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I've been reading through your blog, and it took me a while to get what you're doing. I'm still not sure I fully understand, but this sentence (last line from h

I've been reading through your blog, and it took me a while to get what you're doing. I'm still not sure I fully understand, but this sentence (last line from http://erichocean.com/fohr/story.html http://erichocean.com/fohr/story.html) looks like it captures what you're doing quite succinctly: moving lighting into pre-production To me, that sells it. It's concrete and it promises something that (I assume) directors would love to be able to do but can't (yet!) because it's pretty much impossible Question - Which part of Pixar are you hoping to emulate? The studio part or the technology part? Will you concentrate on making films or on building a technology that you can licence?

erichocean 15y ago
First, thanks for taking the time to give your feedback. "Moving lighting into pre-production" is the key thing that allows all of the other good things to happen, and cannot be done today without our tech (AFAIK). Question - Which part of Pixar are you hoping to emulate? The studio part or the technology part? Will you concentrate on making films or on building a technology that you can licence? I'm a filmmaker, and started looking into how Pixar was getting such good results in 1998. I decided at that time that it was their ability to start rough, iterate and fix things, as they moved towards the final product. In live-action filmmaking, we basically are always shooting "final" footage and don't get to iterate much at all. Anyway, long story short, I wanted to iterate on live-action stuff, and it turns out that in order to get imagery before production that is valid when you get to production, you need 100% physically-correct lighting (or what I now call computer-photography). So, my goal is to emulate Pixar in the studio aspect -- how they develop and produce films. I'm not opposed to selling our technology, but I think that the core "tech" has very little to do with why Pixar is successful as an animation studio -- it's basically a legacy part of their business. In fact, Pixar's Renderman division is in Seattle, and is run totally independently. (Most people think Pixar gets "first dibs" or whatever on new rendering features, but they don't. Pixar uses the latest version of Renderman like everyone else.)

erichocean 15y ago

First, thanks for taking the time to give your feedback. "Moving lighting into pre-production" is the key thing that allows all of the other good things to happen, and cannot be done today without our tech (AFAIK). Question - Which part of Pixar are you hoping to emulate? The studio part or the technology part? Will you concentrate on making films or on building a technology that you can licence? I'm a filmmaker, and started looking into how Pixar was getting such good results in 1998. I decided at that time that it was their ability to start rough, iterate and fix things, as they moved towards the final product. In live-action filmmaking, we basically are always shooting "final" footage and don't get to iterate much at all. Anyway, long story short, I wanted to iterate on live-action stuff, and it turns out that in order to get imagery before production that is valid when you get to production, you need 100% physically-correct lighting (or what I now call computer-photography). So, my goal is to emulate Pixar in the studio aspect -- how they develop and produce films. I'm not opposed to selling our technology, but I think that the core "tech" has very little to do with why Pixar is successful as an animation studio -- it's basically a legacy part of their business. In fact, Pixar's Renderman division is in Seattle, and is run totally independently. (Most people think Pixar gets "first dibs" or whatever on new rendering features, but they don't. Pixar uses the latest version of Renderman like everyone else.)