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

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.

Publish Magazine — August 1989

A short piece about our wedding announcements, printed on a 100-year-old Heidelberg press via computer graphics. I posted an interview from fps Magazine a while back, and one of my old Wolfram Era Pals, Paul Abbott, asked about the wedding… Read More