The computer graphics pioneer goes deep on RGBA.
Alvy Ray Smith’s accomplishments in computer graphics are hard to summarize. Many may know him as a co-founder of Pixar and the inventor of a number of early digital paint systems. Among many other achievements he worked with Ed Catmull to ‘invent’ the alpha channel (RGBA), a keystone of computer graphics and digital compositing today.
It seemed only fitting, then, to feature this important history with Alvy in an episode of VFX Artifacts. I talked to him prior to SIGGRAPH and just prior to the launch of his new book, A Biography of the Pixel, published by MIT Press.
