The Importance of a Classical Education for Writing Renderman Shaders

[NB: Scott Anderson supervised the visual effects of Starship Troopers for Paul Verhoeven, and many facilities participated, including Sony Imageworks, ILM, Tippet and MASS ILLUSIONS.  The pictures below are just to illustrate the movie and, in a few cases the types of elements involved, e.g. thrusters.   I have no idea who did these particular shots, with the possible exception of the one of the escape pod, which was probably done at MASS ILLUSION.  People are very touchy about their credits and who can blame them?]

Through this story I hope to demonstrate the importance of knowing Latin, or of at least having a classical education, when writing Renderman Shaders. It is also a story about what a small world the world of visual effects is.

In 1997 or so, I had been hired by MASS ILLUSION to help them finish their work on Starship Troopers (1997) and get it out the door. They had two other projects that were about to start, What Dreams May Come (1998) and The Matrix (1999), and people needed to segue from Starship onto the new projects. MASS ILLUSON won two academy awards for these latter two projects, an amazing achievement. (1)

If you look closely at the lower picture, the thrust exhaust has a detailed structure which animates slightly

So new talent was needed to help finish the project so that the regulars could move on, and I was available, on the East Coast, and actually like to help finish projects. Often bringing in new people near the end of a long complicated project can be a help, because the new people in many ways are, frankly, unaware of the history and can just look at things with fresh eyes, and they are not yet tired of the project, so they can be energetic. Its not unrelated to some of the tactics of replacements in sports.

I had some credentials for this because I have supervised lots and lots of shots and projects and happen to be very good at rendering, having a Scitech award for writing a renderer, and very good at using Renderman (2), having helped bring it into production in its earliest form at deGraf/Wahrman and enjoyed using it.

MASS ILLUSION was a pioneer in attempting to do visual effects projects remotely from Los Angeles, in this case Western Massachusetts, and not all the bugs were worked out yet, and there was friction which I attributed in part to the problem of communicating 3,000 or so miles away, as well as other complications having to do with a very complicated project and a famously demanding director.

One of the ongoing and unresolved issues was matching the thrusters, or exhaust, of the starships. The exhaust in the starships done at Imageworks had a specific look and we were not close enough to that look for the starships we were doing. But it wasn't clear what Sony had done to make their thrusters, though, because as is so often the case, the people who had done the work at Sony had moved onto other projects, and possibly also because they had used a consultant who was no longer with them to write the primary Renderman shader for the thrusters.

Escape pod thruster detail 

They were hesitant to give us the shader and when I got on the project this was one of the long standing issues between the facilities. But obviously, given that we were having trouble matching the look, having the specific shader would be a big help, and communicate to us in no uncertain terms what was going on here. We thought that they might have some proprietary technology in the shader, but that was probably not the concern. It may have been nothing more than caution, or concern that they would be asked how the shader worked, or didn't know where it was, or who knows.

The shader was called "ROSASRF" for some reason.

Finally, after some effort, I had a success and many, many months after MASS ILLUSION had first asked, we got the source to the shader after a particularly colorful telephone conference call in which I quoted a famous biblical prophecy of what would happen if they did not give us the shader. (3)

Now, I have to backup a little. I have read and written hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shaders, about half of which are written by other people and about half of which were written by myself. Of those which are written by others, if you find a single comment in their shader its a miracle from Jesus himself. Shader writers do not often write comments, it seems, perhaps they believe that it is all self-explanatory.

But ROSASRF which was a very dense and complicated shader was not only well-commented, but one of those comments was highlighted with the cryptic two letters: NB.

NB?

I started laughing. I hardly ever read shaders with Latin abbreviations, in fact it had never happened before. NB, of course, is Latin for "Nota Bene" or "note well", its a convention used by mathematicians of the old school and classical scholars of all types. It basically means "pay attention".  Its the sort of thing one would expect to find when reading a scholarly treatise about St. Augustine's City of God (de Civitate Dei) or perhaps the notes of a 17th century alchemist. Or a mathematical proof.

So whoever Rosa was, as by that time I had determined that ROSASRF was named for the consultant, someone named Rosa, clearly she had a classical education and was not one of the "repurposed garage mechanics" we normally get in visual effects. The shader was very well written, well commented, and indeed, without it, it would have been very hard to figure out how to solve the problem. So we were happy.

But I was even happier to discover that I already knew Rosa, that in fact this was my old friend Rosa Farre, whom I had met a decade before in Barcelona at a company called Animatica, and who had married my friend Darnell Williams of Symbolics. I had never seen her work before, I just knew her as this very pleasant person from Barcelona, but now I had seen her work, and clearly she was not only good at what she did, but most important of all, had a classical education and was comfortable with her Latin abbreviations.

I hope that everyone reading this will take away the final thought that they should study Latin and incorporate Latin abbreviations in all their shaders.

Thank you.

_______________________________________

Notes:

1. By the time these two projects were done, the company had gone through at least one and possibly two different reorganizations, and may or may not have been called MASS ILLUSION by then. However, the people were the same for the most part and the same spirit and sense of excellence existed, so far as I can tell. Also, a facility does not win an Academy Award, only people do. But they had been the primary facility on those two films (What Dreams and The Matrix).

2. Technically, Renderman is the standard and the actual renderer was called Photo Realistic Renderman or PRman. The name may have changed a few times since then.

3. I dont actually remember exactly what was said during the call, but I vaguely recall telling them that we really, really wanted the shader and for them to remember the prophecy "The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood when the great and terrible (day) of the Lord shall come", which in Medieval Latin, by the way, is SOL TENEBRAS ET LUNA IN SANGUINEM MAGNUS ET HORRIBILIS DEI VENIET, which I think has a nice feel to it. Anyway, they gave us the shader.

_______________________________________

References:

Starship Troopers on Imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/

City of God (De Civitate Dei) by St. Augustine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(book)

Latin Abbreviations on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_abbreviations

The Shocking Truth about Roman Architecture in France

[Revised 1/7/2012]

This is the story of the first time I actually saw a Roman ruin. I think it is very funny for what it says about me, and maybe, just a little, about how some of us perceive various cultures and periods, perhaps without realizing it.

My high school had a fabulous Latin teacher (1) and I took advantage of the situation, taking many years of Latin and learning a lot of Roman history.   I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that my high school combined the advanced Latin classes between the Boys and Girls school, so you had to go to the Girls school to study Latin.   Such were the lofty motivations of my youth.  I read Roman and Aegean history and related topics even now and I assure you the past isn't over, it isn't even past yet.

If you never studied Latin, to give you a feel for how nouns are declined and verbs conjugated, see this sequence from Life of Brian (1974) in which anti-Roman activist Brian is trying to write "Romans Go Home" and is corrected by a Roman Centurion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI

But, to my chagrin, I have never been to Rome. We were not of that economic class that could afford such things when I was growing up, and when I was productively employed as a young adult, I had not arranged a trip. Then I got involved in computer animation and of course my life went to hell and I still haven't been there, except of course in books.

But like so many others of my generation of computer animation, I was invited to speak at various European conferences during the late 1980s, which provided an opportunity to see at least some of Europe. So, after one of these conferences, Imagina, I arranged for a friend of mine to meet me in Monaco and we would sight see for a few days in the south of France.

So my friend, Paul Cross (2), met me at the conference and we rented a car and started driving through Nice on our way to Nimes. As we stopped in Nice, I pointed to a building and said, "Look, Paul, someone has built a building and made it look Roman."

I am still looking for a suitable picture.  This one has some of the right feel, but it is not integrated into a major current building on a busy street, like the building this post is about.

Paul looked at it and said, "No, Michael, it is Roman".

I thought that was a weird thing for him to say, so I repeated myself and tried to explain, see, someone has built a building and made it look really old and Roman. Isnt that nice?

In Los Angeles, you see, we regularly theme various venues based on classic European and other civilizations, including our own. We might have a Chinatown, for example. Disneyland would have a Fantasyland including a notable synthesis of many medieval castles at the center of the park. The little tourist town of Solvang in Southern California has a Danish theme, complete with windmills. Our Japanese restaurants such as Benihana entertain guests with a performance that is alledgedly at least somewhat Japanese in origin. Santa Barbara is zoned for a traditional Hispanic style.  Although most studio backlots have been repurposed as real estate development, a few still exist with their various themes: a New York street, an Old West street with its saloon, a small town America main street, and so forth. Theming is a major design concept in use in our local commercial architecture and culture.

So clearly, what we had here was a modern building that had been designed using Roman antiquity as a theme. I thought it looked good, although perhaps they went overboard on some of the "ancient" aspects of it, as the Roman section clearly had seen better days.   

My friend just kept explaining to me that no, they were not pretending to be Roman, that Nice was in part an ancient Roman city, and it actually was Roman.  That's interesting, I thought, it had never occurred to me that it might not be fake.

_____________________________

1. His name was Anthony Ruffa, I think.   Before taking an exam, some of us would say to ourselves, "AVE RUFFA MORITURI TE SALUTANT"  ("Hail Ruffa!  We who are about to die, salute you!")

2. Paul Cross is a very amusing person, and an alumnus of Symbolics.  He moved to Taos, New Mexico and helped set up one of the internet not-for-profit web sites for the Taos Pueblo.   He has disappeared, and is hopefully doing well wherever he is.

Recalling the Days When People Were Merely Called Eccentric

These days I am always careful to look whomever I am with in the eye. Why is that, you may wonder. Well, it used to be, back in the days when people were merely neurotic, I developed an affectation of not looking people in the eye. Beats me where it comes from, I think it has to do with being a little shy. But be that as it may be, these days if you do not look someone in the eye, you obviously have Asperger's Syndrome, and thus must be a barely functioning victim of an autism spectrum disorder. Thus I always make sure to look whomever I am talking to in the eye, at least once, during a conversation. Clever, eh?

I wish that my colleagues and peers would maybe realize that these DSM classifications are not to be thrown around casually, and that doing so is not only incorrect, it is also rude.

Perhaps we could return to a simpler, more innocent time, when someone was merely eccentric and colorful if he was a non-conformist.   That would be ever so much more accepting and positive, don't you think?   This trend of badly diagnosing someone's mental disorders and accusing them of it (or discussing it behind their back) is neither helpful nor accurate.

Eccentricity

Also, and I hate to mention this, but those who live in glass houses should not throw tactical nuclear weapons. It seems to me that the last five people I know who have "diagnosed" me with Aspergers should perhaps look to their own house first.

Even a casual study of the history of such things, these labels for eccentricity, show that society moves fast here.  One period's classification, for example, "moron", becomes a later periods' schoolyard insult.

In fact, I am "in touch" with my mental disabilities, if that is what they are, I think I have a good handle on them.  I am well aware that I am in many respects an outlier.  Some of the issues that some would see as a disability, I have become quite fond of, anyway.   The problem is not their diagnosis or management, per se, it is paying for their management in a society that seems to thrive on punishing the poor.   In other words, my problem is not ADD/ADHD or whatever, my problem today is cash flow.

Thus if you want to be a help, rather than throw diagnosis at me, throw money and that would certainly help me to be better adjusted.   Just trying to be practical here.

_______________________

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

DSM-IV TR (Text Revision)
http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm/dsm-iv-tr

DSM-V (In Development)
http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx

Eccentricity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(behavior)

Outlier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier

Reality vs Photography: The Case of the Flying Peacock

The following image was brought to my attention by Clark Anderson and has been making the rounds on the Internet.

 I looked at this image and immediately thought "fake", but after some research into it, I am pretty sure it is real, with some solid photographic help.

The peacock is the classic example in evolutionary circles of an out-of-control, positive-feedback loop in selection. Peahens like flashy peacocks and mate with them, resulting in more males with flash and more females who like males with flash. So it is believed.

It is also the case that the peafowl (as they are known to non-gender-biased zoologists) does not have many predators where they live, and the predators that they do have only eat them when they can not find anything else. Another helpful trait if you are going to have 2/3rds of your body mass invested in this huge dead weight on your ass.

But getting back to our photograph, what we have here is one in a series of photographs in India of a peacock who was jumping around that day in the presence of a persistent photographer who, with his trusty telephoto and probably image stabilized lens, was able to get a number of pictures when the peafowl was (very briefly) in flight.

So what I think you are seeing here is an unusual pose of the peacock in the process of leaping up, the foreshortening of the telephoto lens, and possibly the benefit of a camera that takes many photos as quickly as it can.   Either that or the photographer was remarkably quick and/or lucky to catch the pose that he or she did.   

Then, one of these photographs, which happened to catch a nearly full jump of the peacock, was cropped, color timed, and probably had contrast modified and some sharpening. Thus a very iconic and graphic image was created from an image of something that does exist in nature, although you are never likely to see it this way yourself, even if you lived near a flock of peacocks.  

Here is the original composition as photographed. 

Original image at http://i.imgur.com/q0ukH.jpg

It has never been the case, that photography simply recorded what was there in an objective and unmodified manner. Photographers have always added their own spin and point of view, but usually it results in something that is not quite so dramatically graphic.

Photorealism is a style of painting, not of photography.

Here is a photograph from the same series of photographs of our jumpy peacock as found on Wikipedia.

Here are nine pictures from the same series:

http://izismile.com/2011/10/24/beautiful_flying_peacock_9_pics.html

Rocket Launch Attempts and Their Many Uses

This post will review various space program "launch attempts" (e.g. rocket failures) in the context of the study of animation techniques, the history of the cold war, and as a short term anti-depressant.

A real test of a visual effects studio is its ability to both animate and light things like explosions, dust clouds and water, the classic effects animation topics.  There are a variety of reasons for this, and one of them is talent.  These types of phenomena come under the purview of the effects animator, a rare and usually undervalued skill.  The way to get around the talent problem, I have always found, is to use computational fluid dynamics to simulate the effect and thus substitute technology for talent.   For excellent real world examples of CFD animation and lighting, look no further than the space program launch attempts.  They are complicated, robust, generally show very interesting lighting (including internal lighting), happen in both night and day, and are well documented from several points of view simultaneously.   And best of all they are free, or almost free.

I have selected several sequences from a collection of such things that I bought years ago on DVD, an excellent collection of launch successes and failures from different points of view, with narration done by a member of a rocket club who seems to be knowledgeable about these launches.  Unfortunately, I can not remember the name of this rocket club that produced this collection, and I can not find them online, yet.  But when I do, I will post a link so that hopefully you can order your own copy should you wish to do so.

Continuing on the theme of animation technique, these launch attempts are excellent examples from the real world of both anticipation and follow-through.   We know that something bad is going to happen, we have to wait for it, and then when an explosion finally happens there is almost always a pause, then another explosion, bigger than the first, often flying debris, or a sense of falling, then another explosion.  This is part of what makes it interesting.  Compare and contrast this with a normal explosion as seen in a stupid movie (oops, I meant to say movie, not stupid movie, how silly of me) when an explosion just happens once, bang.   No, no, no.  What you want is an initial explosion, then another, then another, that sort of thing.  Second, notice the complexity and the additional layering of debris, often with very different momentum and physical characteristics than the initial or primary explosion.  E.g. the pieces that fly off a rocket and fall at their own rate.  This complexity adds authenticity.

A variety of launch attempts have been uploaded to Youtube and a few more are on the way.

Atlas Centaur Launch Attempt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUsUwn5awkE&feature=youtu.be

Juno 2 Launch Attempt:
http://youtu.be/MOBCT6AIvX8

Titan 1 Launch Attempt:
http://youtu.be/T0gofrDOWh0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEeSxJ6dXdc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q47VhdmJwv8

Moving on we now discuss the two related topics of the history of the cold war and of non-traditional anti-depressant technique.

During the cold war the Soviet Union was so presumptious as to attack our civilian space program, accusing it of being a transparent front for our military space program.  Years have passed and I have examined this charge and find that it is only 99% or so accurate: in fact our civilian space program was transparently a front for our military space program.  Our space program had several different purposes, of course, but first and foremost it was a deliberate way to take the high road on the competition for the hearts and minds of the people of the world in the context of the cold war between the two "civilizations".

Finally, in the larger context of finding ways to relieve the vast ennui and despair that afflicts so many of my friends (not me, of course), I find that watching rockets explode many times in a row is good for stress relief, similar to popping a lot of bubble wrap, for some unknown reason.   Its a short term relief, but it does seem to work both for me and for a few people I have tried it on.  Unfortunately to do that well, I have to get more examples online, and I will gradually do so.   (This is a continuation of a theme on non-traditional anti-depressant technology, which I first started in this post).

The Atlas rocket family on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(rocket_family)

The Atlas-Centaur on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas-Centaur

Will Life of Pi Bring Audience Credibility Back to Computer Graphics?

I have noticed for many years now, that the audience has started to associate computer graphics with bad visual effects. Time after time I read on the Internet that such and such a movie had stupid computer graphics in it, and that the movie was the worse for it.

I find such comments to be distressing for many reasons, not the least of which is that there is some truth to the criticism. There seems to be something about visual effects and computer graphics which can cause a producer, or director, or studio to lose their minds. Who needs an original plot point or clever idea when you can just blow up another city? Also, ever mindful of the bottom line, they are eager to reduce costs by eliminating inessential elements, like the writer.

Another cause of this association between bad movies and computer graphics is the relentless publicity machine which grinds out a behind-the-scenes documentary for every film on the glamourous and rewarding world of computer animation. Of course, those of us in this field who have experienced this firsthand are pleased to be in the public eye after so many years huddled around a glowing screen in a dark room, that is only natural, but ultimately the film is not about the bold new technology but about the story, and the people, and what it means to us, the audience. The visual effects is no more important than the soundtrack, in fact the visual effects are usually less important than the soundtrack, yet you do not see a billion documentaries celebrating the composer and the sound effects artists, etc.  You only see a few such documentaries, which I think is more appropriate.

There is a saying in the world of visual effects that "good effects will not save a bad movie". It turns out that this is not entirely true, there are a few exceptions to this but onlly a few. And it turns out that really bad effects can damage a good movie, see for example the movie Them (1954) which will be the subject of another post.

But when you have a director who gets it, and knows how to use the medium, and has a story to tell, then you may end up with something that makes everyone look good and achieves the promise that motivated many of us to be in this field, and to help invent it.

Such a film is Life of Pi (2012) although I admit I have not seen this film (I like to wait a few years, like 20, to let it age and improve). All the reviews are fabulous, and they all talk about the excellent CGI that delivered the main character.

So, congratulations to everyone at Rhythm & Hues for delivering a project that may single handedly redeem computer graphics in the eyes of the audience.

Now Kitty, promise to be nice to Mr. Fish.  

But lest I appear too positive and upbeat here, and thus be out of character, let me remind you what the future holds. First, R&H will be inundated with scripts that are completly original and never been done before and involve a large animal (lion, tiger or bear) in a small space (lifeboat, spaceship, cabin in the woods) and a young person (boy, girl or indeterminate) in a desperate journey or adventure.

And not all of these will be directed by Ang Lee.

Will the sequel be called "Life of 2 Pi"?

Rhythm & Hues:

www.rhythm.com

Life of Pi at Imdb:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454876/

The Story of Columbia University's Second Campus

So I am going to tell you a New York real estate story, the story of Columbia University's second campus. Their current location is their third campus.

Columbia University has been around since 1754, in other words, before the American Revolution. It is a recent college by the standards of a Virginian or a European, but it is still venerable.

It was originally located down by Wall Street, the street named for the wall they built to keep the Native Americans out. That's right they built a wall, and south of that wall was "civilization". How ironic given the pestilent sore of moral depravity that Wall Street represents to the world today! Back then, there was a lot of open country, a lot of farms, and no skyscrapers. But it started getting crowded, people were building the area up, so they decided to move out of there and bought a second campus somewhere around what we call today midtown, and sold their first campus.

After a while, they realized that they had made a mistake. They should have kept their first campus as a long term real estate investment and merely leased it out to others as Wall Street real estate was proving to be a good investment. So, when, years later, midtown was also getting crowded and they started looking for a new campus, they remembered this lesson. This time they leased their old campus and moved to their new location, the location they have now, in Morningside Heights.

So the question you are supposed to be asking yourself, is where in midtown the second Columbia campus was located and what is it called today.

The second campus was Rockefeller Center.

When I heard this, I realized that I had been told this long ago, but had not understood what I had been told. I remember reading that when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center that what they had actually bought was the buildings not the land. The buildings themselves had been built on land owned by the Columbia trust on a 99 year lease said the article in the NY Times.

Now Columbia is one of those old American names filled with Symbolism and doesn't necessarily refer to Columbia University.  We used to call everything Columbia. The Statue of Liberty is called Columbia. So I thought nothing of it, and just assumed it was the name of an old financial institution or something like that. But no, when they said Columbia Trust, what they meant was the Trust for Columbia University.

The moral of the story is that educational institutions are well positioned to benefit from long term real estate investments in the cities where they reside. For two other examples, check out the history of the real estate investments of Harvard and Stanford.

Wikipedia page for Columbia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University

Republicans and Oral Sex

Sometime near the end of the Clinton administration, I was sitting in my apartment in New York reading about current politics and the world in the New York Times.  One more time, Congress was deadlocked and could not debate or make progress on any topic, other than one. The only topic the Republicans would permit the discussion of was oral sex, presumably the oral sex between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, a subject which was, in my opinion, none of their fucking business.

It was oral sex this and oral sex that.  It was blow job this and blow job that.  Oral sex.  Blow job. That is what Republicans wanted to discuss.  That and nothing else.

I want to propose to you why this was a logical thing for them to do.  There is a legal aphorism that goes like this: "When you have the facts, you pound the facts. When the law is on your side, you pound the law. And when you have neither, you pound the table".

My judgment was that the Republicans had no ideas on any of the important topics and issues that faced this country.  So, having utterly failed to be useful to the nation, all they could do was pound the so-called "character issue" of Bill Clinton.  In reality, the people without character were the Republican Congressman who put the country last and their politics first.  But they felt they had to do that, perhaps, because they had no good ideas on any other topic.

They had no ideas about the economy.  They had no ideas about how to help the poor.  They had no ideas about how to bring peace to the world.   They had no ideas about how to educate people about global climate change or what to do about global climate change if we could even agree it existed.  They had no ideas about how to improve regulation of Wall Street and the banks and prevent the financial meltdown their greed and stupidity was about to cause.  They had no idea on hundreds of other issues, big and small, facing our nation at that time.   

No ideas at all on any topic.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

All they wanted to do was to discuss oral sex, endlessly.

So, if I ever feel the need to discuss oral sex with a congressman, I know to call a Republican congressman. I would encourage you to do so as well.

But if you are concerned about any other issue facing America today, the Republicans are the last people you should call as they have nothing positive to contribute.