Bill Reeves Early Advancement in Particle Systems

Most computer graphics up to this point were hard-edged and linear with crisp RGB colors. It was difficult to produce images that appeared truly organic or naturally realistic. Bill Reeves, then at Lucasfilm and later at Pixar, was an early contributor to the solution of this problem by introducing particle systems in a foundational paper published in 1983, “Particle Systems: A Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects,” presented at SIGGRAPH ’83. This is an entirely generative process, as Wayne E. Carlson explains in his book, Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview:

“Each particle in the system is born (or generated), undergoes some dynamic changes, and dies. Particles in the system are generated semi-randomly within the bounds of some initial object. This space is termed the generation shape of the fuzzy object. Each of the particle’s attributes is given an initial value that may be fixed or may be determined by a stochastic process.” The power of a particle system is that these “graphical primitives” can be used to create nearly anything from simple points and lines to complex organic and inorganic systems (grass, fire, etc.). Particle systems were famously used in the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for the famous “genesis effect.” [Carlson, 562]