IIRC James Clarke (who developed the early graphics chips SGI was famous for) said something like "reality is just 80M polygons a second" (at least, in a gross approximation of how the real world is presented to our neuro-optical system).
I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I was only modestly impressed with the CGI. It felt very wire-framey (similar to the Star Trek II genesis sequence) to me, even if (as you say) it had curves and filled polygons.
After some time working in computer graphics I realized that what I really needed/wanted was renderman and an entire team of animators/technical directors, circa 2010. So, basically subsurface scattering, monte carlo sampling, many light sources, rich models and textures. Obviously, none of that was really accessible at the time Tron or Star Trek II was made, but those movies opened the path for the necessary brain and money investment to make the Pixar rendering computer and the rest is history.
> I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I was only modestly impressed with the CGI.
You’re being downvoted, but most of us who saw it when it was originally released were not impressed. My thinking on this is because we were searching for a different aesthetic, likely what we would see much later with Avatar. However, today, the Tron aesthetic has come back in a big way as a retro art style. This is not surprising. It may very well be the case that as contemporaries of the original Tron, it was not intended for our generation, but for the ones who would come later. Perusing art history, this seems to be very much the case. Most generations do not properly appreciate the art from their own time, either because they can’t or they are too focused on their own personal vision of what art should be. I can’t tell you what the real reasons for this are, but I think that the audience is a prisoner of their time, while the artist has more freedom with their vision to see farther than the species is able to do on the level of the group, which is confined by the herd and the status quo.
That's a valid concept, but I thought it incredible then and now. It wasn't a pure exercise in graphics for phds, but rather one part of a movie they struggled to get made.
And not a one minute sequence, but large sections of the movie, rendered by quite primitive chips.
The fact that realism was not the goal, but a cold, rigid computer world helps explain the art direction.
I think the departure from realism was difficult for the audience of 1982, which was still steeped in the softer aesthetics of 1970s naturalism. Tron took many decades to have a larger influence on the overarching culture. Daft Punk, the adoption of the vaporwave aesthetic in the 2010s, and countless other art movements owe a great debt to Tron.
Maybe older folks? As mentioned previously, as a kid I grew up on Space Invaders and Asteroids shortly before the movie came out. Couldn't get enough of the futuristic 80s aesthetic, and still look on it fondly. Wargames blew my mind as well.
I don’t think that the portion of the population who truly appreciates the Tron aesthetics is that much larger today than back then. It’s rather that the internet provides better visibility and discoverability for such non-mainstream interests.
No doubt, but when looking back at post 1982 art during that decade, do you see a huge influence by Tron? We didn’t really see it until the 2000s. There were a few underground artists experimenting with the Tron aesthetic up until that time, but they were mostly unheard of. I remember there was at least one around 1994 or so in SF.
> generations do not properly appreciate the art from their own time, either because they can’t or they are too focused on their own personal vision of what art should be
In this case it seems to be the art acquiring meaning from its successors.
There’s a short part of the solar sailer sequence with various landscapes that I always found particularly impressive for the time: https://youtu.be/8ruRruqKf5M?t=2m32s (the music isn’t the original in that clip)
For a long time I thought the sandy planes were a mandelbrot-like set, but it’s really a Mickey Mouse logo. :)
