The history
Sixty years from a light pen on a lab screen to Oscar-winning films made with free software.
In 1963 a student drew lines on a computer screen with a pen of light. Within ten years, researchers in Utah were animating a polygon hand and inventing the ways we still hide, shade and texture 3D shapes. Film studios hired them, short films proved computer characters could make people laugh and cry, and in 1995 Toy Story became the first fully computer-animated feature. Since then simulation, free tools like Blender and real-time game engines have spread 3D animation from a few California studios to artists all over the world, including thousands in India.
1963
Drawing on a computer screen
Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad, USA
1972
A 3D animated polygon hand
Ed Catmull and Fred Parke, USA
1985
Fully CG character in a feature film
The stained-glass knight, Young Sherlock Holmes
1986
CG film nominated for an Oscar
Luxo Jr., Pixar
1989
CG film to win an Oscar
Tin Toy, Pixar
1995
Fully computer-animated feature
Toy Story, Pixar
2008
India's first full-length 3D CG feature (widely described)
Roadside Romeo, Yash Raj Films and Disney, animated in Bengaluru
2025
Animated-feature Oscar for a film made in free software
Flow, Latvia, made in Blender
1963 – 1978
University researchers, many at the University of Utah, invent the basics: drawing on screens, polygon models, hiding, shading, texture maps and smooth surfaces.
1963
For his PhD, Sutherland wrote Sketchpad on the TX-2 computer. You drew straight on the screen with a light pen, and the computer remembered each line as an object you could move, copy and resize.
Why it mattered. It was the first time a person drew with a computer, the seed of every modelling program since.
1972
Catmull made a plaster cast of his left hand and drew about 350 triangles and polygons on it in ink. He measured the corners into the computer and animated the hand opening, closing and turning, shaded and smooth. Parke did the same for a human face.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first 3D animated films, and the Library of Congress later preserved it as a national treasure.
1974
Catmull's PhD thesis showed how to draw curved surfaces pixel by pixel, keeping a depth for each pixel so nearer things hide farther ones (the z-buffer, also found by Wolfgang Straßer at the same time), and how to wrap a picture onto a surface: texture mapping.
Why it mattered. Depth buffers and texture maps are still in every 3D program and games console.
1975
Phong published a way to shade a surface smoothly across its polygons and add a bright highlight whose size depends on how glossy the surface is. Hollow polygon models suddenly looked like plastic and metal.
Why it mattered. It was the start of shading: telling the computer what a surface is made of.
1975
Newell needed a test object, so his wife Sandra suggested their tea set. He sketched a Melitta teapot on graph paper and described it with curved Bézier patches. It was shared freely and became the most rendered object in computer graphics.
Why it mattered. It gave researchers a common model to compare their programs on; the real teapot is now at the Computer History Museum.
1978
Catmull and Clark published a rule for splitting every face of any mesh into smaller ones and smoothing the corners, over and over, until a blocky cage becomes a smooth surface. It is the subdivision in chapter 1.
Why it mattered. Almost every film character since the late 1990s is built as a subdivision surface.
1979 – 1994
Graphics groups join film companies. Computer effects appear in features, and short films prove computer characters can act.
1982
July 1982
Disney's Tron had about 15 to 20 minutes of computer animation: light cycles, tanks and glowing landscapes, made by four companies. Its director later said it was not nominated for visual effects because voters felt using computers was cheating.
Why it mattered. It showed audiences a whole world built from 3D models.
1982
June 1982
For the Genesis sequence in Star Trek II, a wall of fire spreads across a dead planet. Reeves drew it with hundreds of thousands of tiny points, each born, moved by simple rules and faded. He published the idea as the particle system in 1983.
Why it mattered. Particles are still how films make fire, sparks, smoke, rain and magic.
1984
July 1984
The Adventures of André and Wally B. was a short cartoon made on computers. Lasseter, a Disney-trained animator, gave the shapes squash and stretch, and the team added motion blur so fast moves looked smooth.
Why it mattered. It proved computer animation could use the principles of hand-drawn cartoons.
1985
December 1985
In Young Sherlock Holmes, a knight made of stained glass steps out of a church window and stalks a priest. It is usually credited as the first fully computer-generated character in a feature film.
Why it mattered. Computer characters could now share the screen with actors.
1986
17 August 1986
Pixar became its own company in February 1986, bought from Lucasfilm by Steve Jobs. In August it showed Luxo Jr., two minutes of a parent desk lamp and a child lamp playing with a ball. The audience went wild.
Why it mattered. It was the first computer-animated film nominated for an Oscar, and it made people care about computer characters.
1989
March 1989
Tin Toy (1988), about a wind-up toy running from a baby, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The year before, Pixar had published the RenderMan interface, and its renderer went on to be used on countless films.
Why it mattered. Computer animation was now accepted as an art form.
1991
July 1991
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a shape-shifting robot pours through bars and rises from a floor. ILM built on its watery creature from The Abyss (1989) to make a CG character that moved like a real person.
Why it mattered. It showed that CG could make things no camera could film.
1993
June 1993
Jurassic Park mixed life-size animatronic dinosaurs with computer-generated ones. The CG dinosaurs are on screen for only a few minutes, but they moved like real animals, animated by artists guided by stop-motion expert Phil Tippett.
Why it mattered. After it, studios moved from models and stop motion to CG creatures (see StopMotionClear).
1995 – 2004
Toy Story opens the age of CG features. Subdivision, fur simulation and performance capture push characters further.
1995
22 November 1995
Toy Story was the first feature film made entirely by computer: 114,240 frames, rendered in about 800,000 machine-hours. The crew grew from 24 to 110 people, with 27 animators. Woody alone had 723 animation controls.
Why it mattered. It launched a new kind of film, and CG soon became the main way animated features are made.
1997
Geri's Game, a short about an old man playing chess against himself, used Catmull–Clark subdivision surfaces for Geri's skin and clothes, instead of stitched patches that could crack at the seams. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.
Why it mattered. Subdivision became the standard way to build characters.
1998
February 1998
Maya 1.0 combined modelling, rigging, animation and simulation in one program. It became one of the most used 3D animation programs in film studios.
Why it mattered. Studios could now share one pipeline of tools and artists could move between them.
2001
November 2001
Sulley in Monsters, Inc. had 2,320,413 hairs, too many to animate by hand. Pixar wrote a simulator, Fizt, that moved the fur by physics after the animators finished, on a render farm of about 3,500 processors.
Why it mattered. Simulation became a department of its own in animation studios.
2002
March 2002
The Academy added a new award, Best Animated Feature, and the first winner was DreamWorks' computer-animated Shrek (2001), ahead of Monsters, Inc.
Why it mattered. Animated features now had their own place at the Oscars.
2002
December 2002
Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was driven by actor Andy Serkis's performance, captured on set, then finished by animators keyframe by keyframe (see MocapClear).
Why it mattered. It showed a CG character could give a real acting performance.
By the numbers
Computers got faster and farms got bigger, but frames got richer, so a frame still takes hours to render.
2002 – 2012
Free software and cheaper computers spread 3D animation worldwide, and India builds an animation industry of its own.
2002
13 October 2002
When the company behind Blender went bust, its users raised €100,000 in seven weeks to buy the program and release it under the GNU General Public Licence. Anyone could now download a complete 3D animation studio for free.
Why it mattered. It opened 3D animation to students and small studios everywhere, including across India.
2005
21 October 2005
Hanuman, a hand-drawn (2D) feature about the monkey god, earned about ₹11.7 crore on a budget of about ₹3.25 crore. It is widely credited with starting the boom in Indian animated films, though it was not made in 3D (see Anim2DClear).
Why it mattered. It proved Indian audiences would pay for animated features.
2008
24 October 2008
Roadside Romeo, a comedy about a street dog in Mumbai, is widely described as India's first full-length 3D computer-animated film. About 150 artists at Tata Elxsi's Visual Computing Labs in Bengaluru worked on it for two and a half years. It won the National Film Award for Best Animated Film.
Why it mattered. It showed that a full CG feature could be made in India.
2013 – today
Physics simulators, stylised looks and game engines change what 3D animation can look like and how fast it is made.
2013
November 2013
For Frozen, Disney and UCLA mathematicians built a new snow simulator using the material point method. Snow could pack, crumble and break apart like the real thing, instead of being faked with particles.
Why it mattered. Simulation research now happens inside film studios, and it is published for everyone.
2018
December 2018
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse used 3D models and rigs but rendered them to look like a printed comic, with hand-drawn lines, halftone dots and characters animated on twos. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Why it mattered. It showed 3D animation does not have to look realistic, and inspired many stylised films.
2025
2 March 2025
Flow, a wordless film about a cat in a flooded world, was made entirely in Blender and rendered with its real-time engine, EEVEE, by a small team. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Why it mattered. The free tool from 2002 and real-time rendering reached the top of the industry.
Did you know?
Toy Story's 114,240 frames took about 800,000 machine-hours to render: roughly 7 hours per frame.
Woody in Toy Story had 723 animation controls, 212 of them in his face and 58 for his mouth.
Sulley in Monsters, Inc. has 2,320,413 individually simulated hairs.
Ed Catmull drew about 350 polygons in ink on a plaster cast of his own hand to make his 1972 film.
Blender's users raised €100,000 in seven weeks in 2002 to make it free forever.
On PlayStation 4, Kratos's face alone used 32,000 polygons; a PlayStation 2 hero's face used 1,200.
India's animation, VFX and post-production industry earned about ₹10,500 crore in 2025 (FICCI-EY).
The people
born 1938 · Computer scientist · USA
Wrote Sketchpad, the first program for drawing on a computer screen.
born 1945 · Computer scientist, Pixar co-founder · USA
Animated a polygon hand in 1972, co-invented subdivision surfaces and led Pixar for decades.
born 1940s · Computer scientist · England and USA
Modelled the Utah teapot, the most famous test object in graphics.
1942 – 1975 · Computer scientist · Vietnam and USA
Invented the Phong shading and highlight model still taught today.
born 1957 · Animator and director · USA
Brought hand-drawn animation principles to computer characters, from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story.
born 1964 · Actor · England
Performed Gollum, showing that a digital character could carry an actor's performance.
born 1960 · Software developer · Netherlands
Created Blender and led the campaign that made it free for everyone.
born 1994 · Animation director · Latvia
Made Flow in Blender with a small team; it won the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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