Our air conditioner simply couldn't keep up with the heat yesterday, so Karen and I decided to cool off in a movie theater. We saw Shrek 2, which was simply amazing.

The hair and cloth simulation was mind-bogglingly good. I'm guessing Shrek's shirt had a hair simulation applied to it as well; when he was backlit, thousands of tiny fibers along the edge caught the light. His vest must have been pretty heavy geometry, too, as the surfacing was actually displaced rather than merely bumpmapped.

I'm curious what their rendering machines' specs are; even though I'm sure they used multiple passes, especially during the crowd scenes, the detail in the surfacing maps was just immense. Some of the surfaces were probably procedural, but at least the faces must have been mapped. And then there's that hair again, which really cranks up the CPU time (especially when you have characters which are almost entirely hair-covered, such as Donkey and Puss-In-Boots).

Oh, yes, and there was a story too. It only had one big plot hole that I noticed (spoilers: Far Far Away was at least 700 miles from the swamp, according to the road signs (and we were subjected to Donkey's incessant "are we there yet?" to drive home the fact); however, Pinocchio, the Three Blind Mice, the Gingerbread Man and the Wolf were watching the start of the night-time Wedding Ball on Shrek's TV (Shrek has TiVo?) and managed to get there with enough time for the Muffin Man to mix, make and bake Mongo before midnight).

Warning: spoiler discussion in comments.