kaveh808

Joined 4 years ago

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Member since

Apr 11

• degree in mathematics from MIT • wrote the animation software used in “Jurassic Park." • led software R&D on “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” • senior software developer on “The Hobbit” films

Current project: kons-9 Common Lisp 3D system https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

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Recent submissions

AMA – "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", milestone in CGI, is 25 years old old.reddit.com

2 kaveh808 5 days ago 0 comments

Comment · 5 days ago

Yes, I would imagine you can easily render the movie in real time today.

Comment · 5 days ago

There were stories about Aki, the main character, might become a virtual star. But I don't know how seriously this was considered.

Comment · 5 days ago

If memory serves...

3D: Maya (starting with a beta version) Rendering: Pixar Renderman (prman) Compositing: Shake Hardware: SGI Octane workstations Renderfarm: Pentium 2 boxes

Comment · 5 days ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/comments/1xgd2qy/ama_f...?

Comment · 9 days ago

I led a team of a dozen developers to write software required to make the movie.

We were working with very early (beta) versions of Maya running on Silicon Graphics workstations. My team developed software for simulating hair and clothing, deformation and surface refinement tools, and anything else required to generate "photorealistic" humans.

As most things with my career, there were fortuitous coincidences. I was working on early hair and cloth simulation at a startup in Montreal and someone I briefly crossed paths with ended up at Square USA and recommended me to the company. The industry was very different 30 years ago: there were very few people working on things such as CG hair and cloth.

I am now teaching computer graphics at the University of Hawaii. Passing on what I know to the new generation.

It remains to be seen what the impact of AI will be on the industry and art form. I am currently creating a new course on AI and animation to be taught next year.

Comment · 10 days ago

"The Spirits Within" was produced at Square USA's Honolulu studio. We were disbanded by the time "Advent Children" was made by a team in Japan.

The Honolulu studio produced FF:TSW and "Final Flight of the Osiris", a short for the "Animatrix" anthology.

The lack of commercial success of FF:TSW led to the Honolulu studio being closed down. The staff spread out through the CG industry and took with them the lessons from the project.

AMA – "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", milestone in CGI, is 25 years old

19 kaveh808 10 days ago 13 comments

Comment · 16 days ago

Right out of college, I wrote my first ray tracer in Fortran in the mid-80's at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada. I remember the setup being a VAX 11/750 with a RasterTech color monitor (512x512 if memory serves). [0]

My implementation was based on David Rogers' "Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics", one of only two texts available on 3D graphics, the other being Foley and VanDam.

I remember managing my own stack in a language which didn't support recursion. I learned a lot. Good times.

[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/8-summer-at-xerox-in-24-bit-col...

Comment · 2 months ago

Basically, I launch my Slime/SBCL and do my development by editing and evaluating code in my Emacs buffers. This updates the running image and I can check the results interactively. I regularly save my buffers as one does.

This process can continue for days.

There are times when I need to relaunch my Slime/SBCL and start fresh. These are usually cases where I do some refactor that eliminates some functions, or when a bug causes crashes and I feel it would be cleaner to start fresh.

All pretty common sense.

I never save my Lisp image and relaunch it. Maybe I would if I was delivering binaries, but my project is open source.

Comment · 2 months ago

I have always viewed the Emacs/Slime/CL development environment as being a more frictionless approach than the compile/link/execute approach of most other languages, but I get the impression there are people who evangelize "image-based coding" without having tried it out themselves.

The idea of not maintaining properly documented sources would terrify me.

As people point out, if you are not careful and execute arbitrary code in the REPL, your source and image can drift out of sync. When I was working on [1], I would go days without relaunching my image, but all the development was done by evaluating code in Emacs buffers and seeing the results right away. Occasionally, things got convoluted enough that I relaunched the process as a sanity check.

For me, the real benefit of iteratively modifying a live image lies in the sense of flow it engenders. I have not felt that sense in languages other than CL. I sometimes explain the feeling by saying than CL is the only language that I don't feel is fighting me.