The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
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Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#2An interesting bit of history! I will have to pick up Smith’s book soon.
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#3Of topic, but reading the headline and the intro about Alvy Ray Smith I was half convinced this was going to be a satirical article about how he invented raytracing and that it is actually named after him; in similar vein as the “Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time” meme [0]
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#4An interesting bit of history! I will have to pick up Smith’s book soon.
Also very, very much recommended: "Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution", which features Alvy Ray Smith a lot.
It has a homepage at https://www.droidmaker.com
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#5Of topic, but reading the headline and the intro about Alvy Ray Smith I was half convinced this was going to be a satirical article about how he invented raytracing and that it is actually named after him; in similar vein as the “Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time” meme [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+running
Yeah, it's funny how he actually ended up as a "ray smith" for a living. And even the "Alvy" part means something graphics related in some obscure language iirc. He wrote about that on his homepage, but I can't find it now - his homepage (at http://alvyray.com) is a bit... special.
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#6He wrote the book, "A Biography of the Pixel" [1], which should be an interesting read and is mentioned in the article.
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#7This classic of his taught me much about rendering: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
However, if we're going to talk about actual genius, no one even comes close to Eric Veach; he's like the von Neumann of rendering. Fun bit of trivia: after he finished completely revolutionising all of rendering with his PhD thesis[0], he went on to develop a little thing called AdWords.
[0] Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation - https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#8This classic of his taught me much about rendering: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf However, if we're going to talk about actual genius, no one even comes close to Eric Veach; he's like the von Neumann of rendering. Fun bit of trivia: after he finished completely revolutionising all of rendering with his PhD thesis[0], he went on to develop a little thing called AdWords. [0] Robust Monte Carlo Metho…
So he is an evil genius.
Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#9He wrote the book, "A Biography of the Pixel" [1], which should be an interesting read and is mentioned in the article. [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/biography-pixel
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Re: The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible
#10I don’t have much to say about the article, I’m just glad it wasn’t a headline joke about Steve Jobs.