Hacker Cinema
Robots
2005 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Chris Wedge
AnimationComedyFamilyScience Fiction
Rodney Copperbottom is a young robot inventor who dreams of making the world a better place, until the evil Ratchet takes over Bigweld Industries. Now, Rodney's dreams – and those of his friends – are in danger of becoming obsolete.
1 positive6 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Ah, the Robots movie meets the Exorcist.
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
That kids movie Robots is basically about this exact issue.
I am the author of a private chat system that is used by a medium sized group of people. It was originally developed about 10 years ago, using a basic frame based page and http-refresh, and over time it evolved into a full Ajax/JS web application with features that match Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
The key thing when developing an app is to fill a need. If there's no need for your app, why bother developing it? (unless it's a learning activity which of course is fine)
The 'needs' in this particular case were:
- Be web based; The target users couldn't install a local application. - Be proxy aware; Only use port 80 (and later 443) for connectivity. - Be 'under the radar'; Needed to live on a URL that didn't attract attention to itself.
No other service at the time could fill these needs and this was before the explosion of Smartphones and the PhoneApp ecosystem. As such it became a useful tool, and is still used daily by a group of people.
"See the Need - Fill the Need" - Robots (film)
"Robots" is not a Pixar movie.
Hi, ex-visual effects guy here. You didn't really convince me that these are "myths", and get a few things wrong in the process. I'll hit on a few highlights.
"Ray Tracing, which has major issues with memory and cache"
Memory is impossible to make generalizations about with rendering but there are situations where ray tracing can use far less memory than scanline.
Consider if you have a NURBS surface you'd like to render. With a raytracer, you can solve the ray to surface directly. With a scanline renderer, you must tesselate that surface. Or consider a simple sphere. The memory used to define a sphere can be 4 floats -- xyz position and radius. Solving a ray-sphere intersection is as simple as it gets. With a scanline renderer...it's a lot more. And say you have a velocity and want to motion blur it. Raytracer: 7 floats, stochastic sample the rays in time. Scanline render... it's even more RAM.
Renderman is not a pure scanline renderer anymore. It has had raytracing for a long time.
"Almost all animated movies are rendered using RenderMan"
No, all of Pixars are. That's not "almost all". Dreamworks uses a proprietary renderer. Blue Sky uses a pure raytracer for their movies (Ice Age 1,2,3, Robots, Horton Hears a Who). I'm sure others use Mental Ray.
"Without going into the technical details..."
If you're interested in the graphics space, you should really learn a lot more about how and when raytracing is useful and efficient. I've used pure raytracers and pure scanline renderers in production, I by far preferred the pure raytracer. A compromise between the two is best in general.
This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable course. If people want something that isn't for sale, for heaven's sake, find a way to sell it to them!
Edit: anyone ever see the movie Robots? "See a need... fill a need."