From Educational TV to Blockbuster Films, These ‘Sculptors’ Shaped Our World

“Mathematics can be as beautiful as sculpture,” Jim Blinn, a pioneer of computer graphics, once told graduating students at New York’s Parsons School of Design.

For Blinn and others in his field, mathematics is sculpture. Chipping away at equations and shaping chunks of computer code, they create the virtual images used in everything from NASA flight simulations to Hollywood movies.

Two of the industry’s best sculptors, Blinn and Tony DeRose, are being honored Wednesday in Los Angeles at Siggraph, the most important gathering of the year for graphics professionals.

Blinn, who works as a graphics fellow at Microsoft Corp., is to receive the Steven Anson Coons Award, a lifetime achievement prize for a man whose career in computer graphics spans three decades.

DeRose, who works at Pixar Animation Studios, has been selected for the 1999 Computer Graphics Achievement Award, for a technique he developed that was crucial to the lifelike animation in the movie “A Bug’s Life.”

The two men have taken different paths. One works for Bill Gates, the other for Steve Jobs. Blinn is best known for his work on educational programs aired on PBS, and DeRose is known for his role in creating blockbusters for Walt Disney Co. and Pixar.

Both men have spent their careers solving some of the field’s most nettlesome problems. And each is responsible for breakthroughs in the area of making surfaces in computer graphics look realistic, whether giving dinosaurs bumpy skin or clothing a nuanced texture that stretches and ripples like the real thing.

Of the two, Blinn is the more accomplished, and DeRose is the first to acknowledge that. “Blinn has next to god-like status,” DeRose said. “When he goes to Siggraph, he’s got groupies following him.”

That is partly because many computer graphics professionals today probably got much of their early inspiration and scientific instruction from Blinn, who has spent half his career teaching and developing educational films.

Blinn, 50, was responsible for the graphics that accompanied Carl Sagan’s PBS series on astronomy, “Cosmos.” He also worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he made animations that for millions of people provided their first glimpse--albeit a virtual one--of what space probes sent to Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus might encounter.

His proudest achievement, he said, is the computer animation he contributed to another PBS-aired series called “Mechanical Universe.” Blinn’s graphics illustrated everything from gravity to relativity and helped a generation of students understand the laws of physics.

“I have this urge to have people share my enthusiasms,” Blinn said. “Math and science are interesting and fun, but a lot of people don’t think so and I think that’s a shame. They’ve been turned off by not having things explained to them properly.”

Blinn has a fun-loving streak. He plays the trombone, and even appeared on an album by his tech-savvy musician friend, Todd Rundgren. On Blinn’s Web site, he lists “Amazon Women on the Moon” as one of his favorite movies and “McElligot’s Pool” by Dr. Seuss among the “really good books that have changed my life.”

But Blinn also has been at the forefront of serious computer graphics research since the mid-1970s when, as a graduate student at the University of Utah, he developed a technique that came to be known as “bump mapping.”

In essence, bump mapping allows animators to depict wrinkles on a dinosaur’s skin, weathered paint on the exterior of a house--the imperfections that are key to making computer-generated surfaces look real.

“It was much easier to draw a perfect circle with a computer,” said Bert Herzog, chairman of the Siggraph awards committee. “But Blinn provided a way for making an orange look like an orange.”

With the Coons award, Blinn becomes the first person to have won both Siggraph prizes. In 1983, he was the first person to receive the Computer Graphics Achievement Award, which this year is going to DeRose.

Like Blinn, DeRose has made major advances in improving the appearance of surfaces in computer-generated images. He is best known for a technique known as “subdivision surfaces,” a mathematical way of slicing off the hard edges that used to characterize computer graphics, and hiding the seams that separate the hundreds of graphical components of complex shapes such as a human face.

The technique was first used in an animated film called “Geri’s Game,” a Pixar project that depicted a white-haired man playing chess at a park. The realistic appearance of Geri’s skin, hair, suit and facial expressions set a new industry standard, and the film won an Oscar for best animated short in 1997.

The technical directors then working on the film that became “A Bug’s Life” were so impressed that they immediately adopted DeRose’s software breakthrough for their own project, said Ed Catmull, chief technology officer of Pixar.

DeRose, 41, studied physics as an undergraduate at UC Davis. But he switched to computer science when he entered graduate school at UC Berkeley because he saw a greater opportunity to make a mark.

“After 400 years of brilliant physicists, it’s really hard to do something original there,” DeRose said. “With computer science about 30 years old, the chances of me doing anything worth remembering seemed a lot greater.”

Blinn, Herzog and others said DeRose is well on his way.

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Times staff writer Greg Miller can be reached at [email protected].