actually westworld had the first cg, well soem of the shots were altered a bit by a computer. But Tron is the first big screen full blown cg sequencies I know of.

Actually now that I think of it i'm not to sure if last star fighter was the way it was because of technoligy. If we look at the movie and think about it, I think we can say it looked the way it did because it was spose to be a video game. Thats how the starfighters were recurited. SOi the space sequences were a representation of the game in look and feel. Looking back on it i think it is all stylistic, which makes it all the more cooler. (Hollywood certainly had the skills to do the movie with models)

Interesting. I didn't know that.

That's not what I understood about the effects. It's been a little while since I watched the behind the scenes featurette, but I understood they were trying to be realistic (of course I could have misunderstood.) It sounded like they had the choice to use either traditional models or CGI for the effects. There was doubt it could be pulled off with CGI. Nobody had attempted to do it realistically before. But they ultimately received the go ahead for CGI. If you notice, a few CGI scenes come off almost realistic looking (the Starfighters parked underground, for instance). I believe the fact that many of the CGI shots had the look of video games was the simple reason that they lacked the computer power and time for more complex (and thus realistic) renderings.

A good many rendering technologies were invented for that movie. So it was pioneering for the field of computer grahics. I don't think there was any hope at the time that it could be called photorealistic, only before that movie they didn't even have the math available to approach the task of matching realistic lighting. It was also innovative in animation, laying the groundwork in flocking large numbers of ships.

How true. When someone figured out how to, say, insert two lights in a scene (something that could never be done before then) there would quite a lot of excitement. That kept happening over and over again as they progressively figured out how to do more and more. It was indeed a movie that pioneered many of the basics of CGI that we now take for granted.

They told a story about how they showed a space ship animation of a maneuver that was impossible with traditional effects to some Hollywood big shots, and nobody seemed the least bit excited. They failed to grasp how pioneering it was.