I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm.
RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural).
Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc.
Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it?
No, I don't care to address it. I'll assume that you are correct in whole, since you seem much more versed in this particular topic than I. It's still irrelevent. It does not immediately become irrelevant because you wish to no longer address the cost of making a film, or the history that lies behind the cost of developing said technology. Also, you might want to note that the The Abyss, released in 1989, used RenderMan and the RenderMan Shading Language. Toy Story was released in 1995. Here is a very large list of films which used RenderMan: https://renderman.pixar.com/products/whats_renderman/movies.htmlThe reason it is relevant is because the costs of creating something matter. Oh, and regarding the Pixar animators? Each animator may take more than a year to create two minutes of animation - and that footage may not even appear in the final film. Typically each animator gets assigned just a minute or two in a feature length film. That's just animating. That is not modeling, texturing, shader writing, rigging, lighting, directing, etc. Think about that. A one minute sequence of Mr. Incredible engaging in some action (one minute!) may take half a year of tweaking by an animator to get the eye movements down, the finger movements, etc. Even if Toy Story couldn't have ever been made, the pragmatic argument does not change the fact of the matter that IP is not property, and thus IP laws are violations of real property rights. If you sell me a DVD of your latest work, and we do not have any agreement otherwise, you have no right to prevent me from doing whatever I wish to my property. My property is the physical DVD, your animations are just data. If we have an agreement that I won't buy the DVD and then share your data, I'm bound by different laws and different principles. But there is no such thing as an agreement that I'm bound to simply reason of opening a package.
When you buy a DVD, you have entered into a contract. The intended use is clearly stated on the packaging, and you can make a choice then and there to either buy or not buy. Nobody is forcing you to buy. |
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_Dec_4/ai_17812444/It should be obvious that the cost savings of current hardware compared to a 100 node Sun workstation cluster would be significant, but also the vast amount of highly skilled labor required in both the construction of the cluster itself, and of the custom rendering software, would be entirely unnecessary today. Sure, Renderman might not exist, but alternatives likely would, such as VALVe's own game rendering engine. Renderman was created for that movie, and once created was available for all such followup CGI movies. Yet, if the movie had not been made, CGI rendering software would likely still currently exist due to first person gaming. So if the script had been shelved, and someone were to dust it off today, the production budget would be lower by an order of magnitude if the voice actors didn't have to be Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. Granted, it still wouldn't be cheap, but it still would have been a winner on the direct-to-video path. As noted, however, it still wouldn't have any bearing on the principles of the matter even if I'm completely full of bovine fecal matter. I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm. RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural). Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc. Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it? |
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You got sucked in to his meaningless tangent. Back on topic...
No, I created this tangent. You were the one who deemed it meaningless and tried to avoid getting sucked into it. No perceived or actual benefits of intellectual property law negate the question of morality. In this exact same way, no perceived or actual benefits of slavery negated the question of its morality.
Do you have a response to this, FirstAscent? Why do you get to use violence against me for using my property (pen & paper, computer, etc) in a manner in which you disapprove and get to claim the moral high ground?
One of the issues I believe are faults with most of those I argue with here is their preference for an extreme one size fits all philosophical statement about a world that is filled with very many things. Provide a concrete specific example regarding your grievance with IP laws. |
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Well, to be technical, they could've waited and spent about $10,000...
Oh, by the way, the reason today's graphics hardware supports shaders is because Pixar developed the RenderMan Shading Language for the purpose of making CG animated films (with the intent of making money on them) back in the eighties. Behind my on my bookshelf is the first book ever written on shading languages, "The RenderMan Companion" by Steve Upstill, copyright 1990, which I purchased in 1990. |
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Well, to be technical, they could've waited and spent about $10,000 on four computers with lots of ram and either single Quadro cards, or SLI mode Nvidia or ATI cards, then used a slew of rendering engines, such as the Unreal engine or VALVe's engine, and rendered the movie in near real-time, spending very little on employment for designers and rendering staff, since they would only need them for maybe 6 month to a year, instead of about 5 years on very slow rendering machines that cost a few hundred thousand to a few million to build and operate.
They could've waited? Why? Anyway, have you ever worked with RenderMan and RenderMan shaders? And rendered out super sampled images with jitter, motion blur, featuring many 1,000s of shaders, subsurface scattering, procedurally generated geometry pushing nearly one terabyte of data (or more) per frame at 5k resolution? If you want to try it, download a production ready RenderMan compliant renderer for free here: http://www.3delight.com/en/Few hundred thousand > $10,000
Your lhs and rhs are both underestimated. 5 years of paying salaries and benefits > 6 to 12 months of paying salaries and benefits
Do you know how many days an animator typically spends on one minute of footage? |
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If Toy Story hadn't already been produced, the exact same movie could have been produced by a creative team using three or four consumer desktops networked together.
And how does this radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film? Are you serious? Of course I'm serious. Don't you want to just answer the question? |
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If Toy Story hadn't already been produced, the exact same movie could have been produced by a creative team using three or four consumer desktops networked together.
And how does this radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film? *twitch* Um... are you asking how using four home consumer level desktops instead of a CGI supercomputing renderring cluster from IBM or Silicon Graphics will save money? No. I'm asking how it will radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film. And if you wish to get technical with me, feel free, because back in the late eighties, I was reading the Siggraph papers authored by the founders of Pixar on such topics as stochastic sampling, etc., and I was implementing ray tracing software in C from what I learned in those papers - back when the Pixar team was doing their rendering on a VAX. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Taq9LFbcvxE |
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If Toy Story hadn't already been produced, the exact same movie could have been produced by a creative team using three or four consumer desktops networked together.
And how does this radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film? That's not the question. Ending slavery increased the cost of picking cotton. Would keeping cotton picking costs down have been a valid argument for continuing slavery? My question is the question I asked. I'm looking for an answer to it. |
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If Toy Story hadn't already been produced, the exact same movie could have been produced by a creative team using three or four consumer desktops networked together.
And how does this radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film? |
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Not clear on something - how exactly does the enforcement of IP rights lead to slavery?
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At first there will be several companies competing each other, but eventually they will be merged/bought by super captalists and then capital will take over the operation, finally end up in the bank's control
And, if the banks did not do a good job, you have no other choice
For garbage service, I saw one guy who had his own garbage company. He bought a truck that could hold 6 garbage cans in the back. He would go out in the morning, pick up the full garbage can and drop off an empty. Then go drop the garbage off at the dump. Even if he only did 6 houses per day, that is 180 houses a month times $10 each per month...$1,800 per month income just for owning a truck and making a garbage run every day. $2,600 per month if he makes two trips a day. A corporation could buy him out. Then the next guy would go out and buy a truck and do the same thing... One of the reasons companies take over other businesses is that you get an economy of scale that prevents newcomers. So in your scenario, unless the company can get an economy of scale to drop the price to a point that prevents newcomers, they won't do a takeover. His scenario isn't realistic. Most houses have two trash cans (sometimes three, if separating yard waste, recyclables and general trash). Also, homeowners expect weekly pick ups, not monthly. Assume two cans per household, weekly pickups, and you get 30 dump trips a week with a truck that has a capacity of six cans, which is six dump trips per day. Dumps charge a dumping fee (that's six fees per day), and fuel costs (at $4 a gallon) would not cut it. Furthermore, there is registration, commercial insurance, vehicle depreciation, tires, brakes, and repairs. At the very least, an upgrade to a twelve foot stakebed truck would allow 30 cans per load (double stacked) and operation of said truck would cost about $75 to $150 a day to operate, depending on mileage. Note that this does not include dump fees. Anybody would do an audit, and realize economies of scale are necessary, hence the use of 60,000 pound GVW garbage compaction trucks. |
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Toronto is a big city, with a completely differnet market dynamic. You can't even know how much cheaper a mature & competitive private fire protection market could be. You can't know if it might be $8 monthy for a home. I'd bet that the relative costs of fire protection in NYC are vanishingly small. It's a city of concrete and steel. Toronto is pretty much likewise, is it not?
A simple Google search shows plenty of suburbs in Toronto. |
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"I'm almost speechless. Through your eloquent and well-thought-out post, I've completely changed my mind. The part where you said it was a 'huge fucking difference' sent chills up my spine. I've never really thought about it that way but having it so carefully and thoroughly explained to me, I have no choice but to agree with you. Have you ever considered writing an essay or perhaps even a book? I think that a book, if matched in the detail and intellectual weight of your post, could really open people's eyes. You've answered all of my questions and have left me with nothing but regret that I didn't see things your way sooner."
The above message was just a test. If there had been any actual thought-provoking content in your post, the text you just read would have been spoken in true sincerity instead of being followed by guffaws, belly-laughs and one-handed-wanking gestures.
I already answered these questions in prior posts here. Why would I spend the time answering it yet again? Chances are good I'm instead going to use some expletive to express exasperation. If you were genuinely interested in the answer, you would have read those responses. For example, did you actually read the entire post I made that you initially responded to (this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46532.msg562641#msg562641 ), or did you just quote the first line? My text in that post you responded to enumerates some pretty clear facts, and while you had the opportunity to address them, you instead chose to write some ridiculous and useless post about how I used the term 'huge fucking difference' in a post I made after that post, because you apparently decided to conveniently ignore what I said. |
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Cattle ranchers and businesses selling stuff are not attempting conservation. That's the point. That's not their goal yet that's what they are achieving. Look at cows and buffaloes. They are practically the same animals. Yet, cows haven't been hunted to near extinction. Why? Why don't farmers go out into their fields and shoot all their cows dead today? Because if they do that, they won't have them tomorrow. Cows are privately owned. There's no rush to "kill as many as you can while you can" like was the case with buffaloes. Another example is with forests. If you sell forests to the highest bidder, they don't clear cut the land and never replant. Why? Because they'll be out of business within a few years. They want to make their resources last so they will replant new crops. Once you get rid of the commons, there's no more tragedy. *Sigh* Nobody listens. Cows and replanted trees are not synonymous with ecosystems and old growth forests. There's a difference, and it has to do with the future of the planet. Huge fucking difference. |
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I'm saying that I may or may not agree, depending upon what you actually mean by that. It's a vague statement standing alone.
It's not vague at all. Have you read any of my posts? It's the primary topic I discuss around here. Before I spend yet more time personally explaining something that will likely fall on deaf ears, please tell me what you think I might mean by the following statement: Unfortunately, in the case of the environment, its destruction is caused by fragmentation.
I'd still like to hear your take on this. |
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Using your imagination and using brain power to come up with solutions is a much better way than just fighting humanity, as tends to be the environmentalist solution.
I don't think you're aware of what "the environmentalist solution" is. However, I'm sure you have your preconceived notion of what it is. All that aside, for about the tenth time, learn about ecology, ecosystems, and the environment. A book written by a libertarian pharmaceutical research scientist does not exactly qualify as learning about such things. Who knows more about a subject, someone who is interested in it and uses it as a hobby, or someone who's livelyhood and business depends on it? Wouldn't someone maintaining a chunk of the ocean to keep fish and whales for sale know way more about the environment and how to keep it working right than pretty much anyone else? No. Cattle ranchers and businesses selling stuff are not attempting conservation. They're attempting maintaining a black bottom line year to year. Why compare them to a hobbyist? Compare them to conservationists, ecologists, etc. I can assure you that conservationists and ecologists do not cite cattle ranchers as being pro environment. As an example, here are the leading causes of deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest: - Clearing for cattle pasture - Colonization and subsequent subsistence agriculture - Infrastructure improvements - Commercial agriculture - Logging Things cattle ranchers do: - Put up fences (bad for ecosystems) - Poison, shoot and trap wolves (disrupts trophic cascading effects) - Lobby for hunting of wolves (same as above) - Overgraze to optimize business, but at the detriment of the environment Or are you worried about whale and fish populations exploding to the detriment of other species?
See above. Once again, the environment is not something you just slap your favorite political ideology onto. Learn about ecology. |
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Using your imagination and using brain power to come up with solutions is a much better way than just fighting humanity, as tends to be the environmentalist solution.
I don't think you're aware of what "the environmentalist solution" is. However, I'm sure you have your preconceived notion of what it is. All that aside, for about the tenth time, learn about ecology, ecosystems, and the environment. A book written by a libertarian pharmaceutical research scientist does not exactly qualify as learning about such things. |
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I have already addressed this issue a hundred times. The problems with all the libertarian proposals are fences, barriers, edge effects, inconsistent application, entrusting stewardship in part to those who are ignorant of effects, greed, fragmentation, etc., etc., etc.
You cannot stop greed. The best you can do is direct it toward being beneficial. Exactly. Read the thread on Guiding Markets. And regarding using your imagination, by all means, get to it. There are environmental issues out there that need imagination. But you need to understand things like edge effects, trophic cascades, riparian zones, ice albedo feedback loops, biodiversity, etc. while applying your imagination. |
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The reason, of course, that the policy failed was Khrushchev’s ignorance of the immutable fact – the self-evident truth – that corn can only be grown under certain conditions, and Russia’s climate did not provide them.
A singular vision can get it right or wrong. As shown above. A non unified vision (libertarian property rights) guarantees some will get it right and some will get it wrong. Unfortunately, in the case of the environment, its destruction is caused by fragmentation, like a checkerboard. Can you support the statement in bold? Do you have any evidence that it is so? Yeah, I can. Read some of my 500+ posts. And I'll post more stuff, but it will take time. Because there's lots of stuff. What if I do support it? Are you saying that your beliefs are dependent on there being no support? |
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How much do you know about marine ecosystems? You want to propose solutions and defend those solutions? Then acquire knowledge.
I have acquired plenty of knowledge on free market environmentalism. What knowledge do you have of it? Perhaps you should acquire knowledge. A good start would be "Healing our World" by Mary Ruwart http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/chap8.htmlI have already addressed this issue a hundred times. The problems with all the libertarian proposals are fences, barriers, edge effects, inconsistent application, entrusting stewardship in part to those who are ignorant of effects, greed, fragmentation, etc., etc., etc. |
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