‘Spawn’ of a New Era : How Do They Make It so Real? With Help From Pasadena Firm
There is a scene in “Star Trek: First Contact” that begins inside Capt. Jean Luc Picard’s right pupil, then in one dramatic zoom-out, reveals him standing on a metal girder inside the menacing Borg and continues the pullback to show layer upon layer of the mammoth machine’s intricate but powerful structure.
The scene--par for the course in science-fiction films--is a fantastically designed ruse, a visual trick done with three-dimensional computer graphics intended to make moviegoers believe the Borg really exists and they’ve had a peek inside.
The software that produced those magical effects--and effects in this summer’s sci-fi thrillers “Spawn” and “Event Horizon”--is called an animation rendering engine. Digital artists use it to breathe life into 3-D objects, painting on surface textures and moving them around in a way that looks real, or at least really cool. One of the most popular 3-D renderers for Macintosh computers--still the machine of choice in the digital effects business--comes from Electric Image Inc., a Pasadena company founded 10 years ago by former visual effects artist Jay Roth, 36, and computer graphics programmers Mark Granger, 33, and Markus Houy, 32.
Electric Image’s claim to fame is its program, ElectricImage Animation. When introduced six years ago, it became an instant hit with digital effects specialists, helping the company grab a sizable market share and grow to 40 employees. The privately held business doesn’t disclose earnings or revenue, but Roth, the president and chief executive of Electric Image, said the firm is profitable.
Name a recent sci-fi flick and chances are the $7,500 Electric Image Animation program was used to create preliminary drafts of the special effects and to animate objects or scenes in the finished product, title sequences or trailers. In addition to movies, less-expensive ElectricImage Broadcast software is used for animation in multimedia CD-ROMs, video games, TV title sequences, commercials and simulation rides at amusement parks.
The list of Electric Image software users reads like a Who’s Who of the digital effects industry, including Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks SKG, Illusion Arts, digital artists Jim Lutdke and Peter Mitchell Rubin, and Banned From the Ranch, a Santa Monica effects shop that has done work for “Twister,” “Congo,” “Dante’s Peak” and the newly released “Spawn.”
In addition to being one of the first movie-quality 3-D rendering programs to work on standard-issue Macs, ElectricImage Animation performs the behind-the-scenes number-crunching that digital animation is based on faster than any rival, according to artists who use it.
“It’s the king on the Mac,” said Rubin, a Los Angeles digital illustrator.
But sticking to its Mac-only roots has turned from a positive to a negative for Electric Image as Macintosh creator Apple Computer Inc. loses market and mind share, and as more digital effects specialists work on Windows NT, Unix and other platforms. In the last year, competitors such as Lightwave, which formerly sold animation software only for PCs, began courting Electric Image’s Mac users.
To keep up, Electric Image will soon begin shipping versions of its Animation and Broadcast software for NT and Silicon Graphics workstations. “You have to go where the food is,” Roth said. “We’ve become hardware-agnostic.”
At this week’s Siggraph computer graphics convention in Los Angeles, Electric Image will unveil 3-D modeling software that plugs into its rendering engines, an upgrade some customers will receive for free. Competitors already include modeling software in their animation programs, but until now Electric Image hasn’t, something customers have cited as one of the programs’ chief deficiencies. Also at Siggraph, Electric Image will unveil a program for lighting 3-D objects called Radiosity Renderer, which it says makes computer-generated scenes and figures look more realistic.
“In the past year they were really taking a hit from Lightwave, and they’ve been forced to start addressing their disadvantages,” said Erich Ippen, creative operations manager for Banned From the Ranch.
Roth expects the new products to quadruple Electric Image’s sales.
Roth got his first job, at 19, at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, where he learned the old way of doing special effects by dangling miniatures in front of a camera and painting scenes on glass. Then he struck out on his own as an independent visual effects artist. Along the way he hooked up with Granger and Houy, two Cal Poly Pomona grads and computer graphics programmers, and the three formed a 3-D animation production studio.
They quickly discovered, however, that people were more interested in the software they’d created than in hiring them for production work. So they changed course and spent four lean years perfecting what was to become ElectricImage Animation, released in 1991.
