Question: how does your job involve science even though you only do computer graphics

Ian Stephenson answered on 25 Jun 2014:

My job is all science and engineering (which is applying science).

Whenever you see a CG movie, with cloth, water, flames, explosions, buildings collapsing, then someone has written software to do that. They take the same equations that physicists use to predict the movement of objects, and use the to make the objects in the compute look real.

We also use information about the structure of plants (L-systems) to create vegetation, and the anatomy of animals to produce realist looking animals.

Most of my own work is on rendering, where we study how slight moves around a scene, and interacts with surfaces (we have access to lab equipment which can measure surfaces to see how light bounces off them, and through them) to create an image that we can see.

I’m not an artist AT ALL. I CANNOT DRAW. I have a degree in engineering. There are artists who work in the industry who produce the final images, but behind them there are a massive team of scientists, engineers and programmer who make it all happen