brainwagon

Last night we had a screening of Hoodwinked, the new animated feature by director Cory Edwards and co-directed by Todd Edwards. It’s a retelling of the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood, and features the vocal talents of Glenn Close as Granny, Ann Hathaway as Red, James Belushi as the Woodsman, veteran voice over […]

Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white images. You basically scribble hints into the image, and it propagates the color to nearby pixels that it determines should be the same color. At right, you can click and […]

Metamerist has linked to me before, it seems only fair that I should return the favor, especially since he came up with this terrific Computational Photography Link Roundup. I’ve linked to some of the articles listed before, since I’m generally interested in the topic, but there are some new bits here too. Good stuff.

A group at Stanford has created an interesting new camera using a combination of conventional camera and a microlens array to form a “plenoptic” camera. This link hit our photography mailing list yesterday, and I spent some time reading it. It’s really quite clever. Basically it uses the microlens array to serve as thousands of […]

Leo has shamed us all by writing up a webpage detailing all the things he found interesting at SIGGRAPH 2005. Very nice.

This is mostly just a reminder to myself to look on the Applied Geometry homepage for these course notes on Discrete Differential Geometry.

Holy 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Next week I’ll be leaving for SIGGRAPH, the premiere computer graphics conference. Today I’m trying to work through my agenda, make lists of papers that I want to see, figure out the reception schedule and the list of parties that I’d like to attend. While doing so I noticed that the Computer Animation Festival trailer […]

I’ll be trundling off to SIGGRAPH at the end of the month. Any attendees (who I don’t see everyday at lunch here at Pixar) want to get together and schmooze a bit? I haven’t been in a few years, so my dance card is likely to be pretty clear. Drop me an email and let […]

Cool link today from Boing Boing which extracted elements from the game Halflife 2 and embedded them into real scenes using high dynamic range lighting. This kind of approach is one that I think amateurs could pursue in making their own hybrid CG films. Good stuff. Boing Boing: HOWTO add Half Life 2 elements to […]

Courtesy of Mark Lentczer, have a gander at Context Free, an implementation of Chris Coyne’s design grammars. This puts me in mind of Alvy Ray Smith’a graftals or L-systems which I first read about 20 years ago. After a few minutes of playing, I came up with this: A few minutes more hacking resulted in […]

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the […]

I’m always interested in raytracing and programming languages, so the OCaml Ray Tracer seems pretty cool to me. What’s nice about it as an example of Ocaml code is that it’s very clearly written, and reflects some of the niceties of the functional style.