points by dahart 4 days ago | 0 comments
Hey I was on the PDI side as well, ahoy, nice to see you here! I had forgotten about Shark Tale using RenderMan, but I will say to the degree there was competition and to the degree that PDI won any pipeline battles, DWA eventually won the war. :P ;) There was plenty of cooperation as well, it just takes time for two companies to integrate, and plenty of people on both sides were quite attached to the cool tools they made. (I was certainly guilty!)
PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.
[–] diskzero 4 days ago
[–] dahart 4 days ago
Oh definitely - custom vs commercial. I remember the R&D team having to write a yearly report to justify the development expenditure, explain repeatedly why we were writing custom tools & renderer when these things were available off the shelf. I heard a few strong rants here and there about how the suits just didn’t understand. I remember the term “NextGen” being thrown around but I don’t remember if I lived through it or it was just getting started when I left (before S3). Jono I and tried for a while to stop having our shaders rewritten in C++ (without otherwise changing them nor adding any features). We eventually gave up and just kept building new things, but that was a fairly successful strategy to nudge the IP, tech, and support southward. Possibly the right strategy in retrospect, but felt a little rough at the time.
[–] diskzero 3 days ago
Were the shaders written in “script”? :) We had to deep dive into that runtime a reverse engineer and fix it during the fun you must have missed during the 32 to 64 bit transition we did right around Bee Movie timeline.
[–] dahart 3 days ago
Nope, they were just written in C. It was object oriented C, but without a C++ compiler. Do you know the story about the whole C++ toolset that was rolled out by R&D and promptly rejected by production? That happened before my time, but according to legend is what lead to PDI’s strict avoidance of C++… until a couple of years into the DWA merger. (Clearly there were some problems beyond C vs C++, but I don’t know the whole story.) Anyway, yeah I remember starting on the 64b transition, but left before that was finished.
Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.