Monthly Archives: August 2005

Pixar Animation’s Joe Ranft Killed in Auto Accident

Joe Ranft, You Will Be MissedHoly crap, I spent the day at home today, and was scanning my usual blogs when I read this shocking article that Pixarian Joe Ranft had been killed in an automobile crash. While I didn’t know Joe personally, his infectious smile and humor were a regular feature of the halls at Pixar, as was his voice which would occasionally lapse into his Germanic Heimlich to good comic effect. He was only 45, and had many stories and smiles left to bring the world. The world has truly lost one of the good ones.

Cartoon Brew has some more recollections of Joe.

Holy crap, this sucks.

Addendum: My neighbor Sam sent me an email earlier today, asking me how things were at Pixar. I sent him back a routine email, since I hadn’t heard the bad news. Today was a scheduled group river rafting trip which I bowed out on, since I have had bad experiences with river rafting the last three times I’ve went. Only later did I realize what he was really asking, after I read the news on Boing Boing. Serious bummage.

Addendum2: Ronnie Del Carmen reminisces more powerfully than I ever could.

Fluid Simulation for Games

Every once in a while, it disturbs me that there are parts of the computer graphics world that I rarely delve into, and simulation near the top of the list. I did spend some time fifteen years ago trying to understand inverse kinematics and the like, mostly in the context of robot motion planning, but all that knowledge has long faded. Still every once in a while, I try to dust off my brain and read a few papers on topics I’m not comfortable with, and maybe even stare at some code.

Fluid in a BoxLuckily for me (and many others) there is a lot of good work being done and published. In the world of fluid simulation, some of the most accessible work has been done by Jos Stam, who kindly made his publications, notes, and code available on his webpage. His demo code is about 100 lines of C, includes nothing all that mysterious, and can be adapted to do more complex fluid flows. Check out this short movie to see it in operation. I’m thinking of adapting it to make a spiffy screensaver, mostly as an excuse to delve into its mysteries.

Dr.Weil on EGCG

The other day I was watching TV and saw an advertisement for One a Day Weight Smart Vitamins. Most of the diet plans that I’ve seen lately recommend augmenting your diet with vitamin supplements, something that I’ve done only irregularly through my year and a half attempt to reduce my weight. Since I was out of vitamins, I trudged down to Long’s and picked up a bottle. The selling point of this particular brand is that it contains EGCG (green tea extract) which they claim enhances your metabolism, and doses of chromium, selenium and B vitamins. I was curious about EGCG’s effects on the body. Studies have shown that consumption of green tea can have lots of good health benefits, including effects on inhibiting the growth of certain cancer tumors and possibly effects on luekemia. But I found it relatively hard to find data on the effects on diet and metabolism. The best link I found was:

Yahoo! Health Ask the Expert: Dr.Weil’s All Q&A’s > Can a Green Tea Component Promote Weight Loss?

Despite its many beneficial effects, I know of no good evidence to suggest that EGCG promotes weight loss. A study at the University of Chicago did show that rats injected with EGCG lost their appetites and ate up to 60 percent less than normal, but there was no effect on the rats’ appetites when they were given EGCG orally. The researchers who conducted the study speculated that long-term oral administration of EGCG might have the same effect on appetite as the injections but cautioned that humans would have to drink green tea constantly to get the results seen in the animal study. Furthermore, the EGCG injections caused hormonal changes in the rats that could have negative effects on health if they occurred in humans.

In other words, pretty speculative effects for weight loss. Dr. Weil does recommend drinking green tea, which (because you are consuming multiple cups of a liquid) probably does help you eat less, and has other proven health benefits.

Finding good information about diet is still really difficult.

Virtual Street Reality

From one of our internal mailing lists at work, here is a link to some of the work of English street artist Julian Beever. His drawings are unique anamorphic views: when seen from certain angles, they look normal and three dimensional, although from other views they seem oddly distorted. The geek in my wants to turn this into a treatise on the homogeneous 4×4 transforms we use in computer graphics all the time, but instead I’ll just leave the art to speak for itself.

Buffalo Chicken and Blue Cheese Dipping Sauce

While watching Food Network the other day, I saw an episode of Calorie Commando that featured a dish I thought I might like to try: Buffalo Chicken and Blue Cheese Dipping Sauce. I gave this a whack this weekend. Basically I took a bunch of chicken breasts that I had lying around, and cut them up into smallish uniform pieces. I then soaked them in some Louisiana hot sauce for an hour, took them out, dusted them with a mixture of Pappy’s Cajun seasoning and flour, and then fried them for three minutes a side in a couple tablespoons of hot olive oil. I also prepared their Blue Cheese dipping sauce. Carmen proclaimed them delicious. I thought they were good, but could have been a bit spicier. Perhaps I’ll use more pepper flake and cayenne in the flour mixture next time.

It’s actually not the lowest point recipe you’ll find: in the portions specified in the recipe (4 servings in 12 oz of chicken tenders) it’s about 7 Weight Watchers Points which means that I probably consumed about 14 or 16 points worth, but they are tasty and when paired with some fresh vegetables can be delicious. Certainly they help satisfy the craving for something like KFC which would be much, much worse.

A Homemade PBX

Frequent readers of this blog will note that I’m a bit of a gadget junkie, and I’m particularly interested in people who build rather than merely use gadgetry. In that spirit, a while ago I played a bit with getting Asterix, a free PBX system running on my Linux box. This guy definitely has done one better: he built his own hardware pbx, complete with eight telephone extensions and the ability to process three voice calls at once. Neat, but the coolest thing was his justification of the project.

The only value this thing has is entertainment value. It’s great when there are guests with bored kids, and once set up it gets plenty of attention from the adults too, if they are engineers that is.

I don’t actually use it for anything.

It was worth building because it finally scratched that childhood itch.

There is no better reason to scratch.

Stealth

Warning, there will be spoilers below, so if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read further than this paragraph. I liked the movie, thought it was fun, but there are some things that I just have to rant about, and they will probably give away some of the plot elements (such as they are). You are warned.

Still with me? Okay.

Stealth has a premise which you could view as either promising or weak: three hot-shot jet pilots are joined by a cybernetic UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that is struck by lightning and suddenly starts learning… TO KILL! If you have relatively low standards, you might think this would form the basis of a reasonable action film, and you’d be right. There are lots of pretty cool effects of jet planes moving around at high speed, blowing things up. I found it exciting.

And dreadfully, painfully stupid.

Honestly, this film would make a great demo reel if you were trying to get a job doing effects, but in terms of its writing and direction, it’s just all over the map. In no particular order:

  • The UAV is struck by lightning, and supposedly becomes super intelligent. What does it do with this newfound knowledge? Flies around for a while. Accidently (more than anything else) manages to kill off Jamie Foxx. Pursues a completely fictitious mission it finds in its database, which it then abandons. And that’s about it. You’d think the UAV would be central to the story, but ultimately, it is just hardware that serves as a flimsy premise for…
  • An incredibly weak love story between pilots Ben Gannon and Kara Wade (played by Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel). They are in love. Really. We can tell because at the end of the film they admit it to each other. After all, he rescued her as she…
  • Fled to the DMZ from a crash landing in North Korea. Which she crosses. On foot. With only a couple of people shooting at her. Neatly avoiding any landmines.
  • Oh yeah, you can’t make a neat stable ring of airplane fuel hang in mid air for minutes at a time.
  • It’s nice that ground scenes are filmed in Thailand, but it appears the only reason for that plot point was to give the actors an excuse to lounge around in Thailand, or perhaps an excuse to see Ms. Biel in a bikini.
  • Oh, the smart genius who invents the UAV? His name is Keith Orbit, played by Richard Roxburgh. Absolutely useless to the plot. Tells you nothing, shows you nothing. Richard must have slept with the writers to get a part in this film, because certainly he does nothing on the screen.
  • Oh, there is some subplot about treachery. I’ve spoiled that subplot by telling you everything you are going to learn about it in the film.

Honestly, you’d think that a film nominally about a super-intelligent killer aircraft would feature a killer aircraft displaying some super-intelligence flying around killing things. Did they not read their own treatment?

It’s fun. It’s got explosions. Rent it, or see it in a matinee and be prepared to heckle.

A’s Lead the AL West

Athletics lead the AL WestFor the second day in a row, the A’s pull out a come from behind victory over their rivals in the AL West, the Somewhere Angels from Some Other Place. The A’s trailed 0-4 going into the bottom of the 7th, but scored four times to tie the game. Then, in the bottom of the ninth with Kendell on third, Crosby on second, and two outs, Anaheim reliever Francisco Rodriguez was getting a toss back from the catcher, but it ticked off his glove and rolled behind him. Kendell was alert, and bolted for home, and scored on a slide ahead of the throw of the recovered ball. The box score reads:

J. Kendall scored on fielder’s indifference, B. Crosby to second on F. Rodriguez’s fielding error

The A’s lead their division for the first time this year.

Rockin’.

Best of Show from Renderman Users Group Meeting

Each year Pixar tosses a Renderman User’s Group meeting at SIGGRAPH. In the past few years, we’ve invited some of our users to present some of their techniques to a wide audience in a portion of the program we call Stupid RAT (Renderman Artist Tricks). Each year, there seems to be at least one presentation that really captures your attention, and this year the award goes to Hal Bertram and The Interaction Trick.

The trick was actually pretty simple: to use the raytracing capabilities of Renderman (essentially a batch process) in an interactive viewer. It’s brilliant really. Try watching the videos and reading the notes. We are all very impressed.