When it was released late last year, "Tron: Legacy" drew what might be charitably referred to as "mixed" reviews, though in truth a 49 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating probably lands somewhere south of mixed. Still, one thing that almost everybody seemed to like was Digital Domain's contributions to the movie.
One of the film's animated graphics artists, Joshua T. Nimoy, shares some pretty amazing art from the film on his website. He says it's taken this long to get clearance to show the work — which comes in time for the movie's DVD debut this week.
Nimoy also explains his work on the project, which involves both visual effects and onscreen programming during the hacking scenes. Which means that if you read his explanations without being something of a programming whiz yourself, you might wade through descriptions of ugly non-antialiased polygons and feel a little bit like somebody named Widgett Walls, who reviewed the film for needcoffee.com and said, "Even though it makes very little sense, it just looks kind of amazing."
It sounds kind of amazing, too. "So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep," writes Nimoy. "I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t."
At the end, he reaches a conclusion: "After this project, I was fed up enough with wxWidgets and Carbon that I was ready to author my own OpenGL based UI."
Then again, weren't we all?
Worth a look, even if you don't understand a word the guy says.
