Pixar Retirement Keyboard
An example of the clash between Caps Lock and 40+ years of emacs motor control. When I ‘retired’ from Pixar in 1992 to go back to grad school, my friends got me a (digital) gold watch. Neftali “El… Read More
MacRenderMan
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
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
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
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
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
Tropicana Commercials – Warehouse
We did a whole bunch of commercial for Tropicana. This was our second — This was the second in a series we did for Tropicana. The first one we did was much simpler, a logo and orange in… Read More
Folklore
This is what I had on my desk when I arrived at Pixar. A Sun-2 (the CPU cabinet is ‘desk side’) and a Barco monitor. 640 x 480. That optical mouse was great, so much better than the… Read More
libDraw – Interactive drawing on the Pixar Image Computer
Back in the 1980s I wrote a bunch of software as part of the volumetric medical imaging system we designed for Philips (nee Picker) Medical. We used to document our code in those days. I was digging through some archival stuff of mine, looking for an implementation of Bresenham’s line algorithm I wrote for Mathematica, and this document popped up.