Pixar Animation Studios

RENDERMAN is Pixar’s rendering technology which excels at producing stunning imagery for VFX and feature film animation.

USD (Universal Scene Description) is software that can robustly and scalably interchange 3D scenes that may be composed of many different assets, sources, and animations, while fostering highly collaborative workflows.

A major component in 3D animation involves character models and the rigging of these character models.

Rigging involves setting multiple animation variables (“a-vars”).

• Pixar uses a lot of reference to help with their rigging and animation.

• With subsequent films, more a-vars would be developed.

  • Finding Nemo: more facial a-vars and the addition of eyebrows to the fish models to allow them to be more expressive.

  • Soul: additional finger controls for playing piano

MARIONETTE (“Menv”) / GEPETTO allowed animators to re-use and adapt rigs to multiple characters. They initially had a template rig for 2-legged and 4-legged animals.

• Previously animators had to create a completely new rig for each character like in Toy Story.

• Toy Story 2: GEPPETTO allowed them to create many more characters faster and thus increase the number of characters in the film

PRESTO an update to GEPPETTO which allowed animators to re-use and adapt rigs to multiple characters.

GOO is a muscle rig where the skin, muscle, and fat are built into the model and react according when the characters move. Animators could see this response in real-time as they moved their characters around.

• The Incredibles: character movements, most notably the movement of the shoulders on Mr. Incredible.

The Hank rig was developed for Hank the octopus in Finding Dory. It used a cylinder as Hank’s elbow and a special curve function to dictate how that muscle should move. They also set controls for the depth of the webbing on Hank which would help give Hank the squishy-squashy motion.

A hybrid simulation-animation rig was developed of the dad in Onward who is only composed of bottom pair of legs and an upper half of stuffing. With this rig, animators could manipulate the lower half but the simulation team controlled everything above.

• The top half was simulated using volumetric and cloth simulations

The finger contact rig was developed for the piano playing in Soul. This would allow the fingers to interact with the piano rig accurately.

• Soul: they built a piano rig and fed the audio file directly into the piano so that the keys would play in time with the audio. They then used the finger contact rig to interact with the piano rig accurately.

A transformation rig was created for Luca so animators had more control to how fast and which areas of the body that the transformation would occur.

GROUND LOCKING is a system developed by Pixar which made sure the cars stayed on the ground regardless of the contour of the path so the animators didn’t have to manually animate the cars frame by frame.

• Cars: allows animators to set paths for the cars to animate through without having to animate frame-by-frame to keep the cars onto the path

RENDERMAN shader allowed shading artists to essentially paint (like a make-up artist) different qualities to skin such as wrinkles, pores, veins, sweat, redness, whiteheads, moles, whiskers, etc. onto the basic renderings of characters.

• Toy Story 2: character skin

SUBDIVISION SURFACING is a technique where a modeling artist subdivides a hard-edged shape enough times that it appears as a smooth surface. It was invented with the help of one of Pixar’s founders Edwin Catmull.

• Previously, human characters were made up of various polygons, giving them a rough shape. That’s why Toy Story hid many of it’s human characters with lighting or only showing their hands and feet.

• Geri’s Game is a Pixar short that was the testing grounds for this technique.

• A Bug’s Life: is the first film to use this technique as seen on the glossy textures of the hard-bodied ant characters as well as the smooth curves and rolls of the soft-bodied caterpillar Heimlich.

• This technique would later become an industry standard in creating CGI characters.

SUBSURFACE SCATTERING is a tool which models light scattering outwards through an objects surface.

Along with subdivision surfacing, in which a modeling artist subdivides a hard-edged shape enough times that it appears as a smooth surface (to make skin smooth) and subsurface scattering, which modeled light scattering outwards through an objects surface (to make skin look more translucent), they were able to make skin more realistic.

FIZT is a program that simulates cloth and fur physics i.e. how the cloth and fur will move with the character or respond to forces like gravity, wind, or snow.

• Monsters, Inc.: all the fur in the film, most notably Sulley’s fur.

TAZ is a simulation program that accounts for all the interactions between different strands and how gravity affects the hair.

• Brave: Merida’s hair

KINGPIN was developed for Coco to make the bones appear looser by adding jiggle to them.

Realistic crowds were created using motion capture.

Simulation is a way to automate the movement of elements such as clothing, fur, hair, and water that would take too long to animate by hand. This includes volumetric simulation used for clouds, water, and Hank in Finding Dory.

Surface Details

• Toy Story 4: each antique was assigned as either fairly new, moderately aged, or extremely aged. The computer then gave surface details to fit those ages.

LOOM technology is used to weaves every strand of virtual fabric into a shading software to allow for different textures (fuzzy wool, leather, etc.) on clothing and to take into account light, wrinkles, etc.

3D UV-SCALING is a technique used to preserve the details of a cloth when stretched or compressed

• The Incredibles 2: used 3D UV-scaling and bump roughness mapping on the clothes of characters, most notably Elastigirl’s new suit.

TRANSBLURRENCY is a shading system which blurs the background of objects based on their depth and distance from the viewer.

• Finding Nemo: used to create the Jellyfish membrane

Ray tracing is a technique of mapping out all the rays of light in a scene as they bounce off walls, objects, and characters. This is used to create accurate reflections and lighting.

• Cars: used on the car models for shadows, detailed reflections, etc.

GLOBAL ILLUMINATION is a lighting system which models the natural distribution of light in a scene, all based on real world physics. Basically ray-tracing everything.

• Monsters University: the first film to feature Global Illumination

GUMMI is a type of lighting system that shows light going straight through an object. It was based on the gummy-bear-like quality of Marlin’s and Nemo’s skin from Finding Nemo.

• Ratatouille: GUMMI was used as a two-step effect along with subsurface scattering to create a more translucent look for certain foods e.g. cheese, vegetables, wine.

Pixar rebuilt their virtual camera system, modeling it on how an anamorphic camera would move.

• WALL-E: Pixar consulted with a live-action cinematographer. The first act had a loose handheld feel, while the 2nd and 3rd act use Steadicam movement. They also added little imperfections into the virtual camera movement since a real camera doesn’t always move perfectly.

TESSENDORF is an ocean generator program which uses algorithms to simulate sharper and cuspier waves to capture the danger of the ocean’s choppy surface.

• Cars 2: the waves in the intro with Finn McMissile.

GEOLIGHT, or geometric area lights, is an effect which allowed lighting artists to select a character model and make her into a mobile light source.

• Inside Out: This was developed to create Joy’s effervescence.

The Clouds team created volumetric 3D clouds which could be treated as objects in the scene. They also built a huge library of cloud Lego parts which allowed them to build clouds of all types i.e. rain clouds, stratus clouds, and cumulus clouds.

• Previously the clouds were matte-painted onto the background by artists

• The Good Dinosaur: the first film to use these volumetric 3D clouds.

Bump roughness mapping converts bumps, which become smooth surfaces the farther away you are, into surface roughness.

• Cars 3: to emphasize the aging details on older car characters

Continuous Collision Detection is a technique that was used to prevent cloth simulations from getting stuck on the bones of the skeleton characters in Coco.

Pixar developed a new physics program using Newton’s laws of motion to account for every force acting on the balloons and then how each balloon should move in Up. It also made sure that all the balloons were buoyant, their strings were attached, and the wind was blowing through them in a realistic way.