William Chops Westfield wrote:
> BTW, this is the sort of thing that led me to understand that I was
> NOT particularly cut out for a career in computer graphics.  It was
> 1977 or so, and I was in the "intro to graphics" class (a 1st year
> grad student class, open to undergrads, since it WAS "intro.")  The
> prof's "thing" was modeling the human body.  We had assorted guest
> speakers, one of whom was doing a competing body model based on a set
> of ellipsoids (our prof was using spheres. "Bubbleman"...)  It was
> cool; there were several dozen ellipsoids used to make up a body.
>
> Then he started talking about the way they were optimizing the
> equations to find the interections of ellipsoids, so you could tell
> whether the arms were trying to move through each other or not...
> Ouch!  (This was back when a reasonably fast computer was a couple
> MIPs, and that wasn't something that fit on your desk...)

Where was this and who was the professor?  This was pretty advanced for
1977.  That was a time when just getting raster graphics out of the computer
onto some form of hardcopy was a challange.

Jim Blinn's Blobby Man wasn't until mid 1980s if I recall correctly.


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