Question: Who was the 1st person to design computer graphics and how are computer graphics made??

Ian Stephenson answered on 23 Jun 2014:

It’s really hard to say who really started it, as its such a gradual thing. People started doing experiments, which might not look much like computer graphics today, but which led to greater things.

The guys that are considered the pioneers of modern computer graphics, are guys like Ed Catmull (He founded Pixar, and is now boss at Disney, but he’s a REAL scientist – he invented loads of the techniques we use himself!), Jim Blinn, Loren Cook, Bill Reeves, Martin Newell (he invented the teapot! Teapots are everywhere in CG, and he created the Teapot model that everybody uses – watch out for it in films!).

How its done is a huge questions, but at the most basic there are a whole load of points, represented by three numbers (x, y and z). We make them into vectors (you might have used 2d (x,y) vectors at school, or maybe you will soon). We then move them around using Matrices (again you’ll probably cover them in maths if you haven’t already). That stuff is the core of CG.

We write software to let take all those points and matrices, and let artists move them around in usefull ways. First they’ll make the points into a model (a sculpture on the computer) and then that’s “rigged” where they put bones inside it. Then Animators move the bones, as if it was a puppet. Once all thats’ done everything is Rendered, where the 3D scene is turned into an image.