Category Archives: Computer Graphics

Movie Review: Hoodwinked

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 master Patrick Warburton as the Wolf, David Ogden Stiers as Flippers, a suave investigating frog, and Andy Dick as Boingo the rabbit. The plotline is a fractured fairly tale: the story you know isn’t the real story…

I’ll get the negatives out of the way right off the bat, because I’m not really sure how to be nice about this. In terms of visual effects and art design, this movie is not exactly going to knock your socks off. The characters have a very wooden look to them: the characters have an extremely limited range of facial motion and the animation on the whole appears rather stiff. The net result of this is that the entire movie reminds you of some of the old stop-motion Rankin-Bass features you’d see around christmas. The lighting overall is, well, as near as I can tell, there was no lighting. It really bothered me for the first ten or fifteen minutes, especially when I realized that the highlight in Red’s eyes was actually painted on, and stuck to her eye as she looked around. Bleh. There was a couple of times when Granny was center stage and you could literally see some strange polygonal effects around her mouth. Double bleh. And you should never have a roller coaster like scene without motion blur. Yuck.

Oh, and the music? Mostly terrible, although the villain’s song (mercifully, the last in the movie) was somewhat better, and didn’t seem contrived.

Okay, it’s not the prettiest movie, what’s to like?

HoodwinkedThe vocal performances were on the whole quite good, although I couldn’t really understand what accent Jim Belushi was trying for. Stiers does an amazing job as Flippers, I never would have recognized him as the urbane frog if he hadn’t been listed in the credits. Andy Dick and Glenn close also do well, as does rapper Xzibit as Chief Grizzly.

The story is actually pretty good. Early in the movie I thought it was going to be dreadful, but I think that may have been more of a reaction to the problems I had with the visual look of the film, and that’s probably something that’s fairly unique to people like me who work in the industry. Once I sort of got around that, I began to find quite a bit to like about the story, and by the end, I thought it was actually pretty fun. If you spent $10 to see it, you might feel a bit cheated, but if you got in on a cheap matinee, I would think you might be pretty allright with that.

I stuck around at the end to watch the credits, and it’s pretty clear that they didn’t spend the kind of money that studios like Pixar and PDI spend: their credits are remarkably short. For them to release a movie like this at all and get a national distribution deal is a credit to them.

Overall, I’m going to give the movie a B-, but I’m probably being mean because I stare at computer generated images all day long. Read some user reviews on Yahoo! or whatever if you’d like to get a glimpse at a more well-rounded view. It’s rated PG: some very young children at our screening found the growling wolf pretty intense, they did not like him at all but I suspect most kids over the age of eight will be fine.

[tags]Movies,Movie Review,Hoodwinked[/tags]

It’s a Colorful Life!

It's a Wonderful Life

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 get my version of It’s a Wonderful Life, appropriate for the holiday season, if somewhat garish overall.

Okay, I’ve goofed around enough this morning. Off to Christmas shop.

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera

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 tiny lenses. Each of these “sub-lenses” images the target scene over a narrow field of view from a different spatial location. Then, computer software can take these individual images and recombine them in flexible and clever ways: allowing you to refocus images, shift perspective, and all sorts of other cool ideas.

Very neat stuff.

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.

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.

SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Trailer Available

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 was available online. This is even cooler than normal because I know the Computer Animation Festival Chair: it’s my next door neighbor and former Pixarian Sam Lord Black. Well done Sam, and I’ll be mooching party invites off you later. 🙂

Anyone going to SIGGRAPH?

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 me know what days you’ll be around and maybe we’ll try to get together for dinner or something.

Context Free

Example PictureCourtesy 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:

Brainwagon Receding

A few minutes more hacking resulted in the following branching structure (click on it to waste my bandwidth and download the 2000×2000 image):

Braintree

More fun with reflecting balls

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 overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:

Cylindrical Projection of My Office

I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):


Cube Map of My Office

It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.

Still, fun stuff.