ILM patents correcttive blend shapes?

http://www.google.com/patents/US8624904

Am I reading that correctly?

I’m no lawyer, but this reads, “We want to own this blend shape system with correctives”.

The examiner who granted it is an idiot. Not only is there academic work on this going back 20 years - for the life of me I can’t see the difference between this and the 2005 SIGGRAPH paper they cited - but patents are supposed to be ‘non-obvious’ and the idea that ‘adding a second blendshape on top of a first one’ is non obvious is silly.

What the hell?? This reads like a paper from 20years ago when this kind of stuff was genuinely new and experimental. How can this be granted now, and more importantly, why would ILM patent something that everybody has been using for years?

one word(acronym)… GIF

They are trying to do the same thing with patenting rig builders - as I have reported in another thread on this site.

Its almost certainly one of those ‘lets patent things to prove to our corporate masters that we are adding value’ initiatives that come up every few years in big companies. Sigh