from Hacker News

The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible

by rams on 9/5/21, 9:33 AM with 32 comments

• by pixelpoet on 9/8/21, 10:04 AM

  This 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/

• by nanna on 9/8/21, 2:03 PM

  > the unlikely mecca of the field, the University of Utah

  The story is that David C. Evans was made head of Utah's CS department in 1966, having worked on Berkeley's timesharing research, Project Genie, and having been born in Salt Lake City. He applied for graphics funding from the Arpa-backed Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) which funded practically all the major computing leaps of the 1960s including the Arpanet, chasing the vision of JCR Licklider's "man-computer symbiosis". Not only did the IPTO stump funds, but they decided to make Utah an IPTO centre of excellence in graphics. Furthermore, in 1968 they sent down Ivan Sutherland, a former IPTO director who invented the line drawing program Sketchpad for his PhD under the supervision of Claude Shannon, down to Utah to join Evans. Sutherland accredited Evans with being "The man who figured out the basic techniques that made modern computer graphics possible".

  So bear in mind that Alvy Ray Smith and thereby Pixar stood very much on the shoulders of giants. And that the foundations of computer graphics were paved by a serious amount of public spending.

• by michaelhoffman on 9/8/21, 1:12 PM

  14 years ago, Alvy Ray Smith wasn't listed with the other people in Wikipedia's Pixar navbox. I added him a couple of times but someone kept deleting him without comment. I found it so odd.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Pixar&di...

  Thankfully someone else seems to have added him back in and it has stuck now.

• by wirthjason on 9/8/21, 1:38 PM

  I love these histories of technology. The people and the times are fascinating. I never watched Toy Story growing up. I was in high school and it seemed like a child’s movie so I wasn’t interested in it. Now, 25+ years later, I have daughter who is of the age (2.5) to understand it. Recently we did a marathon watching all movies over a couple days. It’s shocking to see how the animation improves over the years but even more astonishing is how good the original one was for being made back in 1995. I can only imagine how magical it felt back then. As the article points out, algorithms and raw computation is necessary, but not sufficient, for success. Creativity and artistry are required to truly be great.

• by sohkamyung on 9/8/21, 9:34 AM

  He 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

• by biggieshellz on 9/8/21, 12:45 PM

  > As Smith recalls it, Jobs began mocking Smith’s Southwestern accent. “I had never been treated that way. I just went crazy,” Smith says.

  Texan here. That is just beyond the pale. What a complete and absolute jerk.

• by cdirkx on 9/8/21, 9:27 AM

  Of 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

• by callumprentice on 9/8/21, 1:08 PM

  It must be approaching 40 years ago now, but I remember watching a BBC TV weekly documentary called Horizon that was all about the fledgling computer graphics industry - I think the episode was called Painting by Numbers. Alvy Ray Smith was interviewed along with other luminaries like Ed Catmull, Loren Carpenter, Jim Blinn & Nelson Max.

  I must have watched it 30+ times via my parents’ wheezy old VHS player and would dearly love to see it again but never managed to find it.

  Being so enthralled and exhilarated by the magical things they were doing seems like it should have led me into the same industry but I was never clever enough to do so. I still get a thrill when their names come up in articles like this though. Thanks for sharing.

• by lioeters on 9/8/21, 3:35 PM

  Truly this was a wonderfully written article about Alvy Ray Smith.

  > ..You are not looking at pixels on your screen but the expression of those pixels. The pixel itself? That’s just an idea.

  At the end I realized it's written by Steven Levy, who is the author of "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" and other books on the history of computers.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy#Books

• by randall on 9/8/21, 12:48 PM

  I love steven levy. He is a national treasure.

• by robertlagrant on 9/8/21, 2:23 PM

  What's really crazy is that Alan Kay is involved, AGAIN! He's the 20th Century's wizard behind the curtain.

• by floydnoel on 9/5/21, 6:46 PM

  An interesting bit of history! I will have to pick up Smith’s book soon.

• by coopreme on 9/8/21, 11:35 AM

  I don’t have much to say about the article, I’m just glad it wasn’t a headline joke about Steve Jobs.