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

my college CS program's main lab for my first year courses had terminals to several 11/780s (this was the mid-80s). Fun place to play around with Unix!

Didn't know the systems ran so slow, only roughly equivalent to an Atari ST or Amiga . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:18 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for linking to the Genesis sequence from the film! Weirdly, perhaps I'd seen the CGI animation itself so many times, I found myself somehow obsessed with the practical-effects frame around the screen. All those unlabelled, obviously nonfunctional buttons, sliders, and switches. It feels like a modern generative art piece. Crazy.
posted by phooky at 4:59 PM on March 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

the 11/780 was classified as a "mini computer" back in those days ( a opposed to a mainframe ) . not considered a super computer.
posted by MikeHoegeman at 6:39 PM on March 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

That Genesis sequence and its time in the movie was formative for me in so many ways, it's like an entire chapter of my internal Bible.
posted by rhizome at 6:46 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ah, so cool, many feels. The first time I got into "trouble" in University was for hijacking a whole (unused) userlab of Sun3/50 machines to generate frames of animation in the 1 5 minute range. Interesting conversation with Security the next day to get my access back, mild slap on the wrist of "nice" vs "don't do that". Yeah, if you do things rightht, a room full of Amiga/Sun 68k machines was still slow, but fast compared to other options. Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature was on of my totally accidental (I solemnly affirm) library book thefts (I moved suddenly, it got mixed in). A bit later, but still fun times making pictures wise.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:59 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Feels like a bit of early 1990's PC demoscene, but with way more polys. I guess this is the kind of thing those guys were inspired by. Very cool.
posted by biogeo at 7:03 PM on March 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

By contrast, here was the Star Trek arcade game of the era--really somewhere between Asteroids and Battlezone in terms of graphics, but sufficiently diverting for a college freshman in need of distraction to get me the only award that I ever won for a high score (T-shirt).
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:02 PM on March 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

GENESIS?!? Genesis allowed is not! Is planet forbidden!
posted by blakewest at 4:59 AM on March 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

If I recall correctly the camera 'approach & fly through' was pre-computed (using an E&S Picture System?) but the fractal algorithm which created the planet surface rendered a mountain range that the camera then flew through. The mountain had to be manually air brushed out in the final composite. You can see it in the Genesis Planet sequence linked to above at the 33s mark.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:01 AM on March 27, 2022

How can you get a permit to do a damned illegal thing?
posted by credulous at 6:40 PM on March 27, 2022