Ain’t it Cool News has a review of its visit to Pixar. Any gadgeteer is bound to wish they were in there shoes. Makes me wish I kept focusing on art, and took some serious courses in 3D animation, not just many weeks playing with Blender until the wee hours. It also reminds me of the time I spent at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans. On the bus into the event I sat next to one of the original creators of RenderMan.

Anyway, the review is good fun, with a few nice photos of the working environment, including a collection of “little houses”. If the idea of rendering and texture mapping isn’t gadgety enough, then he also has a photo of part of the render farm, and a little description.

One of the most amazing things we saw was the assembled hardware required to make Pixar’s films happen. The computer brain of Pixar is as big as I’d expected, and there’s something surreal about this serene room full of rack after rack after rack of black computer boards, nearly featureless, being the place where such memorable characters as Buzz and Woody and the Incredibles and Boo and Sully all live and breathe. There’s also something HAL9000 about the entire room, and I started to get worried that the computer was reading our lips as we stood looking in at it through the window.

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