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Digital Arts
Established Date: Jan. 1, 1986
Deceased Date: Jan. 1, 1994
- All
- pioneer
- visual effects
- Animation
- Pioneer
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[ Details of start-up and end needed ]
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From 1986-1993 Phil Beffrey was co-founder and VP of R&D at Digital Arts, designing and leading development on some of the graphics industry's earliest successful commercial software tools sold by SGI and Digital Arts. Later he co-developed Pixar's Showplace product for the Apple Macintosh. Robert Beech ...? Bill Polson ...?
Early crew ... -
The first RenderMan-compliant renderer predated the RenderMan spec by a year. Digital Arts' entire package was called "DGS" for Digital Graphics System. The renderer itself didn't have any particular name. The first version, which used an A-buffer style architecture and did shadows with volumes, was first sold in 1986. It was then updated to a world space subdivision (Reyes style) algorithm using shadow maps. This second version was made RenderMan-compliant within months after the spec was published in 1987. It …
First Renderman compliant renderer -
Digital Arts DGS 3.0 ran on several different processors (T-800 transputers, 68040-based YARC cards, 386 and Weitek?) and split rendering among processors via buckets ... under DOS!
DGS specs -
Phil Beffrey -
Jim Hillin
Early crew ...
From 1986-1993 Phil Beffrey was co-founder and VP of R&D at Digital Arts, designing and leading development on some of the graphics industry's earliest successful commercial software tools sold by SGI and Digital Arts. Later he co-developed Pixar's Showplace product for the Apple Macintosh. Robert Beech ...? Bill Polson ...?
First Renderman compliant renderer
The first RenderMan-compliant renderer predated the RenderMan spec by a year. Digital Arts' entire package was called "DGS" for Digital Graphics System. The renderer itself didn't have any particular name. The first version, which used an A-buffer style architecture and did shadows with volumes, was first sold in 1986. It was then updated to a world space subdivision (Reyes style) algorithm using shadow maps. This second version was made RenderMan-compliant within months after the spec was published in 1987. It ran on several different processors (680xx, x86, T800 transputer) under DOS. On transputers, the DGS renderer parallelized nicely by splitting up rendering by the bucket. Because DGS was discontinued before the World Wide Web came into existence, there is little information online about this renderer other than two Usenet articles by Chris Williams.
DGS specs
Digital Arts DGS 3.0 ran on several different processors (T-800 transputers, 68040-based YARC cards, 386 and Weitek?) and split rendering among processors via buckets ... under DOS!
[ Details of start-up and end needed ]