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. [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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. [...] » Read more

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. [...] » Read more

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 [...] » Read more

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): [...] » Read more

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, [...] » Read more

Life has been eventful; this blog has not reflected that. Random noteworthy happenings from the last few months: High school friends visited for a Sonics game a couple of months ago, and I was dragged out to the golf course for the first time in my life. On a beautiful Saturday morning, I shot 68 [...] » Read more