The head of Pixar Animation Studios talks tech with Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan.

摘要

The head of Pixar Animation Studios talks tech with Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan.With the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios President Ed Catmull achieved a lifelong goal: to make the world's first feature-length, fully computer-generated movie. It was the culmination of two decades of work, beginning at the legendary University of Utah computer graphics program in the early 1970s, with important stops along the way at the New York Institute of Technology, Lucasfilm, and finally Pixar, which he cofounded with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Since then, Pixar has become a household name, and Catmull's original dream has extended into a string of successful computer-animated movies. Each stage in his storied career presented new challenges, and on the other side of them, new lessons. In our interview this month, Catmull shares some of the insights he has gained over the past 40 years, from the best way to model curved surfaces to how art and science interact at Pixar.Interviewing Catmull is Stanford computer graphics professor Pat Hanrahan, a former Pixar employee who worked with Catmull on Pixar's acclaimed RenderMan rendering software, for which they share a Scientific and Engineering Oscar. Hanrahan's current research at Stanford focuses on visualization, image synthesis, virtual worlds, and graphics systems and architectures. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of ACM Queue's Editorial Advisory Board.