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Pixar Online Library

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177 pointsshocks11 comments

I'm loving Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc at the moment, but I do tend to forget he is PhD in Computer Science who invented texture mapping. The articles are really over my head too.

It is worth noting that Catmull attributes their original publish everything attitude (against an industry standard for trade secrets) as formative in acquiring the talent and industry came early on.

Indeed, however Pixar's track record on wage fixing[1] and patent trolling[2] isn't all that great.

[1] http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Rendering_Tools

And his legal defense case is "the wage fixing was discovered 5 year ago, this case is essentially the same as a different case we lost against other plaintiffs, so we shouldn't be liable to the other victims also"

Is wage fixing a thing outside the U.S.? It's a bit like bribery laws - you seem ahead of the curve.

One of the few plausible rationales for patents is that they encourage public disclosure of trade secrets.

This list is missing my favorite pre-Pixar paper.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/CS284/PAPERS/CatmullClark...

And one of the interesting things about that is the paper was written in 1978 but the technology was not really used until 20 years later (Geri's Game, 1997) when hardware was finally fast enough to evaluate the algorithm in a reasonable amount of time.

Geri's Game short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWV3XVhaQsc

Interesting, I don't see anything of John Lasseter in there, not even this gem: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/671/readings/lasseter87.p...

In addition to the subdiv papers listed, Pixar also has an open source "OpenSubdiv" project:

http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/intro.html

Somehow really fascinating despite being ridiculously far over my head. The pictures help :-)

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