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Carla's Island Revisited
Nelson L. Max
Lawrence Liverrnore National Laboratory, P.O. Box 808,
Livermore, CA 94550, USA
A computer animated movie,
titled "Carla's Island", showing
sunset and moonset over the
ocean, was recreated as an inter-
active art installation.
The movie "Carla's Island" was
produced by ray-tracing on the
Cray-1 as described in Max
(1981). Figure l a - c are single
frames from this movie, showing
the same ocean scene at different
times of day. The terrain and
clouds are the same in all three
views. The only changes are a) the
positions of the waves, b) the col-
ors, and c) the position of the sun
or moon.
Fig. 1 a Islands, ocean, and clouds in the afternoon,
The Visual Computer (1986) 2:171-173
9 Springer-Verlag 1986
In making the movie, a cycle of
144 ray-traced images was stored
on three magnetic tapes. The
wave motion was made periodic
so that the last frame could be fol-
lowed again by the first. Each
pixel was assigned one of 256
numbers, depending on where the
direct or reflected ray hit the sky,
clouds, hills, cliffs, or beach. As
the film was being recorded, a
minicomputer gradually changed
the tables which assigned these
256 numbers to their colors ac-
cording to the time of day, and
added in the sun or the moon be-
hind the clouds or hills. This mini-
computer was thus able to cycle
through the 144 frames automati-
b Scene of Fig. i at sunset,
to enhance a limited number of
supercomputer-produced frames.
During my presentation at SIG-
G R A P H '81, I proposed that
these simple computations could
also be done on a raster graphics
workstation. When Apollo Com-
puter, Inc. planned to announce
their color D N 6 6 0 at SIG-
G R A P H '82, they requested the
data for one frame of my movie
to use in a " slide s h o w " presenta-
tion on their machine. I instead
suggested that we could make a
real-time demonstration and was
invited to spend the week before
the meeting preparing it.
It turned out that the D N 660 had
exactly the capabilities necessary
to compute the changes a), b) and
c) very efficiently.
First of all, it had two megabytes
of graphics memory connected
with special high speed block
transfer hardware ("bitblit").
This memory was enough to hold
two full frames of a 512 x 512 im-
e Scene of Fig. 1 at moonset
171
Fig. 2. Top half of two megabit graphics
memory of the D N 660. The refresh area
is in the top left quarter. The top right
quarter contains a full image, whose
waves, together with the partial wave-only
images in the lower half of the picture and
in the unseen memory, are copied in order
into the refresh area. The upper part of
this frame is used as a source for unmodi-
age, as well as 14 other partial
frames, showing the portion of
the image below the horizon con-
taining the moving waves (Fig. 2).
The first full frame was in the re-
gion refreshed by the video, and
the lower sections in the other 15
frames formed one complete cycle
of wave motion. The bitblit was
fast enough that if it started trans-
ferring one of these bottom sec-
tions into the refresh area when
the video started refreshing the
top of the frame, the transfer
would be complete before the re-
fresh reached the area with the
waves. Thus, the video picture
could be changed smoothly with-
out glitches.
The color tables were recomputed
with the same program used for
172
fled clouds and sky in steps 1 and 3 of
the process for moving the sun. The two
small square work areas and the four
m o o n and four sun images can be seen
in the upper right. Of the two square work
areas, the upper shows area 1 after step
4). The lower shows area 2 after step 6)
and is identical to the region of the refresh
area onto which it has been copied by step
the movie, taking advantage of
the floating point accelerator in
the D N 660.
Finally, the motion of the sun or
moon was accomplished by spe-
cial raster operation hardware,
which can combine two images
according to boolean operations
on their bits. The upper portion
of the second full frame was used
to keep the data for the sky and
clouds, unmodified by the sun or
moon. In unneeded portions of
this image were two square work
areas and four small square anti-
aliased images of the moon and
four of sun (Fig. 2). The four im-
ages of the sun or moon had
centers at (0, 0), (0, 1/2), (1/2, 0),
and (1/2, 1/2). This made it possi-
ble to move the center smoothly
7). Note the digits on the top, which are
copied into the digital clock area
Fig. 3. The author at the D N 660. The re-
fresh area of Fig. 2 has been magnified to
fill the screen. Note the plastic cover over
the keyboard revealing only the labelled
function keys
with subpixel increments. The
logical steps in creating a new sun
position were:
I. Copy unmodified sky and
clouds over old sun position in
refresh area
2. Copy sun to work area 1
3. Copy unmodified sky and
clouds at new sun position to
work area 2
4. Blank clouds from sun using
area 1 = area 1 a n d n o t area 2
5. Blank sun from sky using area
2--area 2 a n d n o t area 1
6. Combine sun, sky, and clouds
using area 2--area 2 or area 1
7. Copy sun, sky, and clouds to
new position in refresh area
Using the methods just described,
the D N 660 was able to animate
the sunset and moonset just as if