[TommyBoy]

Hmmm... That's pretty fascinating. Cool to know that it's actually kinda/sorta still up and running. Also, thanks for the info on it. Considering that this software was developed in 1988, I was very surprised that they were still using their proprietary CAPS software as recently as 2004; even though all of their competitors and even their direct-to-video/television departments were using commercial software such as Toon Boom, TV Paint, and Toonz. But now that you've provided this info stating that it DID in-fact receive updates over the years, it makes more sense.

[vishnu]

From what little I know I think the original version of CAPS was based on the 12 binary operators that were introduced by Thomas Porter and Tom Duff in the journal Computer Graphics, Volume 18 Number 3 in a paper titled "Compositing Digital Images," Keith Packard has a copy of the paper on his website:

https://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/p2...porter.pdf

[dreammjpr]

Wow. I nver thought that CAPS was ported (somewhat) to Linux, but it make sense since I figure the original hardware is probably inoperable.
I too was once a CAPS enthusiast. I kinda got some closure after reading a pdf of Pixar's proposal to Disney. Honestly I was more interested in how the PIXAR computer worked but then I got sidetracked (I saw "Walt before Disney" and was awed by traditional ink & paint) and saw the CAPS system.

I haven't enjoyed reading a forum thread like this in a while. Thank you all for sharing.

[vishnu]

Not to squirrel too far off topic, but another really interesting image manipulation project is nasa's VICAR, in continuous use since the 1960s to make all sorts of corrections and manipulations to various planetary probe and moon rover and Mars rover images, often you'll see nasa images with the codicil "pseudo color" or some such, VICAR was used to make those color manipulations. It was open sourced a few years ago, some of the photo manipulation operations are GUI based, using a GUI that was developed at SGI (motif app), and which has been considerably enhanced by nasa in the decades since SGI released it, but a lot of the manipulations remain command line based. Anyway, any images you see of space stuff from nasa have been manipulated/enhanced by VICAR.

EDIT: I said motif app was a GUI, it's not, it's a c++ library that has a wide variety of function calls that make the Motif widget set easier to use from c++.

[robespierre]

The SIGGRAPH PDF I posted above also includes some horror stories from animation legend Jim Blinn, who did the Voyager fly-by animations at Caltech (they were not done at NASA).
He says that they were produced by aiming a film cine camera at an Evans and Sutherland Picture System display and pressing the shutter over and over.

[vishnu]

The SIGGRAPH PDF I posted above also includes some horror stories from animation legend Jim Blinn, who did the Voyager fly-by animations at Caltech (they were not done at NASA).
He says that they were produced by aiming a film cine camera at an Evans and Sutherland Picture System display and pressing the shutter over and over.

I feel like that is the entirety of my career working in pulse power electronics, "take the pulse power system apart," "put the pulse power system back together," "take the pulse power system apart," "put the pulse power system back together." 😜