4 ms·

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting c

• currymj 1y ago
  Those came from Larry Cuba, who worked at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/05/23/blueprints-for-star-wars-death-star-were-created-at-uic/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/05/23/blueprints-for-sta...
  • sliken 1y ago
    Ah, yes, vector general. I think that was a bit earlier, but much slower. I think most of the footage was rendered a frame a time then a camera took a photo.
• sliken 1y ago
  I did use the screen a bit, it was connected to the unibus interface (which provides memory access) to read vector data straight out of the PDP-11's memory. One oddity of the vector screen is that if you drew long diagonal lines from A to B then B to A they wouldn't overlap perfectly, I believe the earth's magnetic field made a small difference. My memory of the original star wars was that the schematic and targeting computer was pretty crude. The graphics wonder/GDP/2A Graphics Display processor display was accurate enough for quite small fonts. The fonts did look vectorized, and I believe the end points of each line were slightly brighter. The tube display was very deep to allow the magnetic fields to have high slew rates. I'll have to take a look again at star wars to double check, but I don't think so based on memory.