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I was struck by the resemblence of the new iMac to the oft-used Pixar lamp.

Considering that, this new design is no real surprise.

Ever see the full anim with that light character?

Yep, you can view it here. The lamp's name is Luxo.

Three more "Pixar shorts too!"

Not to mention LoTR trailers (and more).

A long-long time ago (1976), I worked as a student at a place which was doing some of the early stuff on graphics, the Computer Aided Design Centre in Cambridge UK.

We did some very cool things on hardware that was so cool that our techies had to build it themselves. We had some cool software as well such as Things/Hidden-Lines that could generate buildings for walkthroughs.

We couldn't do anything in real-time as a single frame took at least 5 minutes to produce. If we wanted full-definition (512*512), we had to produce separate RGB images which were photographed through a filter by an animation camera. The end result was cool in 1976.

What is the state of the art today? Shrek? Final Fantasy? Again, relatively huge resources to render each frame and no chance to do it in real-time.

Well, graphics has come a long way in 24 years, but if I want to do it in real-time, I have problems getting quality. This is why firms like Evans and Sutherland still clean-up doing the graphics subsystems for flight simulators. First-person shooters have come a long way, but still they are bound by the number of polygons and vertices, so rounded objects are difficult to render in real-time.

Yes, there has been progress, but maybe I will be happy when I can handle the equivalent of a Pixar Render Farm on my desktop and in real-time. The GeForce 4 isn't there, but maybe sometime.........

That's right Luxo Jr. was done with Renderman. Here is the price list for Renderman. Not only that but the software ran on a Pixar computer. I had the pleasure of seeing one of these computers demonstrated. It was very impressive at the time and very expensive.

Anyway, in the shading language, surface shaders set an output color and opacity, both as RGB. To generate the final image, these are then blended the obvious way, from the Porter and Duff paper that other people have referenced. Here is a link to PDF of the spec, and here is a direct link to information about surface shaders.

Now, the amusing thing about all this is that the prior art here is from Pixar, which of course shares the same CEO as Apple...

-matt

Anyway, in the shading language, surface shaders set an output color and opacity, both as RGB. To generate the final image, these are then blended the obvious way, from the Porter and Duff paper that other people have referenced. Here is a link to PDF of the spec, and here is a direct link to information about surface shaders.

Now, the amusing thing about all this is that the prior art here is from Pixar, which of course shares the same CEO as Apple...

-matt

oh, is that where Tomb Taider came from?

Is that a game about dead potatoes?

oh, is that where Tomb Taider came from?

Is that a game about dead potatoes?

oh, is that where Tomb Taider came from?

Is that a game about dead potatoes?

oh, is that where Tomb Taider came from?

Is that a game about dead potatoes?

As mentioned, it's just a teaser. Except that it isn't much of a teaser, either.

There isn't much of anything shown. Most of the teaser is "fade in from black, show something for 2 seconds, fade out to black".

In fact, it was a large let down. If you go to the effort to download it, you'll just be sorry. Even a diehard fan of the series should agree with that!

We saw the teaser with Monsters, Inc. Now, that rocked!

Of the 4 trailers attached to it, Clones was the most second most forgettable; the other being some lame computer animated movie called Ice Age about a band of prehistoric animals saving a human child from the ice age. Lame.

Two good things were shown with Monsters, Inc.

- the trailer for Fellowship of the Ring. While I can't wait for this, I felt the trailer did not do the story justice. (and I'd already downloaded this, too)

- the Pixar short For The Birds. This is hilarious! If you feel like downloading something, then go to http://www.pixar.com/shorts/ftb/index.html and see the first half of it. You won't be sorry!

2017.

Steve Jobs showed a demo of Pixar's 1985 Luxo Jr. running in real time on a home computer this year. So if history holds, you can expect Monsters Inc. to be possible 16 years from now.

Pixar has this thing for procedural shaders, which is what RenderMan is all about. Most non-Pixar high end CG work is done by going out and photographing textures, then mapping them onto models which are then rendered by ray-tracing or radiosity. Pixar does most, if not all, of their textures procedurally. Textures are programmed in a C-like language.

With texture maps, if you get too close, the texture has to be blown up over multiple pixels and blurred, an ugly effect very familar to gamers. Since Pixar's procedural shaders can be computed at arbitrarily close intervals, Pixar's materials remain clear in extreme close-ups. That's what gives Pixar work that hyper-clear look.

It's tough to match procedural textures to the real world (although everbody now does water procedurally), which is why RenderMan isn't used much in work that has to match live action.

This is a common confusion. RenderMan is a rendering interface a spec. Usually it's compared as the Postscript of 3D. You can implement a renderer that follows the RenderMan spec. Pixar's implementation is called Photorealistic RenderMan or PRMan for short. It uses the REYES (which stands for Renders Everything You Ever Saw)architecture for rendering (in gross termsZ buffer scanline renderer). Many people when they say RenderMan they actually mean PRMan. PRMan is sold by Pixar along with the RenderMan Artist Tools or RAT. But there exists many other implementations of the RenderMan spec, including BMRT, Entropy, RenderDotC, AQSIS, and AIR among others.

But when Pixar got started there was barely any adequate off the shelf software, so like many others back then (like PDI, Blue Sky Studios, Abel and Associates, triple I, etc), they had to create their own tools. Actually you can see mention of it at the end of the movie: Marionette is their animation environment, previously referred to as menv.

Alright, I saw this movie last night and thought it was awesome! Some people have been saying that it wasn't groundbreaking or that it wasn't up to par with Toy Story, etc. Personally, I don't really care too much about that - I went into the movie looking for a few laughs and got much more than I expected.

1) The voice acting was great. John Goodman's character (Sully) was hilarious. He had that gentle giant quality about him, due in large part to Goodman's voice presence. This is not to take anything away from Billy Crystal's and Steve Buschemi's characters, but Goodman really carried this film as far as personality.

2) The animation was good. From a strictly technical point of view, the fur/hair systems were excellent, and the rest of the CG was right up to par with what I was expecting from Pixar. While it didn't really break new ground, I don't know that it really needed to. The graphics were good enough that I really didn't notice them after the first few minutes of the movie.

3) There is some great cinematography in the movie. The door-riding roller coaster scene was absa-frickin-lutely crazy. I was actually tense watching them hang on and jump from door to door. Various other scenes in the movie make very effective, though less noticable, use of camera angles and colors and composition to give a great sense of feel to the scene.

4) As was noted in another post, the movie touched on some ethical/moral issues in a very light-hearted, kid-accessible kind of way. That was nice to see.

5) The animated short, 'For the Birds', at the beginning of the movie had me and my friends rolling. Pixar has a snippet of it up on their web site, but you really should see the whole thing. If you go see this movie, definitely get there in time for the previews. I would pay a couple bucks out of my ticket price just to see that short again. BTW, the snippet is here on the Pixar site.

Okay, this is getting rather lengthy, so let me stop while I'm ahead. Long story short, I would recommend this movie to anyone with a sense of humor, especially those with kids.

1) The short, "For The Birds" ( i think ). I thought it was absolutely adorable, and practically everyone in the theater was giggling at it. ( I think you can watch it at Pixar's website

2) The trailers: I didn't get to see LOTR, but Episode II, while simply a bunch of wide shots strung together, is enough to get me salivating, and Harry Potter looks so amazingly like I imagined while reading the books, that it'll probably be my biggest letdown of the year ( this won't, of course, prevent me from seeing it: I have to find out... )

3) The movie itself. Particularly, I enjoyed the very, very cute little kid, Boo, and the Abominable snowman, voiced by John Ratzenberger (complaining about being labeled abominable -- "I'm a nice guy...!")

My complaint is that the villain wasn't amusing at all, but that's hardly a requirement. I just kind of expected it from Steve Buscemi.

Definitely worth my eight bucks.

Well, i tried xine 0.9.3 on one of these and it core dumped:

demux_avi: AVI_init failed (AVI_errno: 9)
xine: using demuxer plugin QUICKTIME for this MRL.
QT cmov: read err tlen 13499
Segmentation fault

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

easy. view source, find the reference to the quicktime plugin and read them off... links to the 320x180 clips:
knick knack
luxo jr.
tin toy
andre and wally b.
red's dream
geri's game
for the birds

enjoy!

They have it available now.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Pixar Animated Shorts (Direct Links)

• Geri's Game [Pixar.com]
• For the Birds [Pixar.com]
• Red's Dream [Pixar.com]
• The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. [Pixar.com]
• Tin Toy [Pixar.com]
• Luxo Jr. [Pixar.com]
• Knick Knack [Pixar.com]

These are the high-quality (320x180) versions... Enjoy.

Renderman is an open API. Photorealistic Renderman is Pixar's implementation. Anyone can make a Renderman compliant render engine. E.g. BMRT is an alternative implementation, free as in beer. It would make little sense for Pixar to GPL it since is what they make money from, it's their main product.

Well it set to open around Thanksgiving, Pixar has been working hard on it for a few years now. During SIGGRAPH they actually had a course in which in one part they explained all about the hair rendering and dynamics for Sullivan (the blue monster voiced by John Goodman). You could probably get the course notes by a library loan, or buy the CD from the ACM.

Pixar introduced a new gemetric primitive, RiCurves, a few years back, which is used for stuff like hair and the like. Here is the Application Note from Pixar:

Not really that suprising, as the combo of RenderMan plus Maya has been used for quite some time. Especially in places like ILM which they get betas and early previews of Alias/Wavefront and Pixar's software. Episode 1 used that combo, among a lot other stuff, probably since 1998 and I'm sure it was being used and tested even before that. And many of these studios had their own tranlation tools to incorporate that stuff into their pipeline, especially big studios since many based parts on it not only on Maya but on previous software like PowerAnimator and Dynamation.

Anyway Pixar has Alfred for batch distributed rendering, part of the RAT tools. There is also project BORG. Many places have custom tools though. Also there has been mentioned that the PBS (Portable Batch System) from NASA has been used (Chris Watts, supervisor of Pleasantville used for his next film, the yet to be released Dubbed Action Movie).

The RenderMan Interface Standard is a very intriguing standard, attempting to be the "PostScript of 3D". It is succeeding.

Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan is the RenderMan compliant renderer that is most used in movies, because it is very fast, but at the cost of several cool things. PRMan can't do true reflections, refractions, or even transparency, because it can't compute global visibility.

Ray tracers on the other hand, such as BMRT (which is fully compliant with the RI spec, and includes many extensions to the interface, which PRMan does not support) is a freeware RI raytracer. This is much slower than PRMan, because with raytracing you have to maintain all geometry in the scene in memory at all times, because you don't know where a ray will bounce until you fire the ray. (Because PRMan doesn't do reflections, it doesn't need to keep all the geometry in memory, and can discard anything not *directly* visible to the camera)

PRMan can however, fake lots of things that can give a nearly realistic effect, saving tons of time. Reflection maps, environment maps, and ambient light all simulate the true effects of things like reflections, and radiosity that all of us see when we take our eyes off of our monitors. BMRT does all of this without any faking.

Both PRMan and BMRT use the RI shading language to programatically define surfaces and volumes. Smoke in a room is a volume (or atmosphere) for example and can only accurately be controlled using a shader. The shading language of the RenderMan Interface is UNPARALLELLED in the industry and can produce some of the most realistic looking surfaces/volumes you'll ever see.

Both renderers read .rib files, which are exactly what were used in rendering this movie. Beware though, to get the polygon counts that they have, you'll need about 1-2 gigs of disk space available for EACH FRAME, and about 1-2 gigs of free memory available to render them. Also, there is a C binding of the RenderMan Interface in which you can write a program that defines the placement of objects in a scene, and pipe the output of this program straight into the renderer. Instructions for this are available with BMRT, as is an example. All the tools to do any of this also come with BMRT, free of charge.

Radiosity is something that PRMan cannot do. Check this stuff out: Radiosity images. These were not done with BMRT but easily could be. These were test renders for Arnold, a global illumination renderer. BMRT does global illumination and could easily (but slowly) produce images just like these. PRMan cannot do this, it simply takes too long.

So satisfy your curiosity about modern day rendering and read up on this. It is very interesting stuff.

BMRT - Pixar's rendering software = $0.00

BMRT - Pixar's rendering software = $0.00

With todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.

Though Pixar is the pioneer of computer animation,
the essence of our business is to create compelling
stories and memorable characters. It is chiseled in
stone at our studios that no amount of technology
can turn a bad story into a good one.

BMRT - Blue Moon Rendering Tools, is a free, downloadable RenderMan-compliant radiosity renderer, which was written by Larry Gritz, a former employee of Pixar's. It's not exactly Pixar's Renderman (PhotoRealistic Renderman), but it's not bad - and it actually gets used by many of the same people who use Pixar's RenderMan.

• One-pixel polygons are good. Perhaps not in yesteryear's games, which feature huge flat surfaces, but various forms of higher-order surfaces with curves are definitely the trend today. Pixar render their movies using subdivision surfaces tesselated until each polygon is less than one pixel in the final image. We want that.
• Multi-pass rendering is good. Many effects in games are achieved by rendering each pixel more than one time. 3dfx realized this back with the Voodoo2, and added support for multiple textures per pixel. That is good, because it allows you to send a triangle to the hardware once, but get it textured twice. This saves one pass of geometry transform. As soon as an effect requires an additional pass, that reduces your effective polygon throughout quite a lot, of course. So, my point is that even though it might sound excessive based on simple "# of pixels on screen" arguments, huge polygon and pixel fillrates are good, because they allow more passes and thereby more flexibility and coolness in effects.

Pixar's products supported platforms
Nothing real
Jig

As far as apps in the porting process, Maya is being ported to Linux (should be ready for SIGGRAPH) and the batch renderer is already available, Softimage XSI is being ported (a beta was shown running under RedHat 6.2, last SIGGRAPH users meeting).

Also several studios have worked on porting there on stuff to Linux or enhancing Linux apps. Most notably, the work that Rhythm and Hues have done on the Gimp, and studios like PDI porting there stuff to Linux, and Hammerahead among others:

Gimp for film

So it's allready happening.

The problem with clothing is that different fabrics "hang" differently. Apparently, this is a big issue in the clothing industry and determines why clothing designers choose different fabrics for different outfits: it isn't just how the fabric looks, but how it behaves. The computer has to emulate the performance of the cloth not just in terms of how it behaves at vertices and how it stretches, but also how it behaves along with gravity. If you look in "Geri's Game", notice how the clothing folds. The designers had to emulate not just the person's body, but the structure of clothing on top of that body (until now, clothing has always been animated along with the body). Don't even get me started on the problems of textures.

In essence, the problem is very, very difficult. It is not so much a question of computing power; we are still working on how exactly to model it in the first place.

uhhh... ever heard of software rendering?! Ever heard of the renderman specification? If you don't know anything about distributed rendering technologies, maybe you should read and research before opening your mouth. You might stick your foot in it!

kick some CAD

Since I appear to be bubbling over with animation opinions today, I might as well say that the Diablo II "short" was OK, with some pretty fun stuff. The really impressive short (which wasn't nominated) turned out to be "Sentinelles," a CGI piece from a Québecois animator named Guy Lampron. It was a nice surprise which made the whole experience cool.

Hey, speaking of which, I wonder when the new short from Pixar, "For the Birds," is going to debut in the US. Looks like you can be pretty sure it's not going to be on pixar.com first!

Luck is skill supplemented by chance. ~Ketriva

When Stephenson began working on Snow Crash, he intended it to be a video game (super-interactive novel). Unfortunately, we're only getting to the point where that would be a plausibility. Or is that fortunately? If Ion Storm can succeed at Deus Ex, someone can succeed at Snow Crash...though Juanita's avatar tech is still a ways away (see Pixar's advances in this realm!)

Speaking of Pixar, it's always easier to fake tech in a movie; you get to pre-render everything. Snow Crash would make a great movie without too much trouble, because of its many high-octane visual elements. Also: the political/social satire that runs rampant is surprisingly easy to do visually: just show the Uncle Nunzio Pizza billboard and you're done.

Of course the movie would be radically different from the book, but it wouldn't be an insane adaptation like LotR--you just cut out the boring stuff, and you've got a whole bunch of cool action sequences. Stephenson's namshub mumbo-jumbo barely makes sense anyway (though it _nearly_ fits together quite neatly); the book could do with the bit of narrative tightening a movie would provide.

Snow Crash is hobbled by the importance of Juanita to the outcome of the book, and her near-complete absence from the book. A rewrite that dealt with the narrative problems caused by her would be welcome. My suspicion is the whole rewrite issue is what's killing this project: the book, while amazingly cool and smart and readable and one of my all-time favorite books, is seriously flawed by its tenuously connected plot threads.

Visually, the movie would be great in so many ways: the avatar world could be done anime-style, the Sumerian backstory (if it even entered) could be covered in a killer animation sequence like that from Todd McFarlane's Do the Evolution video, etc.

Stephenson deliberately drew on pop-culture ideas and imagery for the book, and took a lot from movies. Snow Crash could make a very good movie.

It probably would make a better computer game, but I'm not convinced we really have the tech for it.

Good point. If you wanna do hard-core 3d on linux now and have $$$ to burn, check out a combo of Houdini and PRman. Of course, you'd be dropping ~$30K just for the software, but you'd have a damn good setup!

$.02,

Brian