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Alias Research Inc.
Established Date: Jan. 1, 1983
- All
- Alias
- McGrath & Associates
- Changing Images Productions
- Graphic Resource Group
- Joytec Technigen
- animation
- Canadian
- software engineer
- rendering
- France
- TDI
- pioneer
- software
- compositing
-
Alias Research Inc., of Toronto, Canada was founded in 1983 by Stephen Bingham, Susan McKenna, David Springer, and Nigel McGrath with the goal of creating software for computer animation for film and video production. The four principals were soon joined by employees five and six: Will Anielewicz (recently ex of Omnibus and currently at ILM) and Mike Sweeney on software development.
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The first office was in an elevator shaft and rent was $150/month in the always-under-construction "Much Music" building, Canada's version of MTV.
First Alias office space? -
The name 'Alias' was arrived at during a brainstorming session when Susan McKenna said: "What we need is an alias for the company"
The name "Alias"? -
Stephen was a television producer, a director for the National Film Theatre of Canada, and an advisor to the government on the use of computer graphics for the visual display of quantitative data. Susan worked as an independent producer in the industrial video and film area and had some experience in fund raising in the industry. Nigel ran a local business, McGrath & Associates that specialized in computer graphic slide production. David was head of the CG lab at Sheridan …
The founders -
A little known fact: The name of the Alias image viewing utility 'wrl' came about when Will Anielewicz added to the existing code of 'rl' and wanted to change its name; hence the self initialed w(ill)rl utility name we all know and love today. Will developed his skills in obscurity at Omnibus. One of his dozen-or-so variants of an extrusion program was called newtube, and its help info went approximately as follows: newtube2: useage: file x y z xbang ybang …
wrl -
Raycasting (as Alias called it) is the casting of 2.5D rays into 2.5D buckets of triangles. We call the rays (and geometry) 2.5D because they are in the projected screen space of the image, so they are 2D, but they still have a bit of Z depth information which we can use to generate a real 3D intersection point. Alias Raycasting is like ray tracing in that we can compute volume intersections (fog, particles, glows, et. al.) with the speed …
The Alias Renderer -
Alias research actually had it's beginnings as a TV show concept. I was working with Cross Core Communications in Toronto, where I met Sue McKenna. Her friend Steve Bingham was looking to develop a TV series on interesting statistics, - sort of a believe-it-or-not using the Entertainment Tonight show format, and requiring a great deal of CGI. Sue invited me to meet with Steve in order to help storyboard ideas, and to provide some advice on the use of CGI …
Matchmaking -
Jack Picknell -
Gary Mundell -
Will Anielewicz
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Andrew Pearce
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Thomson Digital Image ( TDI ) -
Alain Chesnais
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Steve "Spaz" Williams
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Fusion
First Alias office space?
The first office was in an elevator shaft and rent was $150/month in the always-under-construction "Much Music" building, Canada's version of MTV.
The name "Alias"?
The name 'Alias' was arrived at during a brainstorming session when Susan McKenna said: "What we need is an alias for the company"
The founders
Stephen was a television producer, a director for the National Film Theatre of Canada, and an advisor to the government on the use of computer graphics for the visual display of quantitative data. Susan worked as an independent producer in the industrial video and film area and had some experience in fund raising in the industry. Nigel ran a local business, McGrath & Associates that specialized in computer graphic slide production. David was head of the CG lab at Sheridan College and would lead the software development. The founders obtained a grant of $61K from National Research Council (NRC), borrowed equipment from McGrath & Associates, and Secured SRTC (Scientific Research Tax Credits) for some funded research work on anti-aliasing that would be needed for their own product, ALIAS/1.
wrl
A little known fact: The name of the Alias image viewing utility 'wrl' came about when Will Anielewicz added to the existing code of 'rl' and wanted to change its name; hence the self initialed w(ill)rl utility name we all know and love today. Will developed his skills in obscurity at Omnibus. One of his dozen-or-so variants of an extrusion program was called newtube, and its help info went approximately as follows: newtube2: useage: file x y z xbang ybang zbang xtang ytang zbang file: a ppt file to extrube about x y z xbang ybang zbang: do the obvious xtang ytang ztang: use only if you wrote the code animators had to chain together dozens of unix programs using Cshell. In fact, Keith Ballinger, a TD, programmed ease-in/ease-out values with his TI-58 calculator. Others looked up the values in tables and typed them in with a text editor
The Alias Renderer
Raycasting (as Alias called it) is the casting of 2.5D rays into 2.5D buckets of triangles. We call the rays (and geometry) 2.5D because they are in the projected screen space of the image, so they are 2D, but they still have a bit of Z depth information which we can use to generate a real 3D intersection point. Alias Raycasting is like ray tracing in that we can compute volume intersections (fog, particles, glows, et. al.) with the speed of a 2D intersetion test, but unlike raytracing in that no secondary rays are (or can be) generated due to the nature of the geometry which is already projected into 2.5D. The Raycasting algorithm is closest to the ZZbuffer (yes, 2 Z's) presented a Siggraph a few years back (the paper was unrelated to A|W). People also tend to think of rendering as a post process, separate task. The Maya renderer is completely integrated so that geometric, dynamic or other properties of the scene can affect the shading (ie. connect the Y coordinate of a sphere to the red channel of a shader and you've got a sphere that gets "redder" the higher it is translated)
Matchmaking
Alias research actually had it's beginnings as a TV show concept. I was working with Cross Core Communications in Toronto, where I met Sue McKenna. Her friend Steve Bingham was looking to develop a TV series on interesting statistics, - sort of a believe-it-or-not using the Entertainment Tonight show format, and requiring a great deal of CGI. Sue invited me to meet with Steve in order to help storyboard ideas, and to provide some advice on the use of CGI in the production. After some discussion, I realized the range of CGI desired was outside the capabilites of the equipment that I was familiar with, so I suggested they speak with Nigel McGrath, who had a broader knowledge of then current CGI systems and capabilities. They met, they dumped the TV idea, and started Alias instead.
Alias Research Inc., of Toronto, Canada was founded in 1983 by Stephen Bingham, Susan McKenna, David Springer, and Nigel McGrath with the goal of creating software for computer animation for film and video production. The four principals were soon joined by employees five and six: Will Anielewicz (recently ex of Omnibus and currently at ILM) and Mike Sweeney on software development.