DeanoC thoughts and musings

I've been studying AI tech a fair bit recently for a variety of reasons. There are lots of areas I want to explore using AI as solvers/approximations but as someone whom is generally employed to do graphics stuff, there always an interest in the application of AI technology to rendering. Currently except for a few papers on copying artistic styles to photos, its not yet a major discipline. The real big thing to take aware from AI like deep neural nets, is that they are approximate function solvers that are taught via showing them the data rather than be explicitly programmed. Once trained they evaluate the inputs, through there learnt 'function' and give you a result. With enough nodes and layers in the network and a lot of training, they can give a solution to any equation you have existing data for. In rendering, the classic Kajiya equation is the solution real and offline renderers attempt to solve. The reason why rendering takes some much compute power, is t...

I was lucky enough to grow up in the era when home computer and consoles were new, and movies using CG was something worth talking about if anybody actually used managed to actually used it (i'm looking at you Max Headroom and Tron, both designed to look like CG but mostly used old fashioned effects as computers weren't fast enough). One of my favourite movies didn't (AFAIK) use CG but now would use it a lot, Who Framed Roger Rabbit . Roger Rabbit is a clever comedy/who dun it about a murder with the main suspect being the eponymous Roger Rabbit. The twist is that Roger Rabbit is a rabbit, a cartoon rabbit. The world is set up so that Hollywood has a section called Toon Town, where cartoons actually exist. Bugs Bunny, Micky Mouse actually exist and act in TV shows and movies just like other actors. The star (apart from Roger) is Eddie Valiant played by Bob Hoskins who is a classic 20/30s grizzled private eye who hates Toons after one kills his partner. The part ...