Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is all about substituting the letter B for a certain letter that falls between the letters O and Q. For example, if you’re substituting the letter B for that particular letter, what would you call the skill that some...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski imagines what might have happened if some favorite movie plots ended up going in exactly the opposite direction. For example, suppose Cary Grant is chased by good guys and bad guys, but instead of ending up at a national...
audio puppeteering n.— «To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script—“Hi, I’m Wall-E”—and Mr. Burtt essentially...
avar n.— «Designing cars for computer animation is not designing for the real world, but it has similarities. To orchestrate the motion, Pixar used a shared platform, a system not unlike a real carmaker’s. The film’s cars have a common software...
renderwall n.— «Remember the movie Toy Story? Well, when Pixar did the rendering on that, they created their own supercomputer to do it. The supercomputer in question was dozens of rack-mounted Sun workstations sans monitors and with their cpus...
Z-buffer n.— «Catmull invented texture mapping (the way to make digital surfaces “pour” over objects), the Z-buffer (an algorithm that tracks the virtual distance between pixels and a viewer, now standard in most personal computers and games), and...
