Lasseter's primary role, as defended to Jobs by company founders Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, was to produce short films to promote the company's own Pixar Image Computers.

Many of the original CGL team now forms the elite of the CG and computer world with members going on to Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, Cisco, NVIDIA and others, including Pixar President Ed Catmull, Pixar co-founder and Microsoft Graphics Fellow Alvy Ray Smith, Pixar co-founder Ralph Guggenheim, Walt Disney Feature Animation Chief Scientist Lance Williams, Dreamworks Animator Hank Grebe, Netscape and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark ( James H. Clark ), Microsoft Graphics Fellow Jim Blinn, Thad Beier, Andrew Glassner and Tom Brigham.

In 1974, NYIT ’ s Computer Graphics Lab ( CGL ) was established and attracted the likes of: Pixar Animation Studios President Edwin Catmull and co-founder Alvy Ray Smith ; Walt Disney Feature Animation Chief Scientist Lance Joseph Williams ; Dreamworks animator Hank Grebe ; and Netscape and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark.

The newly independent company was headed by Dr. Edwin Catmull as President and Dr. Alvy Ray Smith as Executive Vice President.

The credits for the piece are concept / direction Alvy Ray Smith, animation John Lasseter, technical lead Bill Reeves, technical contributions by Tom Duff ( who designed the animation program called “ md ”, short for " motion doctor "), Eben Ostby, Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull, David Salesin, Tom Porter, and Sam Leffler, filming by David DiFrancesco, Tom Noggle, and Don Conway, and computer logistics by Craig Good.

The color is RGB, and may belong to any RGB color space, but an integral alpha value as invented by Catmull and Smith between 1971 and 1972 enables alpha blending and alpha compositing.

Eventually, they discerned, to their chagrin, the reason why the company was supporting the division: the real priority of Catmull and Smith was to make films.

Catmull and Smith justified its existence on the basis that more films at SIGGRAPH like André and Wally B. would promote the company's computers.

Apart from the film's hoped-for promotional value, Catmull and Smith rationalized the project as a test of " self-shadowing " in the rendering software-that is, the ability of objects to shed light and shadows on themselves.

There he also heard about the man he felt was the right man for the job, Ed Catmull.

Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field.

Another early step in the history of computer animation was the 1973 movie Westworld, a science-fiction film about a society in which robots live and work among humans, though the first use of 3D Wireframe imagery was in its sequel, Futureworld ( 1976 ), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke.

Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Dr Edwin Catmull in his Ph. D. thesis of 1974.

Edwin Earl Catmull was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

In 1972 Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry, an animated version of his left hand which was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie Futureworld, the science fiction sequel to the film Westworld and the first film to use 3D computer graphics.

In 1974, Catmull graduated again and was hired by a company called Applicon.

Catmull was the first to leave, and in 1979 he became the Vice President at the computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, part of this effort was to allow directors more creative control as collaborators on their projects and to give them the creative freedom to use traditional animation techniques — a reversal of former CEO Michael Eisner's decision that Disney would do only digital animation, which Catmull thought was the wrong idea of how Pixar's films did well.

In the 81st Academy Awards ( 2008, presented in February 2009 ), Catmull was awarded with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors " an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.

When the first computer animated feature was finally released in the form of Toy Story, Ed Catmull, one of the founding fathers of the NYIT ( New York Institute of Technology ) Computer Graphics Lab and other Lab alumni had become members of PIXAR's staff.

It was Pixar's first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left Industrial Light and Magic's computer division.

Catmull was determined that Pixar would have a film to show at its first SIGGRAPH as an independent company in August 1986.

Shortly after the film's release, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ed Catmull said the " princess " genre of films was taking a hiatus until, " someone has a fresh take on it … but we don't have any other musicals or fairytales lined up.

However in the Facebook page, Ed Catmull stated that this was just a rumor.

It was devised by Edwin Catmull and Jim Clark in 1978 as a generalization of bi-cubic uniform B-spline surfaces to arbitrary topology.

The arbitrary-looking barycenter formula was chosen by Catmull and Clark based on the aesthetic appearance of the resulting surfaces rather than on a mathematical derivation, although Catmull and Clark do go to great lengths to rigorously show that the method yields bicubic B-spline surfaces.

In his new position, Catmull formed a talented research group working with 2D animation, mostly focusing on tools who could assist the animators in their work.

Catmull and Lasseter worked around the clock, and Lasseter even took a sleeping bag into work and slept under his desk, ready to work early the next morning.

Catmull and Lasseter worked around the clock, and Lasseter even took a sleeping bag into work and slept under his desk, ready to work early the next morning.

Precursor work in texture mapping had been established by Edwin Catmull, with refinements for curved surfaces by James Blinn, in 1974.

Catmull saw Sutherland's computer drawing program Sketchpad and the new field of computer graphics in general as a major fundament in the future of animation, which combined his love for both technology and animation, and decided to be a part of the revolution from the beginning.

In 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Catmull with his first Academy Scientific and Technical Award " for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance.

She also acts as the primary contact for hero characters as Oracle in DC Universe Online, voiced by Katherine Catmull for the PC and the PlayStation 3.

* 1998: Jos Stam contributed a method for exact evaluation for Catmull – Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces under arbitrary parameter values.

In 2005, Edwin Catmull received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement together with

As part of the 73rd Scientific and Technical Academy Awards ceremony presentation on March 3, 2001, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ’ Board of Governors honored Ed Catmull, Loren Carpenter, and Rob Cook, with an Academy Award of Merit ( Oscar ) " for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar ’ s RenderMan.

That was not enough for Disney president Ed Catmull, who had called for an advisory committee of toon execs representing each studio to recommend rule changes to the ASIFA board.

Blinn pointed out that the earlier idea of unlit texture mapping proposed by Edwin Catmull was unrealistic for simulating rough surfaces.

ILM began creating computer-generated imagery when they hired Edwin Catmull from NYIT in 1979.

However, by November the same year he had been contacted by the founder of New York Institute of Technology, Alexander Schure, who offered him the position as the director of the new Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT, an offer Catmull couldn't refuse.

The limit surface of Catmull – Clark subdivision surfaces can also be evaluated directly, without any recursive refinement.