This article is full of so many interesting details. E.g. I found this passage on the technological progress in rendering snow from Frozen (2013) to Zootopia 2 fascinating:
"To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that, instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at all."
A similar approach was taken by Pixar when making the beach environment for the Piper short that was previewed with Finding Dory. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
I was on the RenderMan team at the top and remember thinking it really neat that our system could stand up to that.
I remember find it mind blowing when I learned that in Brave, the artists weren't just using a texture/displacement mapped surface for the clothing and armor. They were using tori primitives for the chain mail, and curve primitives for the clothing. (I.e., the clothing actually woven out of curve primitives for the threads.)
The technology is amazing, but rendering lifelike animation seems such an antithesis to what the medium allows. You literally can do anything and for some reason the choice is to constrain it to reality.
The things that Don Hertzfeldt did with line drawings and a vacuum cleaner embrace the medium so much more.
Getting a 404 Not Found for this post - is the blog down?
I was really curious to read it given the comments + full disclosure my co-founder recently wrote about a similar topic ("To Tool or Not to Tool") https://blog.codeyam.com/p/to-tool-or-not-to-tool .
I wanted to see how this is similar or different with the focus on Claude Code + Skills in a more literal sense vs. tools in a more abstract sense.
+1 to this comment! I used to work in this space and have similarly seen many projects and professional attempts at visualizing this kind of trip data.
Argh of course I posted this and then when I tried one more time after the page finally worked. Ignore the above; the page seems to work now (points to a waitlist).
Mine are relatively simple: a walk, some sunshine, some music, and a fresh cup of coffee or tea that I take a moment to brew (or walk to). Making sure I'm at baseline getting enough sleep, exercise, and time to read/think/just be helps as well.
Coffee! That's definitely something that should have landed on my list. Especially when the whole ceremony is considered, like smelling and then grinding the beans, brewing, waiting, and sipping.
This is a really simple yet clever system and I may have to give it a try! I've created vibes-based playlists at points-in-time but otherwise just dump everything to my "like" list on Spotify which is fairly poorly organized after so many years.
Cackling while reading this visiting my family in Northern Virginia for the holidays. Despite it being a prominent place in the history of the web, it's still the least reliable AWS region (for now).
Makes sense and appreciate the transparency. Have admired what you're building at Graphite and look forward to seeing what you build as part of the Cursor team. Congrats!
"To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that, instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at all."
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