An Evening with Jeremy Birn

The last year I met up with Jeremy Birn, the author of the well know book ‘Digital Lighting & Rendering’, who is also the Lighting TD at Pixar Animation Studios. He had visited Singapore to deliver a talk on the ‘Past, Present and Future of CGI’. Here’s a gist of it all -

I had been to a talk yesterday. A talk on 'The past, present and future of CG' by Pixar's Lighting Technical Director - Jeremy Birns, some of you might be familiar with his book - 'Digital Lighting & Rendering'.
Around 7 of us from VHQ Post along with some 100 others from the industry here, attended the talk which was held at Nanyang Polytech. By 6.30 pm Jeremy Brins took the stage after all the formal welcome speech by the organizers. Jeremy Birns - pot bellied man wearing an "Incredibles" T-shirt.

Started off with a video that had Brad Bird talking about Ratatouille and a bit on the making of. Jeremy Birns started off talking about the History of CG, from the beginning of computers, how things progressed from Apple II to Atari 800 to SGI and how Pixar became Pixar.
He also spoke about early CG and some of the first character animations (My sexy lady for the super-bowl commercial in the 80's) There was also a lot of talk on how much of influence ILM has had on Pixar and also about how Pixar was initially a part of ILM but was called 'Computer Graphics Group' until Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas and let John Lasseter and Ed Catmull make Pixar the way it is. Then we went on to know how John Blinn wrote a program that gives you Bump Mapping which we use today, this actually shows us how young the industry really is.

Then he spoke on the current state of the industry and how people are looking at CG animated films as way of making money - a 'la some 7 to 8 penguin movies that came out at the same time. But he says that at Pixar, from their first animated film - Luxor Jr. to Ratatouille, all they are worried about is the story, then comes the technology, if the story fails...no matter what technology you use it'll fall apart eg. Final Fantasy - Spirits Within, Polar Express etc. He also spoke about how Disney actually killed 2D animation after Lion King because they thought the medium was not required anymore, which was wrong because it was their story and execution that killed it. But now after Pixar became a part of Disney things have changed....why? because Lasseter and Catmull are now looking at Disney operations, Disney might have bought Pixar but its Pixar's management thats running it. So as one of their first steps they reopened Disney's 2D division.
As for the future of CG, after one of the audience members asked him, he said outsourcing will not change the industry, it might just move the work around, but for how long? because the work that is being outsourced isn't Technically challenging work its just laborious work soon technology will automate it and they wouldn't need to out source it anymore cos it'll be all automated. For eg. The Foundry already has a Furnace plugin that assists in the automation of rotoscopy...not that it'll al be done by the software but you need lesser people to do it. Companies in India, or china can join the big league if they emphasize on quality not quantity (he actually said this). because end
of the day quality wins...and history has shown it.

After the seminar, we had some refreshments. At this point of time Jeremy Birns was just sitting around, so I went up to him and we had a real good 20-25 min conversation about the industry and about Pixar's lighting Pipeline. He said that for lighting they heavily depend on Shake, a highly customized version of shake, and everything they can think of is rendered in passes and all lighting artists use their 3D software and keep switching between shake for their final lights. I also asked him about LPics (if you remember the GPU based lighting engine which gave almost realtime feedback, that had a paper at SIGGRAPH 2006) he said they have just tested it and are in the process of implementing it in the pipeline as its still under further development. By the way he said Pixar doesn't use a Normal map pass for lighting as it doesn't give good results with Fur and hair. After all this, I got a SIGNED COPY OF 'The Art of Ratatouille' from Jeremy Birns.

Anyways, after the talk I was pondering about the whole thing and my conclusion - The guys who first pioneered are still around and are still making stuff for us to use and advance forward. I personally think that we should take some amount of responsibility and pick up the baton and continue to contribute to this amazing society than just use it as a tool everyday. Looking at the history of CG it is very young and its still new. It was just 20 years back that people were still modeling with lines of code and mathematical equations than just having a fancy UI. Its just 20 years back that the first time people saw Photoshop on a Macintosh, which gave rise to the compositing softwares we have today. The industry is still growing globally....and we as artists, we as members of this industry should take it as our responsibility to build and push this technology higher so that the generation after us can take it to even higher heights, if we drop the baton now, we fall back and lose our place in history.