In the late 1970s, the work turned in the direction of increased complexity of modeling and animation and visual accuracy.

Wayne Carlson worked with Rodger Wilson and Bob Marshall to expand the procedural animation capabilities introduced by Newell of University of Utah, and also developed an expanded surface modeling environment as part of his PhD research.

Frank Crow ( Interval Research) arrived from the University of Texas and worked with approaches to increased scene description and rendering capabilities and continued his work with shadows and antialiasing that were started at the University of Utah. He later went to Xerox PARC, and then to Interval Research.

Dave Zeltzer (David Sarnoff Research Center) developed goal-directed motion description capabilities for skeletal and creature animation. Julian Gomez (Lego) developed TWIXT, a track-based keyframe animation system.

Mark Howard (Sun Microsystems) designed and built a controllable frame buffer that allowed real-time playback of animation tests. This frame buffer was the mainstay of the image creation and representation capabilities at CGRG and later at Cranston/Csuri Productions. Don Stredney (the Ohio Supercomputer Center) pushed the limits of the systems to develop complex anatomical models. Other important work done during this period included Snoot and Muttly by Susan Van Baerle (LambSoft) and Doug Kingsbury (Lamb & Co.), Trash by John Donkin (Blue Sky), Tuber's Two-Step by Chris Wedge (one of the founders of Blue Sky), Vision Obious by Ruedy Leeman (Alpine View Images), early character animation by Michael Girard and George Karl, and animations by Susan Amkraut, Marsha McDevitt, Thuy Tran, Kevin Reagh, Anne Seidman, Tom Hutchinson (ILM), Bill Sadler and others.