Tom Porter (computer scientist)

Thomas K Porter is the Senior Vice President of Production Strategy[1] at Pixar and one of its founding employees.

Professional life

After receiving a masters in computer science at Stanford University in 1975, Tom Porter worked at the National Institutes of Health on computer visualization of molecular models and wrote software at Ampex for the world’s first commercial digital paint program, AVA.

Porter joined Lucasfilm's Computer Research and Development Division in early 1981. He and Tom Duff, another Lucasfilm employee, developed a new approach to compositing images; their 1984 paper, "Compositing Digital Images",[2] is "[t]he seminal work on an algebra for image compositing", according to Keith Packard.[3] "Porter-Duff compositing" is now a key technique in computer graphics.

Porter is listed as one of Pixar's 40 founding employees at the time of its spin-out as a corporation with funding from Steve Jobs in 1986.[4]

Porter expanded on Robert L. Cook’s research into Monte Carlo techniques for image rendering, sampling visible objects not just (spatially) within each pixel but also (temporally) throughout the interval of time that the virtual shutter is open, creating a general solution for motion blur in computer-generated imagery. Porter created the image ‘1984’ as visual proof (and timestamp) of the breakthrough.[5]

Porter's son Spencer was the inspiration for Luxo Jr.. Porter brought his infant son Spencer to work one day and John Lasseter, playing with the child, became fascinated with his proportions. It struck Lasseter as humorous that a baby’s head is huge compared with the rest of its body, and he began to model a young lamp with that in mind.[6]

Porter has received three[7] Academy Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work with motion blur,[8] digital compositing,[9][10] and digital painting.[11]

Porter worked on several Pixar films, notably as Supervising Technical Director of Monsters, Inc. and as Associate Producer of Cars and Wall•E, before assuming the role of SVP of Film Production at the studio.

Porter has an Erdős-Bacon number of 5; 3 for his Erdős number[12] in two distinct paths[13][14] and 2 for his Bacon number.[15]

Bibliography

  • Robert L. Cook, Thomas K Porter, Loren Carpenter, "Distributed ray tracing", ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 137–145, 1984
  • Porter, Tom; Susman, Galyn (January 1, 2000). "Creating Lifelike Characters in Pixar Movies". Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March 13, 2009.

References

  1. ↑ "News Post". The Fenn School.
  2. ↑ Porter, Thomas; Duff, Tom (1984). "Compositing Digital Images". Computer Graphics. 18 (3): 253–259. doi:10.1145/800031.808606. ISBN 0-89791-138-5. (Available at pixar.com.)
  3. ↑ Keith Packard's webpage about Porter & Duff's 1984 paper
  4. ↑ "Alvy Pixar History Page". 2005-04-27. Retrieved 2018-08-23.
  5. ↑ Seymour, Mike. "1984 – Pool Balls 25 Years Later". FX Guide. Retrieved 21 August 2018.
  6. ↑ Price, David (2008). The Pixar Touch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-307-26575-7. p. 90. 2009 Vintage Books edition: ISBN 978-0-307-27829-6, Excerpt available at Google Books.
  7. ↑ "Tom Porter - Awards & Nominations". awardsandwinners.com. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  8. ↑ "Academy Awards - 1992 | Winners & Nominees". www.awardsandwinners.com. Retrieved 2018-03-07. For development of "RenderMan" software providing the means to digitally create scenes or elements that may be composited with other footage.
  9. ↑ "Three Pixar execs get special Oscars". San Francisco Chronicle. February 1, 1996. Retrieved March 12, 2009.
  10. ↑ "Academy Awards - 1995 | Winners & Nominees". www.awardsandwinners.com. Retrieved 2018-03-07. For their pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing.
  11. ↑ "Academy Awards - 1997 | Winners & Nominees". www.awardsandwinners.com. Retrieved 2018-03-07. For their pioneering efforts in the development of digital paint systems used in motion picture production.
  12. ↑ "List of people by Erdős number". Wikipedia. 2018-09-27.
  13. ↑ Thomas K Porter, Tom Duff: “Compositing Digital Images”, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 253-259, 1984
    N.J.A. Sloane, R.H. Hardin, T.S. Duff, J.H. Conway: “Minimal-Energy Clusters of Hard Spheres”, Discrete Computational Geometry 14, No. 3, 237-259, 1995.
    J.H. Conway, H.T. Croft, P. Erdos, M.J.T. Guy: “On the Distribution of Values of Angles Determined by Coplanar Points”, J. London Math. Soc., II., Ser. 19, 137-143, 1979.
  14. ↑ Thomas K Porter, István Simon: Random Insertion into a Priority Queue Structure. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 1(3): 292-298 (1975)[12]
    Béla Bollobás, István Simon: Repeated Random Insertion into a Priority Queue. J. Algorithms 6(4): 466-477 (1985)[13]
    Béla Bollobás, Paul Erdös: On a Ramsey-Turán type problem. J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 21(2): 166-168 (1976)[14]
  15. ↑ Porter appeared with Tom Hanks in The Pixar Story, and Tom Hanks appeared with Bacon in Apollo 13.
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