Pursuit of Perfection
Evolution of Computer Graphics
"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" used new techniques for rendering photorealistic skin and hair, although bordering on uncanny valley and not doing well at the box office, this film advanced our capacity for rendering realistic human characters with revolutionary skin textures and hair dynamics (Moltenbrey).
2001
Pixar's "Monsters Inc." pushed the capabilities of rendering fur with physics interactions (Carlson).
"Shrek" won an Oscar for best animated feature for its large, detailed environments (Moltenbrey).
Golem is a computer generated character used in "Lord of the Rings 2: Twin Towers", that while not entirely convincing, does move realistically (Sevo). He was modeled in Maya (Moltenbrey).
2002
Dobby in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" was animated by 3D artists (Moltenbrey).
2003
"Polar Express" attempted realism with performances captured with a 360 degree capture system, but it falls into the uncanny valley (Moltenbrey).
2004
“Chicken Little” was Disney’s first fully CG film (Moltenbrey).
2005
"Happy Feet" attempted to create photorealistic penguins doing things they wouldn’t naturally do, dancing (Moltenbrey).
The giant ape in the "King Kong" remake, created by Weta Digital, pushed technical boundaries (Moltenbrey).
2006
nVidia released the (Computer Unified Device Architecture) Cuda core GPU which took advantage of multi-threaded processing techniques (“Computer History”). This has helped push graphics in real-time rendering applications like video games to new heights (“Computer History”).
Imageworks released “Beowulf” which dances at the edge of the uncanny valley by stylizing its characters slightly (Moltenbrey).
2007
Assassin’s Creed had groundbreaking character animations and environments (Moltenbrey).
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" had some the the most convincing CG of a human ever, but there were times that it fell short (Moltenbrey).
2008
Pixar tackled problems with cloth simulation in it's feature length film “Up” (Moltenbrey).
James Cameron’s long-awaited "Avatar" is released, it is a groundbreaking success and is hailed as the pinnacle of CG achievement (Moltenbrey).
2009
