How NASA Visualized Voyager, and Helped Revolutionize Cinema

And those animations would be some of the first attempts at realistic CGI, and very likely the most widespread from the era. The creator would spend some time at ILM getting the visual effects industry a real start in CGI for cinema.

If you're interested, there's a lot more on the subject and Jim Blinn has a website with his own presentations and even more articles on this subject and many more

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[I_am_ARTBOT]

Jim Blinn was my first CGI teacher at Art Center College of Design in 1985. I believe he was teaching at Cal Tech down the road and somehow ended up teaching CG to industrial design students! It was awesome and I loved every minute. We were using software Jim wrote on PC-AT's. It was manual point entry (like a spreadsheet) and was a far cry from today's 3D programs. Fast-forward 10 years and I'm in the computer games biz and attending Siggraph. Who do I see in the hallway but Jim Blinn! I had to stop him and tell him how much I loved his class and how I was now working at Lucasarts and how he was critical in sparking my interest in CGI. He lights up and says he and his wife love LEC's adventure games! It's a wonderful closed-loop memory for me. Good to see Jim is still going strong.

[nicholashylton]

As primitive as those graphics seem now, as a kid, they absolutely blew me away. It was immediately clear that NASA wanted to give you an accurate "over-the-shoulder" look at what Voyager was imaging. (I'm still getting the tingles as I did as a boy seeing it for the first time!)
Thanks Scott!!

[josephraffurty]

When people ask why we spend money on going to space, this is great example why. Innovations in science and our understanding of the universe ultimately come back to improve the public good.

[TheSpacecraftX]

I'm a game developer and find this really fascinating. This is all really fundamental stuff being pioneered here. Like seeing the how and why of the invention of each of the basic components of an internal combustion engine or the invention of the modern bicycle wheel.

[evildrganymede]

Those Voyager animations were a huge inspiration to me and not only got me interested in space as a kid but also got me into tinkering with 3D rendering with POVray (which also uses things like sphere and cone primitives rather than triangles, and I always wondered why later programs didn't do that). I even made my own Voyager model in POVray so I could do my own flybys (which took ages to make, and really makes you appreciate how complex that Voyager model is when they made it for the original animations!)

[vincei]

Props to Jim Blinn. I have all his CG books (one of them is signed!). A real unsung hero.

[davevann]

3:33 The PDP-11 shown was the first PDP-11 model than came standard with floating point instructions. On this model and all later models of PDP-11, floating point calculations were about as fast a integer calculations.

The PDP-11 did not have any of the program ROM that was mentioned in the video. The PDP-11 model at this point in the video was the first to have virtual memory, which allowed a separate 64K memory space for the operating system (kernel), and a 64K memory space for the user program (user), and a third 64K address space that was rarely used (supervisor), all in RAM.

A side note, the "++" and "--" operators in some modern computer languages such as C++, C#, and Java, came from the C language taking advantage of PDP-11 processor instructions having a pre and post increment snd decrement addressing modes.

In 1972, we used Tektronix monitors to make 3-D solar system fly-by videos. We used monitors with storage scope technology, where once something is written to the screen, it passively stayed on the screen until the entire screen was erased in a brief flash. No scrolling on this screen. After a frame was drawn, the computer would trigger a film camera to capture one film frame, then erase the screen in preparation for drawing the next frame. These film videos were used in planetarium presentations. We had even done realtime 3-D wireframe graphics on an earlier PDP-8 using scaled integer arithmetic.

[joshsusser]

I was lucky enough to get to take CS174 Intro to Computer Graphics from Jim Blinn when I was a freshman at Caltech in the 80s. It was mostly a course on matrix math and coordinate transformation matrices, and I still use what I learned there when I do web dev and have to scale and rotate things. Two things about Jim Blinn: One, he's an amazing teacher, maybe the best professor I ever had. And two, he's gigantically tall. When his shoe was untied, he'd put his foot on the top of his desk and bend down to tie it, like most people would put their foot on a chair.

[mickjones]

Jim Blinn is an absolute legend for anyone working in the field of CG..

[charleslord]

SIGGRAPH was the most cutting-edge conference around in the 70s and 80s. Even though i was a hardware design engineer and didn't directly work in computer graphics I attended every year just for the WOW effect. I got to know many of the key researchers in the field - brilliant thinkers!

[DiveTheseClips]

This just goes to show how long the Voyager spacecraft have been active.
The rendering technology progressed by many orders of magnitude since then, all the while the Voyagers themselves are still fine and working.

[MattMcIrvin]

Jim Blinn was one of my heroes as a kid and that interest probably helped lead to my current career in software (I got in through graphics, initially scientific visualization).
In the 1980s I had a summer job at NCAR producing visualization software for atmospheric scientists that was not far advanced beyond what Blinn had been doing for JPL. Initially I was working on VAX systems, producing output through Raster Technologies and Chromatics graphics hardware. Later we got some DEC MicroVaxen and graphics workstations, running on either VMS or Ultrix, and I moved to that. One of them actually had an Evans and Sutherland 3D accelerator card, the first one I'd ever encountered.
I then went to grad school in physics, but when it seemed like it was good time to get out of academic physics I drew on that NCAR experience to get my first programming job out of school. And I really owe it to a large degree to my fascination with the early efforts from Blinn and from Lucasfilm/Pixar, before they were making feature films.

[uhokthatmustbeit]

Scott, this video is a great help in sorting through the timeline of the evolution of the computer graphics of my youth! Thank you!

I was always a bit muddled at how Kubrick’s beautiful “2001” got ahead of everything else I was aware of…. The use of LITERAL Wire Frame Models makes much better sense within the timeline.

For what it’s worth, I would really enjoy seeing @CorridorCrew wrap their heads around these ORIGINAL technological evolutionary steps. Maybe even a @ScottManley and @CorridorCrew collaboration?!? (Especially since you have that recent experience technically advising on a movie production in 2021(?).

Either way, Thank you again for your content. 👏🏻👏🏻

[shankthebat]

An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. But the approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set off a chain reaction. The shaft is ray-shielded, so you'll have to use proton torpedoes.

[BeechSportBill]

Wow! In the Air Force, (1975 era) I used a PDP-11 mounted in a truck to run a program that tested the guidance system of the Titan II in the silo) over a 24 hour cycle.. The program was loaded from a punched tape reader on a Teletype machine after about 45 switch settings…. Results printed out on the teletype. Three years later, I had an Apple ][ with a floppy disk drive! ($3, 500) I loaded (and saved) PONG from the Big Red Book, using basic hand controllers. For only $145 I upgraded from 32 KB to the maximum 48kb ram. Seven years later…MACINTOSH!

[ICKY]

its amazing to see how much modern tech exists simply because we looked up at the stars and yearned to explore.

[DMLand]

It might be half a century later, but wireframe 3D graphics (especially green on black) still speak to me. Their limitations inspired the elimination of needless detail: the animations included only what was strictly necessary to tell the story. I kind of miss them.

[wilboersma]

As a kid, one of my favorite vides to watch was "The Planets: Epoch 2000 Narrated by Patrick Stewart"as the name suggests, it was narrated by Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard from Star Trek TNG), and showed NASA/USSR footage of the planets all while playing Isao Tomita's electronic version of Holst's "The Planets" I recognize almost al of these animations from that video, especially the "through the rings" shot and the view from Mimas' crater. It is really cool to see where they came from, thanks!

[allancopland]

Hi Scott. I'm a fellow 'Scot', from Paisley, not too far from your homeland. I'm old enough to have used several PDP-11's in anger. I also used the wonderful HP9845B with it's external 'mass memory' cartridge storage system. That HP9845B ran day and night, 24*7 for over 14 years in a production environment. One PDP-11 (running RSX-11M) was used for job tracking using VT100 terminals all over the factory and another one (running RTE-11) controlled our entire dye-house using "AREL AutoColor2 dyehouse controllers fitted to each dyeing machine. A PC (A 386 running Netware) collected telemetry (data from the machines connected to the PDP-11 and provided a paper trail of the dyehouse machine parameters. . The HP9845B? It ran Colour Physics software written in house, essentially electronic colour matching. A very very expensive Zeiss RFC-3 spectrophotometer, A Digico Computer (British made and had mag-core memory and a Boot ROM), an HP paper tape reader amd a FACIT 'comb' printer pretty much completed the setup. It all ended up going to a computer museum... still in working order. I remember we had a HALON fire-protection system. It wasn't for *my* protection but to protect their investment. Best job I ever had.

[zounds]

Some of those Voyager wireframes may predate the actual Voyager program. In the MLI video there's a shot at 9:16 that shows a Pluto flyby. The shots are also labeled 'JSP 76/77' which are launch opportunities for a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto mission, as far as I can piece together. The original Grand Tour plan from the 1960s was for four spacecraft, two to visit Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto, and two for Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune (JUN).