The Graphics Pipeline (again)

I've been thinking more about the graphics pipeline, which I wrote about here. Sometimes a picture is worth a bunch of words, so here's a simplified diagram that may explain the idea better:



The particular inspiration for my current thinking was a documentary, The Pixar Story, currently airing on Showtime. This hour-and-a-half film gives a good overview of the evolving technology of computer animation, as well as the histories of some of the major players. It's worth a look.

By the way, speaking of art and technology, the above diagram was drawn with a program called Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org). It reads a simple text file that describes your diagram, and then draws it automatically. For example, the text file for the above diagram was simply this:

digraph G {
 node [shape=box];
 edge [labeljust="l" arrowhead="empty"];
 "3D Computer\nModel" -> "2D Image" [label="Computer\nRendering"];
 "2D Image" -> "Final Image" [label="Retouching"];
 Imagination -> "2D Image" [label="Artist\nRendering"];
 "Real World" -> "2D Image" [label="Capture"];
 "Real World" -> Imagination [label="Perception"];
 "Real World" -> "3D Computer\nModel" [label="Scene/Motion\nCapture"];
 Imagination -> "3D Computer\nModel" [label="CAD"];
}