9 ms·

The Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible

120 points by rams 5y ago

floydnoel 5y ago
An interesting bit of history! I will have to pick up Smith’s book soon.
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  Also very, very much recommended: "Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution", which features Alvy Ray Smith a lot. It has a homepage at https://www.droidmaker.com https://www.droidmaker.com
cdirkx 5y ago
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 https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+running
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  Yeah, it's funny how he actually ended up as a "ray smith" for a living. And even the "Alvy" part means something graphics related in some obscure language iirc. He wrote about that on his homepage, but I can't find it now - his homepage (at http://alvyray.com http://alvyray.com) is a bit... special.
- dolmen 5y ago
  His first name is ALvy and he invented ALpha channel.
  - CalChris 5y ago
    Porter+Duff's 1984 Compositing Digital Images paper paints a slightly different picture: Credit should be given to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and Ikonas Graphics Systems for the existence of an alpha channel as an integral part of a frame buffer, which has paved the way for the developments presented in this paper. https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf
- taneq 5y ago
  Similarly, being good enough was invented by John B. Goodenough when he invented the lithium ion battery, which was good enough.
sohkamyung 5y ago
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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/biography-pixel
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- password4321 5y ago
  A promo for the book was discussed here when the book was published last month: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-real-story-of-pixar https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-real-story-of-pixar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053810
pixelpoet 5y ago
This classic of his taught me much about rendering: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf 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/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/
- croes 5y ago
  So he is an evil genius.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    Thats a bit unfair. Nobody knew the implications of AdWords or online advertising in general when it began. Edit: I was wrong, read mistrial9 and chubots comments.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      this is flatly false -- I was a participant on academic networks in the early 90s, and on the proto-Internet in 1995 and onwards.. a primary means of communication between coders at that time was Usenet, which I read and posted to daily.. Programmers discussed at length, repeatedly, for years, about the ethics and social implications of commercializing the networks, about owning domains personally and re-selling them, and about using ads, ad placement, commercials, micro-payment systems and others. The general sentiment at the time was that it was rude, crude and unacceptable to monetize the open networks with ads, as it was clearly a "commons" and every single Western person was familiar with bill-boards along a highway, and endless commercials on radio and television. It is quite interesting today to see the name of the man who "invented adwords" as I had not seen it even once before.
      - chubot 5y ago
coopreme 5y ago
I don’t have much to say about the article, I’m just glad it wasn’t a headline joke about Steve Jobs.
- dolmen 5y ago
  It is a joke about the article NOT being about Steve Jobs.
biggieshellz 5y ago
> 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.
- micah94 5y ago
  Unfortunately, this does sound exactly like something Jobs would do. He was a jerk.
randall 5y ago
I love steven levy. He is a national treasure.
callumprentice 5y ago
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.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  Here you go: https://archive.org/details/paintingbynumbers/paintingbynumbersreel1.mov https://archive.org/details/paintingbynumbers/paintingbynumb...
  - callumprentice 5y ago
    Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. I cannot wait to watch it again.
michaelhoffman 5y ago
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&diff=prev&oldid=144641356 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.
- fifticon 5y ago
  It was probably Steve Jobs who did that.
  - Jedd 5y ago
    Happily there's a change record that demonstrates that wasn't, unsurprisingly, the case.
wirthjason 5y ago
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.
nanna 5y ago
> 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.
robertlagrant 5y ago
What's really crazy is that Alan Kay is involved, AGAIN! He's the 20th Century's wizard behind the curtain.
lioeters 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy#Books

120 points by rams 5y ago

floydnoel 5y ago

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

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
Also very, very much recommended: "Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution", which features Alvy Ray Smith a lot. It has a homepage at https://www.droidmaker.com https://www.droidmaker.com

cdirkx 5y ago

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 https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+running

ManuelKiessling 5y ago
Yeah, it's funny how he actually ended up as a "ray smith" for a living. And even the "Alvy" part means something graphics related in some obscure language iirc. He wrote about that on his homepage, but I can't find it now - his homepage (at http://alvyray.com http://alvyray.com) is a bit... special.
dolmen 5y ago
His first name is ALvy and he invented ALpha channel.
- CalChris 5y ago
  Porter+Duff's 1984 Compositing Digital Images paper paints a slightly different picture: Credit should be given to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and Ikonas Graphics Systems for the existence of an alpha channel as an integral part of a frame buffer, which has paved the way for the developments presented in this paper. https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf
taneq 5y ago
Similarly, being good enough was invented by John B. Goodenough when he invented the lithium ion battery, which was good enough.

sohkamyung 5y ago

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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/biography-pixel

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
password4321 5y ago
A promo for the book was discussed here when the book was published last month: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-real-story-of-pixar https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-real-story-of-pixar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053810

pixelpoet 5y ago

This classic of his taught me much about rendering: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf 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/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/

croes 5y ago
So he is an evil genius.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  Thats a bit unfair. Nobody knew the implications of AdWords or online advertising in general when it began. Edit: I was wrong, read mistrial9 and chubots comments.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    this is flatly false -- I was a participant on academic networks in the early 90s, and on the proto-Internet in 1995 and onwards.. a primary means of communication between coders at that time was Usenet, which I read and posted to daily.. Programmers discussed at length, repeatedly, for years, about the ethics and social implications of commercializing the networks, about owning domains personally and re-selling them, and about using ads, ad placement, commercials, micro-payment systems and others. The general sentiment at the time was that it was rude, crude and unacceptable to monetize the open networks with ads, as it was clearly a "commons" and every single Western person was familiar with bill-boards along a highway, and endless commercials on radio and television. It is quite interesting today to see the name of the man who "invented adwords" as I had not seen it even once before.
    - chubot 5y ago

coopreme 5y ago

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

dolmen 5y ago
It is a joke about the article NOT being about Steve Jobs.

biggieshellz 5y ago

> 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.

micah94 5y ago
Unfortunately, this does sound exactly like something Jobs would do. He was a jerk.

randall 5y ago

I love steven levy. He is a national treasure.

callumprentice 5y ago

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.

AndrewDucker 5y ago
Here you go: https://archive.org/details/paintingbynumbers/paintingbynumbersreel1.mov https://archive.org/details/paintingbynumbers/paintingbynumb...
- callumprentice 5y ago
  Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. I cannot wait to watch it again.

michaelhoffman 5y ago

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&diff=prev&oldid=144641356 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.

fifticon 5y ago
It was probably Steve Jobs who did that.
- Jedd 5y ago
  Happily there's a change record that demonstrates that wasn't, unsurprisingly, the case.

wirthjason 5y ago

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.

nanna 5y ago

> 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.

robertlagrant 5y ago

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

lioeters 5y ago

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