Well, here I am! San Diego is a beautiful city, and even the convention center looks great. The architecture around here is like nothing I've seen before. I'll take many pictures! There are thousands of people walking around, and excitement is in the air. I can hear many languages, and I see a lot of diversity (though admittedly the geeks, whatever country they're from, outnumber everyone else!).
Right at this moment I'm sitting in a huge room where four people from Pixar are explaining the concepts and challenges of representing food in their newest movie, Ratatouille. I got here just in time for the break (so I can write this post!), and will be able to catch the second half.
Alright, just watched the second half. The speaker was the manager of the effects department at Pixar, and he did a really good job explaining the challenges of food in computer animation. There are many to say the least! Everything, from steam on hot food, to scum on the inside of soup pots, to stains on a chef's clothes has to be explicitly created. And to do it, they cheated - a lot! When it comes to feature film animation, it's something you absolutely have to do, or your movie will never be finished.
One funny example was when they tried to simulate a sauce coming out of a pan and pouring onto some bread on a plate. The sauce would either take too long to pour out, or be too watery. Also, once it reached a certain threshold of pouring, it would just snap, and a big amount would stay in the pan, while the rest just plopped to the plate. What they ended up doing was literally reducing the pull of gravity when the sauce began to pour, then ramped it up as it poured onto the plate. To solve the snapping problem, they created extra sauce as particles - the whole thing changes from one CG object to another and you don't even notice. One of their programmers needed to create a new in-house piece of programming to be able to accomplish it. Amazing!
So, right now I'm eating a delicious lunch under a huge sunlit tent-like structure between the two massive buildings of the convention center. Later today, after getting back to my hotel room, I'll post some pictures of the flights (I took some incredible ones out of the airplane window) and the area of the hotel. I'm going to finish my lunch and then check out the book store before the next course. Great day so far!
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