COMPUTERS GIVING FILM NEW MAGIC : DIGITAL ANIMATION BLURRING LINE BETWEEN FANTASY, REALITY.

Byline: Janet Rae-Dupree Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

They've exploded a commando out of a moving jet. They've brought static human silhouettes on restroom signs to flirtatious life. They've released tropical fish to swim through a redwood forest.

Morphing faces, cola-drinking polar bears, even an athletic Pillsbury doughboy - Silicon Valley's digital animators are giving global audiences glimpses of impossibly peculiar worlds.

Eventually, these animation artists who use computers as their canvas will be immersing us completely in their digitized creations - and we won't even know it.

``Jump five to 10 years down the road and you're going to see movies that look exactly like live-action films, but the production process will be almost entirely digital,'' said Carl Rosendahl, president and founder of Pacific Data Images in Sunnyvale, Calif. ``Directors won't need elaborate sets; we can do that in the computer. Stunts can be done with safety wires and then the wires can be deleted in the computer. Lighting can be enhanced in the computer.

``The audience won't perceive it, but it will be there.''

Rosendahl's vision of computer-enhanced entertainment - rather than entirely computer-generated movies, such as last year's ``Toy Story'' - is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Animation outfits such as Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic are creating their ``eye candy'' - imaginative new digital creations - in studios from Marin to San Jose. Silicon Valley's influence on this cottage industry has prompted Hollywood's producers to wed the two in words even when geography separates: ``Siliwood.''

Although computer-generated actors aren't likely to replace leading men and ladies any time soon, Pacific Data Images' animators already have used their computers to add a subtle cyberspace stuntman to a ``Batman'' movie. Rather than send a flesh-and-blood stuntman plummeting from a rooftop, animators created a digital Batman and sent him streaking to the ground. Computer sleight of hand then let animators change, or morph, the digital stuntman seamlessly back into a living actor safely on the ground.

Pacific Data Images also did Michael Jackson's ``Black or White'' music video, which let the singer morph from himself into nearly a dozen other people, including an Asian man and an Indian woman.

And now that cyber-Hollywood leader DreamWorks has purchased a 40 percent share in the company, Pacific Data Images will move to new offices in Palo Alto, Calif., next month and produce a completely computer-generated movie within the next 18 months.

``More and more, if our artists can dream it, there's a way to make it,'' said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former president of Disney and one of the founders of DreamWorks. ``And that is revolutionary, because artists have dreamed of things for hundreds of years and not had the wherewithal to realize the dreams. This development of digital technology and (computer-generated) animation are allowing artists to dream bigger and, we hope, better.''

Digital animators today use Silicon Graphics' desktop workstations that are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1980s to invent a constant stream of creatures, settings and situations for Hollywood's directors and advertising agencies.

In the industry's infancy about a decade ago, the briefest computer animations required months of painstaking work. Even the most powerful computers would take hours, and for more complicated images, even days, to draw each realistic-looking frame.

That tedious process, called rendering, has been streamlined substantially by faster computers and by special software programs that let animators create characters and scenes one layer at a time and then blend them automatically.

What once took days to render now requires a few hours of computer time. And what once took hours now takes only a few minutes. Take that one step further to understand the power of digital animation today: What once took a few minutes per frame to render now can be done in milliseconds, letting animators see quickly and smoothly whether their new character or scene is appealing.

That creative power has attracted more than movie producers. Investors eager to capitalize on the success of ``Toy Story'' snapped up Pixar's initial public stock offering in November and more than doubled the $22 offer price in a matter of days. Reality set in by January, however, as Wall Street realized that live-action movies will remain just as appealing as entirely computer-generated films and that Pixar, specifically, did not have a host of new productions in the hopper.

Fortunately, animation usually begins the old-fashioned way: with pencil and paper and, often, clay.

Artists sketch out the basic look of new characters and create hand-drawn action plots, called storyboards, that describe what they plan to do later on the computer.

In the case of major digital characters, a clay model is sculpted of the character with arms (if it has any) outstretched and feet planted squarely on the ground. Pacific Data Images used dozens of different models of the old Pillsbury doughboy's facial expressions to digitally animate him, and clay models were a crucial part of the company's effort to let cartoon character Homer Simpson enter a ``virtual world'' in last Halloween's episode of ``The Simpsons.''

A fine grid of lines was drawn on the clay Homer so that a three-dimensional computer scanner could read the dips and curves of his body into a basic Homer database. On top of that database, animators created textures for Homer's skin, his bulging eyeballs, his jiggling tummy and his polo shirt.

Rather than replacing cell animation, however, digital animation most likely will be used only to enhance it.

``Photography didn't replace painting,'' Rosendahl pointed out. ``It allowed painters to begin to experiment because they no longer were required to be the ones capturing reality..''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) Carl Rosendahl, president of Pacific D ata Images in Sunnyvale, Calif., predicts that some day audiences won't be able to distinguish live from animated films.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service

(2--color) In contrast to the entirely animated feature ``Toy Story,'' most films use digital animation only to enhance scenes.

The Walt Disney Company