Actually there were many obvious ones, but some were more inside jokes, you had to know about Pixar and the CG and FX industry. I was about the only person laughing at them at the thatre. The most obvious one was the "Harryhausen" restaurant (as in Ray Harryhausen, stop motion genius). The VR glasses in the TV, when Boo hands over a Jessie doll (from TS2) and the ball Luxo played with to Sulley, a crayon drawing of Mr. potatoe head, and many others. And there are probably tons I missed on a first viewing. I'll probably have to catch it again. They usually do this kind of stuff, there are many references like that in both Toy Stories.
That film is Ice Age, and it being done by Blue Sky Studios which Fox bought a few years ago along with VIFX (which they later sold to Rhythm and Hues). Blues Sky Studios have even won an Oscar for best animated short, "Bunny", just like Pixar did and they are CG veterans, founded in 1987 (one year after Pixar), though many of the principals are veterans from other facilities. They also are a mostly propietary software house just like Pixar and PDI. Besides doing commercials and animated shorts they have also done tons of FX for movies including Joe's Apartment, the CG aliens in Alien Resurrection and the penguin in Fight Club. They are in the same league as Pixar and PDI and I wouldn't discount them. Tghey seems to be going for a more classic cartoony feeling, like the old Warner Bros or tex Avery cartoons. personally I can't wait to see it. At SIGGRAPH Blue Sky had the short first teaser during the Electronic Theatre and I can tell you it was a success.
Here is the article, it mainly deals with Dreamworks Animation, but also touches on PDI. There is also Daniel Wexler's page, who is the main rendering guy at PDI:
If you can get your hands on the SIGGRAPH 2001 course notes on FX R&D, you'll see a very good discussion about this. Pixar presented the research that went into the hair and also the cloth animation, mainly Boo's shirt. You can even see pictures of Sulley with only the control hairs applied.
There have been many previous examples of CG hair in film and commercials, for photorealistic hair. Probably the best example was the remake of Mighty Joe Young, done by Dream Quest Images and ILM. Actually the guy that wrote the hair renderer for DQI, Rev Lebaredian, later made a product based on it called JIG, which has been used for many hair rendering related projects:
Many other FX studios have created their own propietary solutions or used the something like the Curve primitive in Photorealistic RenderMan. Many early project include a commercial with bees by PDI, the Island of Dr. Moreau by Digital Domain, Jumanji by ILM and many others. Other ones include Episode 1 which have many examples of hairy creatures. There has even been CG hair applied to real persons, like in What Lies Beneath.
Though of course Pixar did an amazing job with Sulley's hair for this film. They actually made a presentation this past SIGGRAPH at the FX R&D course. You could probably also get some onfo by looking through archives of the RenderMan newsgroup.
He mentions it was done in 4 old VAX/780s, done while RenderMan was still in development. No RIB, no shading language. RenderMan didn't get fully realized until a couple years later. The RenderMan Companion book which culminated the effort ((though it doesn't cover RIB) wasn't published until 1989.
Yes it the Vizualization program, part of the School of Architeture. Not only did they have graduates that went to Pixar but many that have gone to many FX and Animation facilities like ILM, Blue Sky Studios, Will Vinton studios, SPI, PDI and many others. You can check here:
Actually while Red's Dream does involve a clown and a dream he might be referring to Bingo. It was produced internally by Alias/Wavefront under the direction of Chris Landreth, to test the newly created Maya. It premiered at SIGGRAPH 98 in Orlando. You can see it here:
You can also get it on video and DVD. It's included in the SIGGRAPH 98 video review of the Electronic Theatre, and at least in one of the Odysey 3D DVDs/videos (some others also included many classic animation and shorts by PDI among others):
Yes it came before. But notice I said "full frame all digital compositing", not morphing FX or any other CG FX. There was a period when ILM had a mixed approach a transition because they were still not sure of digital compositing versus optical.
Even before Willow, ILM started using CG FX. Star trek 4 had the morphing heads captured from Cyberscans of the actors, Die Hard 2, Young Sherlock Holmes etc. Depending on what you consider digital FX, ILM was doing way before Last Crusade but still composited part or all the frame optically.
Yeah I think all the leftover tapes they had was what they brought to SIGGRAPH;-). At least someone on the booth told me that. Still a very nice gesture.
Yeah they had many propietary stuff. The Pixar Image Computer, which was the framebuffers you mentioned, were controlled by early SUNs. They (ILM) did their first fill fulm frame all digital composite on it (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade if memory serves).
They also came up with volume rendering (R. Drebin, L. Carpenter and P. Hanrahan), they even made some medical volume visualization back then. Lucas wanted to computerize the whole filmaking process. They had also the EditDroid (probably the first non-linear editor and later either sold or licensed to Avid), also a SoundDroid I believe, film scanners (I believe Richard Edlund was one of the first to experiment with these) and many other nifty stuff. Though like many things thy either remained internal or later became available or feasable with commercial things (like SGI's). Probably why if they developed their own CAE solution it probably died soon enough. By then SGI was already founded. Hey thanks for info, I'll make a note.
Yeah, but Pete Docter has been with Pixar for quite some time. Also Geri's Game and For the Birds were not directed by Lasseter, but Jan Pinkava and Ralph Eggleston respectively. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Pixar had an extended preview at SIGGRAPH 2001 of Monsters Inc. both at the Electronic Theatre and also in the FX R&D course.
Well there is also a VHS tape called Tiny Toy Stories that has all the classic Pixar Shorts from Luxo Jr. to Tin Toy. It's a bit hard to find but worth. Also from time to time Pixar have given tapes of their shorts (well at least Geri's Game, a months before it was attached to A Bugs Life) at SIGGRAPH. They are not the only ones, Blue Sky Studios also distributed Bunny on DVD at SIGGRAPH, very cool.
No, the original Star Wars displays were done by Larry Cuba. The Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group, which eventually became Pixar was not formed until 1979 (between Star Wars and Empire)
Well Pixar got started first as the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group back in 1979. Back in those days Triple I, one of the pioneer companies in commercial CG, did a test for Lucas that had several CG X-Wings flying around. This was for the FX work in Empire Strikes Back. Art Durinski and Gary Demos were among those involved. Unfortunately they couln't come to financial terms and Lucas opted to continue the traditional way but move ILM to Northern California. But Lucas was so impressed that he decided to start his own CG division. The first guy they hired was Ed Catmull but many others soon followed and the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group was born. They worked on maby things, from the Pixar Image Computer, film scanning, the beginnings of RenderMan and shading languages and digital compositing, among many things. They produced the Death Star hologram for Return of the Jedi. One of the last few things they did was the Andre and Wally B. short, that's why you'll see Lucasfilm credits in there.
But Catmull was always interested in doing animated movies while Lucas was interested in photorealistic effects. So he let Catmull look around and later in 1986 Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs (of course way before he went back to Apple). While Jobs might be the owner, if you want to equate Pixar with someone that would be Catmull (though there are many talented folks there). They also had an agreement that ILM would get first access to any new technology Pixar developed. And the rest as they say is history.
While I would love to see something like that happen I think we would have to wait for a long time. Some apps are really complex and specialized. I don't think we'll see anytime soon something like Maya, Softimage XSI, a Mediacomposer or Inferno like GPL app.
FX companies don't share most of their propietary code because 1) it's written by them, not taken from other GPL code and 2) they need that competitive advantage. Linux usage in FX is a relatively fairly recent occurence. And besides there is tons of propietary stuf that no one knows about outside those places. Sometimes you get brief insights at SIGGRAPH or in specialized publications. It's a very particular market that doesn't lend itself to just open stuff overnight. Then again from time to tiem you see stuff that could be the beginings of the ideas you propose. There is AQSIS (a RenderMan compliant renderer), Mesa and Falmaidan (a fluid simulator) at sourceforge.
There has been talk of FX companies of releasing a lot of code (Michael Goldfarb of Rhythm and Hues for example). It may eventually happen. Some companies have already released stuff or are working on it. Just check some of the RenderMan SIGGRAPH course notes.
Probably best way is to keep an eye on SIGGRAPH and the VESTECH meeting to see how much progress is done, it amazes me every year.
I think you got it a little bit backwards. You probably meant stuff ported from *nix (Irix mostly) to NT and then Mac maybe. At least the highend stuff like Softimage, Maya and Houdini. Some of the new stuff is actually being developed in Linux first now, like Softimage XSI 2.0 and Rayz. Shake has been ported to Linux too. It depends on the area.
That was probably Foundation Imaging who were pioneers in the TV FX area. They did use Lightwave on Macs, most notably for Babylon 5, and they did work on some of the Star Trek series (DS9 and Voyager). Eden FX (doing Enterprise) I believe is NT but don't quote me. But not all FX in Star Trek series were done in Lightwave. many were practical especially on the Next Generation. And even the CG ones, I know there were certain scenes in Woyager that were rendered in BMRT which doesn't have a Mac port.
But other shops like Blur (who did the Billy shot for Deep Rising), Digital Anvil (Wing Commander), and many of the boutiques that worked on the Lost in Space movie and Dungeons and Dragons used 3DMax. And there tons of examples of games and commercials also done under NT, sometimes Lightwave and 3DMax, but also Softimage, Maya and many others.
Re:Why should the GPL be a problem?
on
Behind the Scenes
·
· Score: 1
Well they either softened their stance or the techies are sneaking things without management knowing. Here is an article about the use of Python and Perl at Disney feature Animation:
And TSL is/was doing the same at least for some time. It would have been uncoceivable that DQI didn't use something GPL. During SIGGRAPH 2001 John P. Lewis of TSL demoed one of the apps he developed to remove the spots on a dog for 102 Dalmatians. It was running on a laptop with RedHat on it (6.2 I believe though it might have been older). It was quite amazing. They also used it on something else. Tal Lancaster also of Disney, in the RenderMan newsgroup mentioned he had used PRMan under Linux, though I think he didn't mentioned specifically being used for Dinosaur. Maybe they have changed since then.
Re:Once again Quake to the rescue
on
Behind the Scenes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's funny that you mention it. The Unreal engine was used by ILM to create a pre viz tool for Spielberg during the production of AI. Basicly it allowed Speilberg to have a 3D storyboarding tool. Read about it here:
Re:Windows *ever* used?
on
Behind the Scenes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It depends on the size of the FX company. Most major companies (ILM, SPI, Pixar, etc.) mostly use SGI/Irix for production, and also Macs, Suns and a few things here and there. Windows would only be used for office style apps.
Smaller shops (boutiques) probably use mostly Windows and also Macs. Companies like Blur, Digital Anvil, etc. Probably mot TV FX are done in Windows (Enterprise (Eden), Xena, etc.).
There was one time that Windows was given a chance. When Microsoft owned Softimage and released it for NT, I know that ILM at least did tests with it (a short film). While the short looked good in the end it was a failure. Apparently there were just too many issues of porting their in house software and also integrating it into their *nix network.
Funny you should mention this. If I remember correctly Ken Musgrave had a terrain renderer called Slartibartfast in the mid nineties while he was at GWU. Unfortunately I think those pages are long gone. You could check some old stuff from his webpage.
Well the thing is Ken Musgrave is one of the pioneers, if anything a lot of people that have posted code like this out there are based on Ken's numerous papers. He was a researcher with Mandelbrot, kinda developed "multifractals", given SIGGRAPH courses about terrain and procedural modeling, and has written several chapters for a great book "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural; Approach". He also worked for a time for or at Digital Domain, doing code a for the moon on Apollo 13, and procedural smoke for Dante's Peak (not used) and Titanic.
Ohh I thought I might be misreading;-). Actually yes in the context of the story, sending stuff for dailies and editorials is perfectly reasonable. I was thinking about Cineon files, found out that for 2K the size seems to be around 10 MB per frame depending on the format (from Cinesite's site and also the visual FX newsgroup). But for dailies it's just video size and it's quite reasonable. As the IGN article says, ILM has been doing it, and at least they did it for Jurassic Park. Spielberg might actually be doing it right now since after AI he jumped into Minority Report. In the JP case they used a satellite linkup.
Seems Picture Pipeline uses broadband which is interesting.
Well at SIGGRAPH nVidia had that demo running, stuff from the movie rendered in realtime displayed in HDTV. It was quite impressive. Still not even close to the quality of a final PRMan frame. Lighting and shaders were of lower quality, and the whole thing was not film rez. Still enough to make even the pros do a double take. Though SGI has been doing some of these stuff also. At SIGGRAPH 2000 they had this hige video wall kind of thing driver by an Onyx2 I believe rendering a car you could go in and out, stuff like for designing teams. Still it makes you wonder how much "consumer" grade stuff from nVidia has come along.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there were many obvious ones, but some were more inside jokes, you had to know about Pixar and the CG and FX industry. I was about the only person laughing at them at the thatre. The most obvious one was the "Harryhausen" restaurant (as in Ray Harryhausen, stop motion genius). The VR glasses in the TV, when Boo hands over a Jessie doll (from TS2) and the ball Luxo played with to Sulley, a crayon drawing of Mr. potatoe head, and many others. And there are probably tons I missed on a first viewing. I'll probably have to catch it again. They usually do this kind of stuff, there are many references like that in both Toy Stories.
That film is Ice Age, and it being done by Blue Sky Studios which Fox bought a few years ago along with VIFX (which they later sold to Rhythm and Hues). Blues Sky Studios have even won an Oscar for best animated short, "Bunny", just like Pixar did and they are CG veterans, founded in 1987 (one year after Pixar), though many of the principals are veterans from other facilities. They also are a mostly propietary software house just like Pixar and PDI. Besides doing commercials and animated shorts they have also done tons of FX for movies including Joe's Apartment, the CG aliens in Alien Resurrection and the penguin in Fight Club. They are in the same league as Pixar and PDI and I wouldn't discount them. Tghey seems to be going for a more classic cartoony feeling, like the old Warner Bros or tex Avery cartoons. personally I can't wait to see it. At SIGGRAPH Blue Sky had the short first teaser during the Electronic Theatre and I can tell you it was a success.
Blue Sky StudiosBunny site
Here is the article, it mainly deals with Dreamworks Animation, but also touches on PDI. There is also Daniel Wexler's page, who is the main rendering guy at PDI:
DreamWorks Feature Linux and Animation
PDI Renderfarm Statistics
If you can get your hands on the SIGGRAPH 2001 course notes on FX R&D, you'll see a very good discussion about this. Pixar presented the research that went into the hair and also the cloth animation, mainly Boo's shirt. You can even see pictures of Sulley with only the control hairs applied.
There have been many previous examples of CG hair in film and commercials, for photorealistic hair. Probably the best example was the remake of Mighty Joe Young, done by Dream Quest Images and ILM. Actually the guy that wrote the hair renderer for DQI, Rev Lebaredian, later made a product based on it called JIG, which has been used for many hair rendering related projects:
JIGJIG hair gallery
JIG credits
Many other FX studios have created their own propietary solutions or used the something like the Curve primitive in Photorealistic RenderMan. Many early project include a commercial with bees by PDI, the Island of Dr. Moreau by Digital Domain, Jumanji by ILM and many others. Other ones include Episode 1 which have many examples of hairy creatures. There has even been CG hair applied to real persons, like in What Lies Beneath.
Early CG hair (1995)FX for Jumanji (1996)
Articles on Might Joe Young
Hair in Mighty Joe Young
Though of course Pixar did an amazing job with Sulley's hair for this film. They actually made a presentation this past SIGGRAPH at the FX R&D course. You could probably also get some onfo by looking through archives of the RenderMan newsgroup.
Well here is a brief post by Tom Duff, one of Pixar's top guys, in the RenderMan newsgroup:
Pixar's renowned shortsHe mentions it was done in 4 old VAX/780s, done while RenderMan was still in development. No RIB, no shading language. RenderMan didn't get fully realized until a couple years later. The RenderMan Companion book which culminated the effort ((though it doesn't cover RIB) wasn't published until 1989.
Yes it the Vizualization program, part of the School of Architeture. Not only did they have graduates that went to Pixar but many that have gone to many FX and Animation facilities like ILM, Blue Sky Studios, Will Vinton studios, SPI, PDI and many others. You can check here:
Alumni of Vizlab at Texas A&M
Actually while Red's Dream does involve a clown and a dream he might be referring to Bingo. It was produced internally by Alias/Wavefront under the direction of Chris Landreth, to test the newly created Maya. It premiered at SIGGRAPH 98 in Orlando. You can see it here:
Chris Landreth portofolio at Maya MastersYou can also get it on video and DVD. It's included in the SIGGRAPH 98 video review of the Electronic Theatre, and at least in one of the Odysey 3D DVDs/videos (some others also included many classic animation and shorts by PDI among others):
Issue 125: SIGGRAPH 98 Electronic Theater Program
Computer Animation Marvels
Yes it came before. But notice I said "full frame all digital compositing", not morphing FX or any other CG FX. There was a period when ILM had a mixed approach a transition because they were still not sure of digital compositing versus optical.
Even before Willow, ILM started using CG FX. Star trek 4 had the morphing heads captured from Cyberscans of the actors, Die Hard 2, Young Sherlock Holmes etc. Depending on what you consider digital FX, ILM was doing way before Last Crusade but still composited part or all the frame optically.
Yeah I think all the leftover tapes they had was what they brought to SIGGRAPH ;-). At least someone on the booth told me that. Still a very nice gesture.
Yeah they had many propietary stuff. The Pixar Image Computer, which was the framebuffers you mentioned, were controlled by early SUNs. They (ILM) did their first fill fulm frame all digital composite on it (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade if memory serves).
They also came up with volume rendering (R. Drebin, L. Carpenter and P. Hanrahan), they even made some medical volume visualization back then. Lucas wanted to computerize the whole filmaking process. They had also the EditDroid (probably the first non-linear editor and later either sold or licensed to Avid), also a SoundDroid I believe, film scanners (I believe Richard Edlund was one of the first to experiment with these) and many other nifty stuff. Though like many things thy either remained internal or later became available or feasable with commercial things (like SGI's). Probably why if they developed their own CAE solution it probably died soon enough. By then SGI was already founded. Hey thanks for info, I'll make a note.
Yeah, but Pete Docter has been with Pixar for quite some time. Also Geri's Game and For the Birds were not directed by Lasseter, but Jan Pinkava and Ralph Eggleston respectively. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Pixar had an extended preview at SIGGRAPH 2001 of Monsters Inc. both at the Electronic Theatre and also in the FX R&D course.
They don't make that much money from RenderMan, their main source now is the animated movies. They don't even do commercials now.
Still if you wanted an open source RenderMan compliant renderer there is AQSIS hosted at Sourceforge.
AQSISAnd there are many others (mostly closed).
Well there is also a VHS tape called Tiny Toy Stories that has all the classic Pixar Shorts from Luxo Jr. to Tin Toy. It's a bit hard to find but worth. Also from time to time Pixar have given tapes of their shorts (well at least Geri's Game, a months before it was attached to A Bugs Life) at SIGGRAPH. They are not the only ones, Blue Sky Studios also distributed Bunny on DVD at SIGGRAPH, very cool.
No, the original Star Wars displays were done by Larry Cuba. The Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group, which eventually became Pixar was not formed until 1979 (between Star Wars and Empire)
Well Pixar got started first as the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group back in 1979. Back in those days Triple I, one of the pioneer companies in commercial CG, did a test for Lucas that had several CG X-Wings flying around. This was for the FX work in Empire Strikes Back. Art Durinski and Gary Demos were among those involved. Unfortunately they couln't come to financial terms and Lucas opted to continue the traditional way but move ILM to Northern California. But Lucas was so impressed that he decided to start his own CG division. The first guy they hired was Ed Catmull but many others soon followed and the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group was born. They worked on maby things, from the Pixar Image Computer, film scanning, the beginnings of RenderMan and shading languages and digital compositing, among many things. They produced the Death Star hologram for Return of the Jedi. One of the last few things they did was the Andre and Wally B. short, that's why you'll see Lucasfilm credits in there.
But Catmull was always interested in doing animated movies while Lucas was interested in photorealistic effects. So he let Catmull look around and later in 1986 Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs (of course way before he went back to Apple). While Jobs might be the owner, if you want to equate Pixar with someone that would be Catmull (though there are many talented folks there). They also had an agreement that ILM would get first access to any new technology Pixar developed. And the rest as they say is history.
While I would love to see something like that happen I think we would have to wait for a long time. Some apps are really complex and specialized. I don't think we'll see anytime soon something like Maya, Softimage XSI, a Mediacomposer or Inferno like GPL app.
FX companies don't share most of their propietary code because 1) it's written by them, not taken from other GPL code and 2) they need that competitive advantage. Linux usage in FX is a relatively fairly recent occurence. And besides there is tons of propietary stuf that no one knows about outside those places. Sometimes you get brief insights at SIGGRAPH or in specialized publications. It's a very particular market that doesn't lend itself to just open stuff overnight. Then again from time to tiem you see stuff that could be the beginings of the ideas you propose. There is AQSIS (a RenderMan compliant renderer), Mesa and Falmaidan (a fluid simulator) at sourceforge.
AQSIS
falmaidan
Mesa
There has been talk of FX companies of releasing a lot of code (Michael Goldfarb of Rhythm and Hues for example). It may eventually happen. Some companies have already released stuff or are working on it. Just check some of the RenderMan SIGGRAPH course notes.
Probably best way is to keep an eye on SIGGRAPH and the VESTECH meeting to see how much progress is done, it amazes me every year.
I think you got it a little bit backwards. You probably meant stuff ported from *nix (Irix mostly) to NT and then Mac maybe. At least the highend stuff like Softimage, Maya and Houdini. Some of the new stuff is actually being developed in Linux first now, like Softimage XSI 2.0 and Rayz. Shake has been ported to Linux too. It depends on the area.
That was probably Foundation Imaging who were pioneers in the TV FX area. They did use Lightwave on Macs, most notably for Babylon 5, and they did work on some of the Star Trek series (DS9 and Voyager). Eden FX (doing Enterprise) I believe is NT but don't quote me. But not all FX in Star Trek series were done in Lightwave. many were practical especially on the Next Generation. And even the CG ones, I know there were certain scenes in Woyager that were rendered in BMRT which doesn't have a Mac port.
But other shops like Blur (who did the Billy shot for Deep Rising), Digital Anvil (Wing Commander), and many of the boutiques that worked on the Lost in Space movie and Dungeons and Dragons used 3DMax. And there tons of examples of games and commercials also done under NT, sometimes Lightwave and 3DMax, but also Softimage, Maya and many others.
Well they either softened their stance or the techies are sneaking things without management knowing. Here is an article about the use of Python and Perl at Disney feature Animation:
Python Helps Disney Write a New ScriptAnd TSL is/was doing the same at least for some time. It would have been uncoceivable that DQI didn't use something GPL. During SIGGRAPH 2001 John P. Lewis of TSL demoed one of the apps he developed to remove the spots on a dog for 102 Dalmatians. It was running on a laptop with RedHat on it (6.2 I believe though it might have been older). It was quite amazing. They also used it on something else. Tal Lancaster also of Disney, in the RenderMan newsgroup mentioned he had used PRMan under Linux, though I think he didn't mentioned specifically being used for Dinosaur. Maybe they have changed since then.
It's funny that you mention it. The Unreal engine was used by ILM to create a pre viz tool for Spielberg during the production of AI. Basicly it allowed Speilberg to have a 3D storyboarding tool. Read about it here:
Unreal CityIt depends on the size of the FX company. Most major companies (ILM, SPI, Pixar, etc.) mostly use SGI/Irix for production, and also Macs, Suns and a few things here and there. Windows would only be used for office style apps.
Smaller shops (boutiques) probably use mostly Windows and also Macs. Companies like Blur, Digital Anvil, etc. Probably mot TV FX are done in Windows (Enterprise (Eden), Xena, etc.).
There was one time that Windows was given a chance. When Microsoft owned Softimage and released it for NT, I know that ILM at least did tests with it (a short film). While the short looked good in the end it was a failure. Apparently there were just too many issues of porting their in house software and also integrating it into their *nix network.
Funny you should mention this. If I remember correctly Ken Musgrave had a terrain renderer called Slartibartfast in the mid nineties while he was at GWU. Unfortunately I think those pages are long gone. You could check some old stuff from his webpage.
Well the thing is Ken Musgrave is one of the pioneers, if anything a lot of people that have posted code like this out there are based on Ken's numerous papers. He was a researcher with Mandelbrot, kinda developed "multifractals", given SIGGRAPH courses about terrain and procedural modeling, and has written several chapters for a great book "Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural; Approach". He also worked for a time for or at Digital Domain, doing code a for the moon on Apollo 13, and procedural smoke for Dante's Peak (not used) and Titanic.
Here is his webpage:
Ken Musgrave's websiteSaw Mojoworld briefly at SIGGRAPH and it looked neat.
Ohh I thought I might be misreading ;-). Actually yes in the context of the story, sending stuff for dailies and editorials is perfectly reasonable. I was thinking about Cineon files, found out that for 2K the size seems to be around 10 MB per frame depending on the format (from Cinesite's site and also the visual FX newsgroup). But for dailies it's just video size and it's quite reasonable. As the IGN article says, ILM has been doing it, and at least they did it for Jurassic Park. Spielberg might actually be doing it right now since after AI he jumped into Minority Report. In the JP case they used a satellite linkup.
Seems Picture Pipeline uses broadband which is interesting.
Well at SIGGRAPH nVidia had that demo running, stuff from the movie rendered in realtime displayed in HDTV. It was quite impressive. Still not even close to the quality of a final PRMan frame. Lighting and shaders were of lower quality, and the whole thing was not film rez. Still enough to make even the pros do a double take. Though SGI has been doing some of these stuff also. At SIGGRAPH 2000 they had this hige video wall kind of thing driver by an Onyx2 I believe rendering a car you could go in and out, stuff like for designing teams. Still it makes you wonder how much "consumer" grade stuff from nVidia has come along.
Good luck on Maya.