Turdpaint

In my computer graphics youth, everyone wrote two programs – a 2D paint program and a 3D renderer. Such was the curriculum of the time. Ed Tripp taught CIS 781-2-3, a three quarter sequence that took you from… Read More

Oh the things you’ll find…

I’m cleaning up a bunch of archived files. While I was in grad school, after Pixar, I did a little bit of consulting to make ends meet. One of the more fun things that I did was write… Read More

MacRenderMan

Pixar MacRenderMan floppy disk

Some historical floppy disk fun from old Pixar days. When Pixar decided to sell RenderMan to the public we had to come up with a good name (It was REYES, Renders Everything You’ve Ever Saw / Seen). You… Read More

On Talks and Slides

Some history of style. Once upon a time, Ed Tufte called me a “sanctimonious assohole”. I suggested that he up the dosage of his medications and stopped recommending his books to my students and colleagues. But — The… Read More

The PICS 2000

The Philips PICS 2000 imaging workstation. Developed at Pixar in 1987.

A medical imaging workstation – the beginning of volume imaging When I got my interview at Pixar, I was at Ohio State working on volumetric rendering of CT and MR images. There are a few callbacks to that… Read More

Listerine Hack

Boxing listerine bottle from Pixar commercial circa 1990

How to drink a few bottles of Listerine, scare your clients, and ultimately see your clients repeat your prank. I told this story to Penn years ago and he decided it was worthy of a place in their… Read More

Highland Aire

I just finished a row. It’s about 99% humidity this morning, which, to credit Chris Wedge, reminds me of having just rowed inside someone’s mouth. Chris and I used to ride our bikes together when we were at… Read More

Cat Came Back Jeans

Sometime in the late 80’s, I was a guest at a Spike n’ Mike animation festival, Santa Cruz I think. A bunch of us from Pixar went down, JL was probably the only ‘true’ special guest, but somehow… Read More

Chuck Csuri – 1922-2022

Research is just an excuse to have fun and make some crazy art. — Chuck, early 1980s I showed up in Columbus in 1982, a first-generation college student, intent on getting something out of the opportunity to get… Read More

My Favorite Screen Credit

I don’t think IMDB has a category for this role. I’ll drop this here briefly, but this is a slide from Pete Docter‘s Student Academy Award winning short film, Next Door. I will put together a whole post… Read More