This gave PDI the major client they needed to fund the creation of most of its early software.
Elastic reality sgi tv#
PDI's first client was Rede Globo, Brazil's largest TV network. This was quite an accomplishment for a low margin service business with a lot of risk. PDI was debt-free when acquired by DreamWorks in 2000. Money was never taken out of the company which maintained a 7% investment in R&D. The company was run as an open book monthly financial reviews were shared with the entire company, and a detailed monthly financial report was released.
The growth of the company was financed solely through profit. PDI moved to its first real offices in 1985 (Sunnyvale), to its second offices in 1995 ( Palo Alto) and to its last location in Redwood City in 2002. Its original offices were in Sunnyvale, California working out of a garage owned by Carl's father. The initial investment to start the company was $250,000, about $600,000 in 2005 dollars. All of these tools were written in C and deployed on a variety of machines running various flavors of Unix.
Elastic reality sgi software#
The original in-house software evolved into a large suite of tools which included a polygon scan-line renderer (called p2r), an interactive animation program (called e_motion), an animation scripting / scene-description language (called script) and a lighting tool (called led). This machine was 2–4 times faster than the VAX-11/780 at a fraction of the cost. The PDP-11 was soon replaced by a DEC VAX-11/780 and later PDI shifted to another superminicomputer called the Ridge32. The resulting image was 512 by 480 by 24 (8 bits for red, green and blue channels) which took 2 minutes to render. The spheres were not polygonal, they were implicitly rendered and were fully anti-aliased. The image was simply a 4 by 4 by 4 grid of spheres of varying colors. The first 3D image rendered at PDI was done on March 12, 1982. Attached to this was a $65,000 framebuffer which had a resolution of 512×512 and was 32 bits deep. This was a lot of memory given that the computer had only 64 kilobytes (16-bits) of address space. The first computer at PDI was a DEC PDP 11/44 with 128 kilobytes of memory. In January 2015 DreamWorks announced they were shutting down the studio. By the time PDI reached its 25th anniversary in 2005, it had completed over 1000 projects and grown to over 400 employees. The initial goal of the company was "Entertainment using 3D computer animation". They started work on 3D software at the end of 1981, and 3D production started in the fall of 1982.
Richard and Glenn wrote the foundation of the in-house computer animation software that was to be used for the next two decades. He was joined in 1981 by Richard Chuang and in 1982 by Glenn Entis. PDI was founded in 1980 by Carl Rosendahl with a loan of $25,000 from his father.
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