pt.reyes
Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter, Tom Porter, Bill Reeves, David Salesin, and Alvy Ray Smith
©1983, Pixar, All Rights Reserved.
This landscape is defined with patches, polygons, fractals, particle systems, graftals, and a variety of procedural models. The various elements were rendered separately and composited later. The piece is very much a team effort, a "one-frame movie". The credits, in alphabetical order, are:
Loren Carpenter used fractals for the mountains, rock, and lake, and a special atmosphere program for the sky and haze. He also wrote the hidden-surface program.
Rob Cook directed the picture and had the original concept. He designed the road, hills, fence, and wrote the texture-mapping and appearance factors software. He studied the theory of rainbows (in Minnaert's classic Light and Color in the Outdoors) and generated the theoretically accurate one for this piece.
Tom Porter provided the procedurally drawn texture for the hills and wrote the compositing software.
Bill Reeves used his particle systems for the grass and wrote the modeling software.
David Salesin put the ripples in the puddles.
Alvy Ray Smith designed and rendered the flowering plants using his procedural graftal software. Cf white.sands.
The picture was rendered using an Ikonas graphics processor and framebuffers,. It took about a month to execute mainly because it had to be executed by parts, the final resolution of the original image - 4096x4096, 24 bits per pixel - being far greater than that of our framebuffer. The piece was scanned onto film with a COLOR FIRE 240, courtesy of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, Ltd.
Created at Lucasfilm Ltd in Marin County, California in April, 1983. Also exhibited at The Computer Museum, Boston, 1984-5.