Flight Studio bridges the film, video and games communities with the GIS and military world.

Probably the area least understood by the entertainment world is CGI created for U.S. government programs. Many animators are vaguely aware that 3D animation and online gaming were originally created for the military, but are unaware of how large the government animation workforce really is. To compound the problem, most entertainment animators live on the west coast, from San Diego to Vancouver, while animators working for the government and its contractors tend to the east coast, especially northern Florida. Let's examine some of the details.

The largest epicenter for military animation (which is termed the "modeling, simulation and training" industry) in the world is in Orlando, Florida, where the simulation offices of both the U.S. Army (Program Executive Officer, Simulation Training and Instrumentation, or PEO STRI, at www.peostri.army.mil) and the Navy (NAVAIR Training Systems Division, at www.ntsc.navy.mil) are housed in a complex next to the University of Central Florida (the Air Force has a number of simulation centers elsewhere across the U.S.). These two centers award well over $1 billion per year in simulation contracts, which supports some 102 companies and more than 16,000 jobs in the immediate area. Additional companies and jobs stretch out in a technology corridor that extends to Tampa. Graduates from the University of Central Florida with simulation expertise can sometimes almost literally walk across the street to get jobs either with the government or with the many contractors that ring the area.

The gap between Orlando and Hollywood is immense. Entertainment animators would probably never think of applying for jobs at CAE, Northrop Grumman, DigitalGlobe, Lockheed Martin or AAI, yet these employ animators in much greater numbers than do the better known animation houses such as Digital Domain or ILM. Government animators usually do not attend E3 or SIGGRAPH — they have their own huge trade show, the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or IITSEC (www.iitsec.org), which is usually held in Orlando, and is similar in size and content to the E3 (although, regrettably, there are no booth babes or brightly costumed characters). European animators have a similar show, called ITEC (at www.itec.co.uk), which will be held in Amsterdam next year. You will see few of the same faces or companies at these shows, other than sgi, which has always had a strong presence in both camps, and derives a very significant part of its revenues from government work.

Why the gap between government and entertainment animation professionals? Some of it is historical. Military simulation started way back in the 1960s with aircraft simulators, which went to great lengths to produce 3D environments with realtime motion. These simulators cost a small fortune ($40 million or so each, more than the aircraft they simulated) because the Air Force insisted on realistic controls and realtime motion, no matter what the cost. Companies such as Evans & Sutherland provided the highly specialized hardware for this. Hollywood, on the other hand, was always willing to compromise in the interest of costs or time — if a full-resolution 3D gaming effect could not be achieved in realtime, a little darkness and rain could always hide a few flaws, for instance. It was not until SIMNET and similar systems came along in the late 1980s that military simulators finally started using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to save costs, taking advantage of the economies of scale produced by the gaming industry, which caused graphics boards to be produced for hundreds, rather than hundreds of thousands, of dollars.