Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

Here's the thing about computer graphics and visual effects. For the most part, we who scour the cyber halls for hints, clues and fascinating news about the latest effects, newest animated shorts, all the while listening for gossip about who might be moving to which company, are somehow part of the world responsible for creating those effects. Maybe we're students who want to make the next Star Wars or Toy Story; maybe we're producers; maybe we're animators working on a really cool short or programmers designing that really cool new game my kids will spend all their time playing after school.

And although we marvel at digital cloth, at webriding superheroes or dancing, skeletal pirates, chances are that, amidst our interest and amusement, if we're creating images for an audience, we're probably not considering the companion industries that also use computer graphics but require a whole different way of thinking. So, with SIGGRAPH hovering around the corner, it seems a great time to think about the 3D that results in something other than animated heroes, explosions and vast worlds built of pixels and time.

First of all, take a look around you. Maybe you're reading this in your office: your fabulous Aeron chair, most likely designed and modeled in 3D? What about that anthro desk you're working on? And the building in which you're working? OK, maybe not if you're working somewhere like my old house, but if you're lucky enough to work in architecturally conscious surroundings — a great warehouse with a fabulous conference space, for instance — you're probably working in a space realized at least in part via 3D software. The remarkable thing is that while architects have been using high-end CAD applications for years, it is now entirely possible to model your own house, down to the plumbing and landscape design, even if you don't use Maya. Like many industries (ours included), it takes more than software to make you a master, so while most of us still won't be I.M. Pei or Frank Gehry, it's pretty incredible that these tools are now available for any of us who have a desire to realize our dream house, whether or not we actually build it.

Many of these CG-using industries have a way of colliding with our imaginary universe. Forensic pathology is one such field of work. I know of at least one pathologist who uses Maya to reconstruct crime scenes and uncover the stories within. He uses splatter patterns and angles of bullet holes in walls to reconstruct a scenario. Morbid, perhaps, but in a television show like CSI, protagonist Gil Grissom could easily be based on an amalgam of many actual crime investigators working in the real world. Art (or something like it) imitating life.

Even more specifically, we have the Visible Human Project. This is a National Library of Medicine project to create a "complete, anatomically detailed three-dimensional representation of the normal male and female body." Though you won't find any visual effects artists working at the NLM, I'm sure this research would have been welcome for the Leeloo reconstruction sequence in The Fifth Element (an astonishing eight years ago — is that possible?), another example of art imitating life — or something like it. In fact, these worlds of fact and fiction collided when, for Hollow Man, Sony Pictures Imageworks consulted with anatomical specialists to make sure Kevin Bacon appeared and disappeared with absolute integrity.

While we're busy pushing pixels to make movies, though, molecular biologists are rendering biological objects at the molecular level. By creating either a computer display or a stereo-lithographed physical rendering, they're able to physically manipulate elements invisible to even the most powerful optical microscopes, which they've achieved for the T-cell and the polio virus, among others. According to Dr. Arthur Olson, professor in Molecular Biology and director, Molecular Graphics Laboratory at Scripps, "Molecular rendering is a type of scientific illustration… they help scientists understand the physical characteristics of these molecular objects, generate hypotheses about how they function and, in some cases, design drugs and vaccines based on that understanding." And that's the divine duo where art meets science head on.