What's new in redshiftertown?
Pretty chill weekend; I was not one of the zillions who went to see Monsters, Inc., but I'll probably go peep a matinee sometime this week. I've been hearing a lot of talk lately about Pixar's new dynamic hair animation technology (Jah Bless noted it as well) — it renders each individual hair on the fly, according to some pretty darn complex mathematics. To criminally oversimplify, the animator just tells the system, "put hair on the creature at x density and y length, and there's z amount of wind blowing," and the render farms do the rest. Pretty nifty.
I, like everyone else, must also comment on the new Star Wars Episode II teaser. Keep in mind that it's a teaser, people — not a trailer! So mostly it just whets our collective whistle with some neato eye candy. Boba Fett's papa is up in the heezee along with his ride Slave I, and Yoda looks impressively grumpy, thanks to some extra-tight CG animation. And, yeah — not a frame of Jar Jar freakin' Binks. Fingers crossed.
While I'm waxing enthusiastic for dork-ass technology, allow me to submit that the new cross-fade feature in Apple's iTunes2 is really, really cool. Let's just hope it burns better CDs than the previous version.