Following the law.

Change usually is a good thing, particularly in the computer graphics industry. For the most part, "change" here means technological advancements. And, as this month's issue of Computer Graphics World demonstrates, the CG arena continues to "change."

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a prediction: the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years (though some sources contend his original statement entailed an 18-month, rather than 24-month, time frame). Known as Moore's Law, his observation has been the rallying cry in a technological revolution. Initially meant to be an observation and a forecast, his comment soon became an accepted timeline for the semiconductor manufacturers and the computer industry in general. The effect of Moore's Law on the computer graphics industry has been substantial. The reality of more processing power for less money has resulted in a visual evolution for all types of digital imagery. While the computer industry may gauge the incremental changes of Moore's Law using

numbers and acronyms, in the graphics industry, the changes are visible. It was only a few years ago when animators untapped the power of computer processors to generate neverbefore-seen water effects for Warner Bros.' summer blockbuster The Perfect Storm, for which ILM crafted a raging digital ocean using a fluid-flow simulation. Soon thereafter, creating realistic digital water became a little easier to accomplish. For the remake of Warner Bros.' Poseidon earlier this year, ILM and director Wolfgang Petersen not only made even bigger CG waves, but also increased the realism of the physically accurate simulation. Just recently, Flash Film Works devised a new method for creating digital ocean storms that were the ...