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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

We watched Monana a couple of weeks ago and afterwards my wife said that she was amazed with how good the water looked. I said, I bet there were a bunch of mathematicians working on that :-)

In another life I'd be doing maths for 3D movies. I went to university in Wellington where Weta are based (Peter Jackson's film companies) and at one point had a look around the digital arm. I seem to recall that they had the SGI machines as desktops and a big unix rendering farm. I just love the way you can use maths to create such magic.

Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, Moana is fantastic. Incredible animation, catchy pop hooks in the music and a brilliant storyline. It's wonderful to see a Disney film with a strong female lead that needs neither male support nor a love interest.

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Take a look at an application of deep learning in accelerating complex 3d rendering. (Two Minute Papers)

Stunning Video Game Graphics With Voxel Cone Tracing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWamCtnwTc

The title to the video you linked should be "Neural Network Learns The Physics of Fluids and Smoke"—though he does also have a voxel cone tracing video.

"Stunning Video Game Graphics With Voxel Cone Tracing" is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQSzmngTbtw

Great Video about a very intruiging subject !

Yep. I mixed up the source when I picked it from my browsing history.

That paper is kind of weird -- linear PDEs are solved by convolutions (yay for Green's functions), so using a CNN seems a bit, well, overkill and obvious?

> a strong female lead that needs neither male support nor a love interest

Now I'm trying to think of other Disney leads of either sex without a love interest... is there one? Other than those for whom it's not really applicable (ones who are too young, mostly).

Mary Poppins

Brave, with its tomboyish princess Merida is one.

Disney even got some flak for "glamming" her up to be like other Disney princesses [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/16/disney-princess...

The protagonist in the Force Awakens as well if I'm not mistaken.

Lilo of Lilo & Stitch!

Home (lead is a teenage girl, other major character is not a love interest, nor actually male).

Up (about a guy escaping being sent to an old people's home .. or something).

Up's love interest is, ah, obfuscated for the sake of trying to avoid spoilers, unavailable at the time of the "main plot", but there definitely is one.

But it's a male lead (two of them) nevertheless.

Judy (Zootopia) Hiro (Big Hero 6) Elsa (Frozen) Ralph and Velellope (Wreck it Ralph)

There are plenty more. I think it has more been current society that is recognizing it more.

Come on, Anna is the real hero in Frozen! :)

Wreck it Ralph puts the love interest relationship between Felix and Calhoun (and subverts it all over the place).

Those are all quite recent, while the historical Disney films all fall into the traditional template of male and female lead falling for each other. To the extent that Enchanted can assume the audience knows the formula that they're parodying.

There is indeed a recognition and a policy change that stories don't have to be made to fit that formula any more. And it seems that the films are exploring other affectionate relationships, such as the sisters in Frozen. Wreck it Ralph clearly has affection between Ralph and Vanellope, but it's more a parental/big-brother-little-sister thing than a romance. Brave focuses on mother/daughter. And so on.

I saw it and said the same thing to my wife. But also, I'm super glad that the movie is going to lead to more people knowing about Polynesian Dead Reckoning, because it is amazing.

They used wayfinding by reading what was around them, rather than dead reckoning.

You're right. "Polynesian Dead Reckoning" doesn't appear to be a thing at all. Maybe the GP was referring to the "cold reading"-like ingenuity of their navigational techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation

The water was certainly incredible when I saw the movie. The cinematography was pretty nice all around.

To be pedantic, it's not cinematography.

Cinematography is the science or art of motion-picture photography by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as film stock.

perhaps it was when that was the only way we could create films

I'd call it the art of deciding the movement/placement/focus of the camera, regardless of whether it's a physical camera or a software one. A scene from a different perspective is not as powerful, after all; thus the regard for cinematography.

It's definitely an Art form, but if you look in IMDB, there's no cinematographer listed. That function is "visual effects".

  Rob Dressel      ...  director of cinematography: layout
  Adolph Lusinsky  ...  director of cinematography: lighting

Awesome, go Rob! (Historically cinematography in animation tended to be called simply "layout")

Disney uses a difference organizational design to produce animated films, including going all the way back to the days when they were shot on film with real cameras. The lack of a "cinematographer" title in IMDB for the film has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the organization of the team.

As smhost pointed out, this is simply a false statement.

In case others would like to verify, the full credits on IMDB are here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521164/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_s...

There are two cinematographer credits listed for the movie.

take Rango (2011) for example.

     Roger Deakins	...	(cinematography consultant)
     Mike Sanders	...	virtual cinematography

Deakins worked with the team to determine camera angles, lighting placement, and framing, among other things. They paired an old school film cinematographer with a digital effects supervisor, and the output of their work is what anyone should call cinematography.

> I seem to recall that they had the SGI machines as desktops and a big unix rendering farm.

Is this during LoTR or even before? I though SGI was out by the time of LoTR

I'd guess before, they've been in the CGI business for quite a while. I saw a presentation from Milton back in 2000 (I'm also a VUW CS grad) with pictures of the render wall.

At one point they bought the building of an ice cream factory in Miramar because it already had a massive electrical feed.

They employ a fair few people in Wellington, my neighbour used to work for Weta as a sysadmin. Everyone was a contractor, doing 10 hour days. Not my scene.

Erm, not sure - it would have been 1999 maybe. I can't even remember what I was doing there, meeting a friend of a friend I think.

Actually, I seem to recall that there were guys around at the time that were making the monsters for Xena or one of those shows.

Pretty sure Irix was the _Heavenly Creatures_ era.

More trivia - LOTR SGI machines went to the railway afterwards and were used by the engineers for making CAD models of wagons and things.

How does Weta compare to Animal Logic?

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