mike and pixels

It's 2015 and a new semester just started.  A class that I have been waiting for a while is the one about Computer Vision and Image Processing.  Sometimes, I do wish I could take Roland Chin's one again .... but well, looks like this one should not be bad.

1986 Pixar Christmas Card by John Lasseter and Eben Ostby

The first time I saw RenderMan rendered image was 1989, the book cover image of "The RenderMan Companion" by Steve Upstill and the second RenderMan image that I saw was the famous pseudo pod image from the movie "The Abyss" by James Cameron and side by side with an image of SGI Indigo machine.

Why RenderMan images were so appealing to me was because they look very unique, you could tell they were directed by photorealism in mind and carefully crafted to meet artistic challenges.  Silhouettes of the object were just so perfect and had no sign of any traces of polygons.

How they managed to produce such silky smooth edges more than twenty years ago ?  These guys were just so smart and they designed a rendering pipeline named REYES and they published this paper:

The Reyes Image Rendering Architecture

As the Ph.D. study come with an obligation to do TA, so it gave me an opportunity to do some teaching and today we were talking about Microsoft Project and it offered me a chance to revisit this piece of software.  Back in the centro days, I once tried to use Microsoft Project but I believe it was in its infancy so it was very rough and today's Project looks much more usable but it's still a bit disappointing that I believe Microsoft should be able to deliver something much much better than this if Microsoft understands Google is sharing the pie rapidly.

Provided all the resources that Microsoft possess, the company should be able to deliver something much more advanced and at least purely cloud based.  Sometimes when an organization has grown to this size, it's very hard to deliver innovations unless you use Apple's model.

I have never been a fan of PowerPoint and practically never used it and will not.  I always simply used my HTML slides ( or I once made a slide show app on a SEGA Dreamcast game console for an artist-oritented programming class, it was fun ) when I was teaching in SCM, and now I am a bit lazy, I have recently switched to Google Presentation or Google slides, it's absolutely awesome, purely cloud based, ZERO LEARNING CURVE !!!  and can publish online with just a click.

When you compare Google Slides with Powerpoint, you will understand why the latest Microsoft Project does not impress.

It's been a while that I haven't been to any classroom, 6 years ? almost.  This wonderful return places me back to the seat in the room, all I had to do was to enjoy the delivery.  When I was a kid, I seldom had this wonderful feeling except the only computing class I had back in HKU where I could do programming.

One class I enrolled was just wonderful, even when I am familiar with most of the materials, I just enjoyed so much, especially this morning was talking about CG History ........... it reminded me my own version of similar class but I still enjoyed very very much because it was like talking about my CG career journey, haha ..... I bought my RenderMan Companion book in HKU bookstore back in 1989, I recall I had not much idea about what it was but I loved it.  I was not aware that it was going to change my whole life.

As I have been asked the same question for several times, so it's better everyone has the same answer.  

I was pursuing my Ph.D. at HKUST back in 1993 but was not able to find a supervisor with matching interest and then a few friends of my class decided to start a venture.  My CGI professional career began with our start-up named Pointer Digital Grafix ..... if you wanna know more, I recommend this interview:

nukepedia interview with artixels

No waiver here, so here's the presentation prep'd for it Shorest Path Algorithms

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