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From: evltube
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  • how they made 3D animal? one scene is droid is riding on it. it is unbelievable.

    1977 computer Could do it?

  • @zviaditemp I think that was from the 1990's special edition where they went back and cleaned things up and put new effects in, such as the one you just mentioned.

  • @Colbynfriends

    thanks :)

  • just wonder how long it probably took to make the real,edited,flying trough the trench version

  • In 1976, they did a lot with very little. In 2007, you did very little with a lot. Congratulations.

  • I'm wondering if it wouldn't have been easier to use a quality stencil cartoon, rather than creating a program on those PCs.

  • In space they have poor CGI

  • THE EFFECTS WERE CREATED BY INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC!

  • amazing. Thanks for sharing.

  • Time to bring those big knobs back, apple get on it.

  • lol @ all the sound effects they added in for this!

  • @obesehairydog well - its imrpoessive because it is 1970. But to be honets all ships CGI in I-III are awesome also.

  • So how was Dan O Bannon involved in this?

  • @threedotsdead he wasn't.

  • @burlearth He has a credit as computer animator...

  • The old star wars are more valuable in terms of special effects, back then it truly was an amazing achievement.

  • Amazing, Just. Amazing.

  • A 3D Death Star being rotated in real time, in 1977. Hands down, this is awesome even today. Larry Cuba rules!

  • @AkelA984

    Its SO DAMN COOL isn't it? Now we can do even better CGI on our home PCs!

  • @agfagaevart You mean, you can make a program coded in assembly which rotates the 3D death star in real time, on a 8 bit computer? Sure, we can do better CGI on our computers, but not on HIS computer. That's the point. Bypassing technological limitations is the key. To do the 2011 equailent of Larry Cuba's work, you need to make a rotating 3D death star model with a detail as high as the original in the movie, rendered in real time. I hope you could grasp a bit of the meaning of my words.

  • @AkelA984

    I see what you mean. you've got to have TALENT in order to do it!

    fair enough...

  • What we have seen here are effects groundbreaking for their day and very elaborate in their nature. The Special Editions of Star Wars have shat all over the efforts made individuals such as Larry Cuba in this documentary.

  • When you think about it, this is extremely high tech stuff for 1977.

  • This type of stuff was not advanced for the time. It was the advanced technology OF the time.

  • goddamn this shit is advanced for that time

  • Now this is CGI! 

  • In my opinion, this stuff pisses all over Avatrar

  • @cymrutube3 Amen, brother!

  • @cymrutube3 nop, avatar is another step in the cg industry, avatar is ahead of its time ;)

  • @warex3d Avatar was made using vue maya and other industry standard software. Someof them where tweaked a little. TheLord of thrings trilogy gave birth to the crowd simulator known as Massive and several other steps forward in terms of software.Avatar ended up providing a lot of charity to the raiforest so it`s not all badthough. The facial expressions on the blue monkeys where uncanny valley(fake looking)and it was bland even for a childrens movie.1/10stay away from battle angel Alita Cameron.

  • @yarloo you just did not know what you're saying. Sorry

  • Why isn't this on and of the DVD features? ;(

  • @CYMRUTUBE2 Yes, 5 years later. This was remarkable for 1977.

  • This is pretty amazing. I never understood why these computer graphics weren't updated during the re-release? They did all those other unnecessary changes but not these. Well, maybe it's a good thing. They would probably end up looking worse.

  • Anyone notice the dish is on the trench, not the northern hemisphere?

  • Can anyone give me a torrent to this software ;)

  • @joeyvanderkaay XD You can't get it. It was proprietary graphics software for a presumably 8-bit computer, coupled with a datapen or whatever the hell it's called. Would be nice though. Better-looking in my opinion than all the CG you see these days, Uncanny Valley all over the place. I'd rather have CG effects that were INTENDED to look surreal and computer-y instead of CG which was trying to replicate as much of a realistic scene as possible and just failed to suspend disbelief.

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  • very impressive

  • what is the computer they used?

  • would it be great if your pc has dials on it???lol

  • I liked the cgi from the last starfighter...

  • @CYMRUTUBE2

    I agree. Tron was way more advanced than this and really catapulted CGI as an integral part of movie into mainstream (although it took years for the movie industry to get it).

  • @McLarenMercedes

    you know starwars came out in '77 right?

  • @jetflock

    Yes, but the computer graphics in Star Wars were nothing they hadn't seen before at the time. Westworld (1973) and its sequal had roughly the same computer graphics even before Star Wars. There were other films, whose titles elude me at the moment.

    In 1982, pretty much nothing had changed for computer imaginery used in films, until Tron came around and really pushed the envelope.

    In '77 3D computer images did exist.

  • Damn that must have painstakingly hard and time consuming to do this back then. 3dmax makes things so easy in comparison. Excellent work however!

  • Your hard work paid off big time

  • oh wow computers were advanced more than I gave them credit for

  • @CYMRUTUBE2 5 years = 6-8 times faster computers

  • proto hammer editor

  • Wow! Wacom's Granddad was involved too.

  • that's just cool

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  • is that the apple II at 4:50

  • This is far more interesting than the cut-and-paste CG of today.

  • @lookbacktime Agreed!

  • I never wondered in 77 they had soft shadows active in the viewport, lol

  • Those dials are so goddamn cool! I wish I could try out a piece of machinery like that.

  • very impressive that a 1970 computer can do that, thanks for posting this awesome video

  • This is Very Cool!.............

  • Amazing What they were doing even in the 70's.

  • OMG in real time???

  • man how does he take hearing all those foreign co-workers fighting in the office, I keep hearing them in the background, I wish he would tell them to shut up 02:40

  • How much efford it took back then to animate such a simple 30 seconds clip. Its something done in one or two days today.

  • I've a little experience with messing around with modern day cgi programs, and let me tell you, maneuvering and handling objects in three dimensions and three axes of movement with only a mouse and a keyboard is a bitch, I would kill for some of those old school etch-a-sketch xyz-knobs

  • @Unclesamslair There's a company called 3dConnexion that does 3D mice. I have one, it's pretty fun and easy to use.

  • @Unclesamslair get a wacom

  • It's possible to put together such a setup yourself. If your 3D package supports MIDI input, all you need is a MIDI controller with rotary dials or sliders. It might take a bit of fancy scripting and tweaking to get it to function exactly as you'd like, but it's certainly possible.

  • pure genius. this led to the present films!

  • how far we've come!

  • Incredible, groundbreaking work Mr. Cuba. Amazing... and it still holds up today.

  • Larry Cuba. A true pioneer. Why the Dept of chemistry though? Because CGI wasn't taken seriously back then?

  • I noticed that the computer model of the Death Star shows the beam array dish astride the equator, rather than at the 45º position it actually is.

  • @cljohnston108 Interestingly the original concept drawings show the dish on the equator too!

  • How wrong you are...! U.S. Patent #2 455 992, 1947(!!): a computer game, designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. 1952: tic-tac-toe, by A.S. Douglas, 1958: Tennis for two, by Willy Higginbotham, 1961: 3 MIT students, Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen, created a videogame called Galactic War where 2 spaceships were shooting at each other. 1966: Chase Game, by Ralph Bear. 1972: Magnavox and Atari released their first home video games. Read your history books, pal !

  • amazing work back in 76/77...groundbreaking!

  • Don't forget Stanly Kubrick's computer displays in 2001: Space Odyssey, from almost a decade earlier.

  • They were not really CGI displays. They used cell animated drawings, matted into the film in post.

  • wow dude, i was not putting this down at all, i was actually worshipping this by saying, "THAT WAS AWESOME". I think the caps and the use of the word "awesome" explained that well enough, gosh!

  • THAT WAS AWESOME!!! I think it's amazing that the technology was around back in '77 to even make this!!! I wonder what was the first movie to use computer generated sequences...

  • @FirebirdDude

    when people think of the 70's, they don't think of good computer graphics, but then again the 60's had 2 moon landings and the 70s had 4, 3 had lunar rovers. technology evolves.

    PS: for those that think moon landings are fake, dont post that shit on me. WE REALLY WENT

  • @FirebirdDude

    According to the Wikipedia article called Timeline of CGI in film and television:

    Westworld 1973:

    First use of 2D computer animation in a significant entertainment feature film. The point of view of Yul Brynner's gunslinger was achieved with raster graphics.

    Futureworld 1976:

    First use of 3D computer graphics for animated hand and face. Used 2D digital compositing to materialize characters over a background.

  • @FirebirdDude

    The Andromeda Strain from 1971 (also based on a Michael Crichton novel) contains a sequence when we see a screen showing something that looks like CGI. But it was actually all handmade, and only looked as CGI.

  • Mind blowing! And painful to think a man spent hours spinning dials and entering code ect, when today modeling is so much quicker! Is this how they made the other graphics or was everything else physical models and stop motion filming?

  • Well, there was just one other scene that I remember that used computers. It's when Luke and Solo are in the Millenium Falcon fighting against some Imperial TIE Fighters. The "targeting computer" screen of the MF was CG'ed. Maybe the X-Wing fighters' was also? I'm not sure.

    The rest of the movie is all miniatures filmed against blue screen with the help of a (computer controlled) motion camera, matte paintings and such. Except for indoor and outdoor shots, of course.

    And lots of optical effects.

  • The first film is timeless. Even though I saw it at the time, it's still difficult to believe they could pull off something like that in 1977. These graphics still look impressive.

  • Larry Cuba's effort is impressive, especially when you consider the tools he had to work with. Anyone that touched Maya or a similar package probably shrieks in terror at the thought of having to input data all the time and use real analogue dials to rotate objects.

    State of the art back in '77 is stone age today.

  • slightly misleading with the title, star wars and early sfx movies had very little "cgi" and were mostly done using small live minature model work. still cool video. props.

  • How is this misleading? The whole video is about the computer graphics used in the first star wars movie, as the title says.

  • How is the title misleading? It cleary says making of the computer graphics for starwars. It in now way implies that the rest, or even majority of the special effects from the movie are cgi. You having a bad hair day or something?

  • Geez, how could he get any work done with those noisy Jawas next to his cube...:)

  • This should be on the DVDs

  • George does talk a bit about this on the Dvd commentary in detail. Praising Larry Cuba's early work.

  • @moviefact1 lol everyone knows that, perhaps one a starwars fan page is not the best place to say it.

  • Bravo... awsome

  • Haven't you seen the old SW films with the new cgi?

  • the z coordinates would be a bitch to enter for every fucking coordinate. wow :D

  • Really makes your realise how easy we have it with the digital world

  • Impressive. Real impressive. For such a short bit of footage in the movie a lot of work sure has been spent making it... and it actually looked a lot more interestingly made than the usual modern 3D models and animation.

  • I think the phrase you're looking for is "Most impressive".

  • ITS BEUTIFULL!!!

  • that is some epic silence when he shows the mostly finished version of the clip. Absolutely epic!

  • That's simply amazing, the amount of work which went into it.

    This guy had to understand programming (hard back then in languages such as assembly), mathematics, geometry, and above all he had to have the patience of 10 gurus to pull this off.

  • what a lot of work, but cool that this footage about it is still available

  • Too cool. There's some history, kiddies!

  • rotating dials?!

  • No doubt before the mouse was invented!

  • Not accurate...It was invented before this but didn't gain popularity until the 1990's

  • I find it very disturbing how the technology explained/demonstrated in this video is a lot more interesting than the sci-fi -tech in the movies D:

  • He screwed up. The Death Star weapon is located on the upper hemisphere, not along the equator.

  • You mean the Rebel Spies got the wrong information!

  • That's gotta be the most satisfying 10,000 manhours anyone's put into a movie since Cecil B. DeMille. Just the thought of entering those Z-coordinates by hand makes my jaw drop. Bravo!

  • ...and this is not on any of the DVD sets? WTF?!?

  • That would've taken hours of painstaking work to enter those models. Absolutely incredible. The knobs strike me as being potentially imprecise, though - when he's rotating the models to form the U-shape, he's not locking them to any particular angle, just placing them where they look good. I would think that would've cause alignment issues further on.

  • this was back when looking good, was good enough

  • right. If he had to actually surface the models, you'd see all sorts of gaps. Luckily it was all wireframe -- and no triangles required :)

  • Wow.. that is quite a lot of work. I could pull off the same thing today with google sketchup in a few hours.

  • No copyright date? I wonder if this was made in 1977 as well or if it was something made later.

  • Seeing as lucas holds the rights to star wars, the copyright is his not larry's. I twill be interesting to see if lucas has youtube take this down.

  • Seriously?? FUCK Lucas!

  • Blew My Mind!

  • just wait for the next "special edition" to find out.

  • That's amazing - and I complain about Maya and Max sometimes...top work!

  • I would assume that Jar Jar Binks would have been in 'a new hope' instead of episode 1 XD

  • This system looks much better than using a mouse with autodesk. i want some dials!

  • Is that Michael Phelps at 0:04, at the bottom right corner?

  • haha! Phelps is a time traveler!

  • lol true

  • awesome textures!

  • Wow! Computer work before the invention of the mouse looks like working with an overly complicated electronic etch-a-sketch. I'm glad this little gem has been uneathed. Thanks for posting it.

  • Very cool, you paved the way to Illustrator 88(vector-based), and the basis for all vector illustration. Cheers!

  • Amazing vídeo!

  • he would have cashed in and made 3 shitty movies.

  • What's amazing to me is that this looks like a slightly more advanced version of the kid software LOGO. I remember learning how to draw using an x, y, and z coordinate system on an Apple II in grade school in 1983 that was remarkably similar to this. The fact that it was less than a decade between something was the purview of scientists to grade school children is amazing to me.

    Thanks for sharing!

  • Interesting! Thanks for sharing :)

  • What a nightmare it was to use computers back then. But then again there was no such things as PCs.

    Actually im impressed that it was even possible to have a real time preview running while editing. I thought that it was almost strictly coding with text.

  • Great piece of history!

  • Wow the digital luxeries that we have today would make this extremely time consuming and difficult task childsplay. Amazing to see how things have progressed.

  • Great work Larry!

  • cool but labor intensive. good job!

  • From the speed of the rotation of the 3D building blocks I would assume that a vector graphics display is in use. However that would mean that it can draw only so many lines at one time. Which is why he draws each piece of perspective one after the other. Then the picture is composted together by using the longer exposure of the film. Very cool.

  • Actually I think I'm wrong because he says in the video that it draws all the pieces which takes 2 minutes then it exposes the film. The 2 minutes must be the calculation of the perspective for each piece. The calculations are made and then the X,Y coordinates are stored for display. Then all 4 pieces are displayed once calculations are finished.

  • I can only imagine the hours and hours of coding for that one scene! Nice!

    What kind of computer was that being made on, anyway? Was it a terminal to something larger? Vic something??

  • Don't lie. I can hear R2 rendering it in the background! NOT UoI computers!

  • lol

  • I'm glad I saw this video...

  • Wow. People usually don't understand how much time and care was needed to make these frames. In anything, the small details are always the most interesting and complex. It's amazing!

  • at 0:35 I thought he was going to say

    "a piece of film being reprojected on a screen by R2D2" :)

  • Heh, I was thinking the same thing. The timing was perfect. :)

  • Wow, i work with blender and other software, and this is very advanced for its time, especially the hardware that was running this. The responsiveness of the mesh is impressive.

  • I had 3 separate nerdgasms watching this...

  • Simply EPIC!!!!

  • Haha ! There you go,the first 3d studio ! Wat a boring job just for that! Great work! Star Wars Rules! Industrial light and magic ROCK ON DUDE!

  • People often forget how innovative the original trilogy was in terms of special FX for the time. This sequence looks painstaking as all hell, but is amzing for it's time.

  • amazing work, for his time!

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  • And to think their is over 8 hours of deleted scenes and behind the scenes content like this not widley available in DVD format!

  • really really interesting for it's time !

  • now these were times. Daamn. Really ahead of time here :)

  • this is cool... i like the "oh wow, 3D" attitude :)

  • oh, and the background SW sound FX and score are a nice touch as well.

  • Very interesting! I totally identify with pvx's remarks. ty eviltube

  • crysis is shit compared to this

  • WOW! ... Es como vectorizar xD