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Back in May, while they were filming the documentary for the Toy Story 10th Anniversary Edition, Susan and I nonchalantly wandered into the Pixar atrium to get coffee and to make sure we’d finally make it onto a Pixar DVD.

It was released on Sunday. Got my hands it today, loaded the documentary, found this is the best view you get of me: slouching in some very weird posture, only the back of my head visible. Susan is recognizable at least.

At other times (probably when I actually peered over my shoulder), Pete’s head conveniently blocks me from view. That’s Brenden in the red shirt.

Sigh.

Neither of the two patent applications I actually wrote up are online yet, but Patent Application 20050179686: Flexible and modified multiresolution geometry caching based on ray differentials, which for some reason has my name on it, is up on the USPTO site.

SIGGRAPH came and went last week. It was in Los Angeles again this year. Next year in Boston hopefully marks the return to the alternating coast format. Certainly, seeing the smog and urban sprawl that is L.A. from the plane early on Sunday put me immediately in a resigned mood.

I spent most of the time at the Pixar booth again. I did make it to George Lucas’ keynote. It wasn’t much to speak of, someone obviously noted that Lucas isn’t a great speaker and instead put him on a comfy couch with a moderator, so it ended up being an interview – mostly a rehash of things you’ve read in Cinefex or other trade rags. I will admit that I’m enough of a fanboy to have said “Cool!” at the sight of the full size X-Wing sitting in the lobby of the L.A. convention centre. At the booth I avoided handing out bronze teapots (no posters this year!) by talking about RenderMan for Maya (which is looking great) or in the inner sanctum attending meetings. All in all it was a very busy week.

The user’s group meeting went well. Hal Bertram got a well deserved standing ovation for his Stupid Rat Trick (which can be seen here). Release 13 was announced, which means I can mention one of the things I’ve been working on lately has been multithreading. Along with the SSE work I’ve been doing on and off this year it’s kind of interesting to find myself programming at a level I haven’t been before; right next to the metal, so to speak.

Electronic Theatre was in an exhibit hall again. I think I will be happy to live the rest of my life without having to watch another weird French animated short ever again, although I did disturb others with my laughter at Fallen Art.

The Friday after, Susan and I spent two hours at the Tutankhamun exhibit at LACMA. It was ok. I didn’t think it was worth the $25, although to be fair our ticket probably got us into the rest of LACMA and we didn’t bother. It was still cool to be two feet away from things that I’d seem in National Geographic as a kid. My chief complaint was that the flow through the exhibit sucked. The signs were too small and generally only on one side of the glass, even though you could quite easily have had people on all sides of the exhibits. As well, the sarcophagi and burial masks weren’t there, replaced by a sarcophagus of Tut’s grandmother-in-law (!), and some artifacts buried next to him: a golden dagger, a diadem, chestpieces, etc. Cool nonetheless, but not really what captures the imagination about King Tut. I kind of hoped for a linen wrapped mummy and had to settle for a metal cast of his skull.

We wrapped up the week with a short jaunt on Santa Monica beach. A latent cold manifested on the way home and I’ve spent the last week coughing and hacking. Apart from one party, a couple of reunions, and a dinner with He Who Shall Not Be Googled and friends, I think that covers SIGGRAPH 2005.

Another milestone at work. PRMan 12.5 was released today, although the announcements don’t seem to have made it to Pixar’s web site yet. Yes, raytracing really is a lot faster in this release. The factor of three mentioned in the release notes aren’t an exaggeration, so if you’re doing a movie with occlusion, you should upgrade pronto. No, we weren’t doing something stupid in previous releases, it was a concerted optimization effort that paid off handsomely.

Of course, the real reason to upgrade is hierarchical subdivision surfaces since they’re the coolest thing since sliced bread. Locally refined detail only where you need it, and even the ability to animate in a hierarchical fashion – think deforming a character’s torso to show him breathing in and out; then think deforming just the part of his chest wall where his heart flutters. Easy with hsubdivs without having to think about modelling the character that way from the get go. Even if you don’t buy into hierarchical edits, hierarchical subdivs along with saved attributes solve the problem of applying different shading sets to different pieces of the same mesh and still have those pieces meet in a continuous fashion (and without any alpha holes), without having to resort to specifying disjoint meshes with overlapping faces.

Can you tell which part of the software I worked hardest on?

It’s late Sunday night and no, I’m not making a political statement. I just honestly forgot they were on until I read some fellow Pixarian blogs. I was far too engrossed in my latest project, which involves a musical commission. After finally realising that music notation software is quite a lot simpler than pencil and ink on paper, I made much progress since I started on Thursday, as evidenced by the following excerpt. Think about the kind of music I listen to if you want a hint on identifying it.

I promise I’ll go into more details about this soon since what’s involved are a perfect confluence of everything I find interesting in life: music, software, friends, and utterly baroque processes linking them all.

In the meantime, congratulations to everyone involved in The Incredibles for our two new shiny gold statuettes. Also, it’s late notice but I should mention that Wayne and I will be giving a talk Wednesday evening at the Linux Movies Group. Apparently no charge or reservations necessary, so if you’re in L.A and want to hear me blather about PRMan drop by. I promise not to work in too many digs about programming on Linux. I guess I should stop procrastinating and start working on that presentation.

I was debugging some motion blur issues in RenderMan the other day, using scene data from the Incredibles, and rendered this picture quite by accident. Bob Parr and family, sucked into a matrix singularity.

C’mon Apple, at least get your math right. The Mac mini does look like a winner though. I predict geeks (like me) who are sick of fixing their relatives’ virus and spyware infested Windows boxes will cause this thing to fly off the shelves.

I had a meeting with a patent attorney today. One of those frankly more distasteful aspects of the job – not the meeting itself, since the attorney is a perfectly nice guy, just the entire patenting thing. But I really don’t want to get into a discussion on software patents, so to get the point some interesting factoids I learned today: there are less than five thousand patent examiners in the U.S., and the average time spent examining a patent is twenty hours. This surprised me, since my gut reaction was ten minutes. I guess I kind of figured that a lot of silly patents get filed, even with the filing fees being what they are. Also, patent examiners must be way more specialised than I would guess, since the backlog for computer network security related patents is around three years, whereas other computer related patents seem to be taking around one year or so to process. If you do the math, this means the maximum throughput of the patent office is maybe around half a million patents a year. And that as was pointed out to me is perhaps a somewhat dubious way of quantifying the rate of human progress, at least in the US.

It’s rather coincidental this meeting occurred today, given recent news related to patents. In particular, IBM “released” 500 patents to open source (today’s press release). Before one gets all excited about this simply because the words “open source” are involved, one might check and find out that IBM owns more than 40000 patents, so this is a very small part of their overall portfolio. And if you look at the specific patents being released it’s clear a lot of this seems to have something to do with a processor. What is IBM about to release? Think PS3 hardware. Then think about getting gcc to support this right off the bat. So really in the end it just looks like.. well, business as usual in this silly industry of ours.

A different sort of book review: my copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook showed up today. Folks, this isn’t your grandma’s copy of The Joy of Cooking. The words “fuck the Health Department” are featured prominently in at least one recipe. I throughly enjoyed his other books (which weren’t cookbooks, but were about food), and it’s written in the same sort of style, and yet the recipes actually look quite doable – at least as far as authentic French bistro food goes – there does seem to be an emphasis on developing a cozy relationship with a butcher. Fortunately, you can always just go to Chinatown instead – and Bourdain even recommends this! Cool! Since I’m not one to blanch at things like tripe or pig’s feet or lamb’s tongue, I’m already dying to try some of them. Highly recommended and I’ve only done skimming half of the volume so far. Now where do I get veal bones in Seattle?

After flying down two Fridays ago for Susan’s housewarming party, we attended the Incredibles wrap party on the following Saturday. This involved a bit of dressing up: a full tuxedo and vest for the first time in my life. Apparently to office mates, I “clean up well”. Hmph. Needless to say, Susan looks better even when I do clean up.

First, there was the movie premiere at the Paramount Theatre – this year we apparently masqueraded as a insurance company stockholder meeting. The Pixar singers (including Susan) outdid themselves for their tenth anniversary with a medley including music from a certain 80′s song by Bonnie Tyler (that I actually have on my iPod, scarily enough). As for the movie itself, it was great. Not quite our best work – to me, Toy Story 2 still holds that title – but it was funnier throughout than Monsters and Nemo, definitely on the edgy side, and still touching without being mawkishly sentimental, all at once. And of course it’s nice to see Pixar finally doing movies with explosions and giant robots, and the gratuitous special effects count was way up there. There’s a cute short in front (“Boundin’”) that I have to admit I’m a little less enthused about, and we saw a surprise after the credits which I’m not sure will make it to the theater, but I’m guessing should be on the DVD. (But everyone reading this will stay through the credits, just to see our names, right?)

The excellent party afterwards was held a air hangar at Alameda naval base – definitely an improvement on the space situation from last year’s version. Sadly, this is one of the few decent pictures I got all night, since my camera definitely doesn’t do well in the dark. It’s the outside of the air hangar, lit up with the Incredibles logo.

After a short week to recover, this past weekend included opening night for Seattle Opera’s rendition of Rigoletto. Setting it during Mussolini’s time period was an interesting choice, although to me it didn’t have much emotional impact other than costumes and settings. Kim Josephson and Norah Amsellem were amazing together as Rigoletto and Gilda, Frank Lopardo much less so as the Duke, although I suppose I’m forever ruined by recordings of Pavarotti in the role.

That’s about it for two weeks. levork.org seems to have yet another bad hard drive (although it could have been something to do with the upgrade to Fedora Core 2) and Speakeasy has been having outage issues, which hasn’t made connectivity and blogging easy. Vonage VoIP service at least has been painlessly set up – more on that later.

As I wait for builds at work, I occasionally update an informal list of entirely CG animated films. I was doing this today (reminded by tomorrow’s release of Shark Tale) and updated what I knew of the CG movie releases for 2005 (most of these dates are from IMDB, these aren’t state secrets):

• Valiant (Vanguard Animation) – March
• Robots (Blue Sky Studios) – March 11
• Foodfight! (Threshold Digital Research Labs) – May
• Madagascar (DreamWorks) – May 27
• Chicken Little (Walt Disney Pictures) – July 1
• Over The Hedge (DreamWorks) – November
• Cars (Pixar Animation Studios) – November 4
• Delgo – A Hero’s Journey (Fathom Studios) – unknown date

Looks like it’s going to be one heck of a crowded schedule. By my reckoning, more movies will be released in the single year 2005 than were released in the three years from 2002 to 2004 (this year’s crop including Shrek 2, the aforementioned Shark Tale, The Polar Express, and of course our very own The Incredibles). 2006 looks just as busy, with at least nine movies that I know of. So much for this CG animation thing being a fad.

I just found this out this past weekend the house has another completely separate line to the sewer. I found out in the ugliest way possible: laundry/kitchen water backed up into the basement. It was tree roots again. I already had Roto-Rooter in to clear the other line earlier this year and was all smug that I’d actually done some maintenance to prevent a repeat of last year’s disaster (which I don’t seem to have blogged about – the main sewer line backed up and destroyed a lot of the vinyl tile I’d put in a scant few weeks earlier) – and now this occurs again. Fortunately I caught it early enough to prevent any real mess. I’m all for redundancy in many things, but having two entirely separate lines connecting my house to the sewer sucks.

SIGGRAPH last week was rather boring. We were excited about the youth and hipness of the attendees this year until we realised they were actually the X-Games spectators heading to the Staples center next door. The cutbacks were annoying; no buses were running in the middle of the day making lunch difficult or undigestable, and the Electronic Theatre was in Exhibit Hall K – not a movie theatre experience by any stretch of the imagination.

I didn’t go to many technical presentations; the Weta course was an exception, and it was very good. I spent a lot of time at the booth where RenderMan for Maya got a lot of interest. While there I was able to catch up with random acquaintances or meet people I’d communicated with only via e-mail – for some reason, a lot more than in years past. The higher attendance this year probably helped a lot. And the User’s Group meeting seemed to go very well despite ourselves.

The CirculaFloor and the LumiSight Table were probably the coolest things I saw, both in the Emerging Technologies exhibit. The latter was being demoed with a video poker application. I can already see this being adopted by Las Vegas real soon now.

After Thursday we visited Jeff and his now-fiancée Cathy in the OC. We went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center and ogled plastinated human bodies. The pregnant woman and the guy holding his own skin ala Michelangelo were particularly disturbing. After a walk on Long Beach and dinner at Roscoe’s, the week was over and we were soon back to work.

It’s been quiet this week. Greg and Agi visited Tuesday on their way to Disneyland, Lohengrin was at the opera on Wednesday, complete with animatronic swan and mystical Grail knight references. Off to Vancouver today to visit family this weekend, and pay respect to the General (uncle) who is not doing very well with cancer.