How Toy Story Creator Pixar Revolutionized Animation

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The technology allows us to build fanciful kinds of worlds where toys can come alive or fish can talk or monsters can roam the world. [00:00:27] Speaker 2: While it's common knowledge that Pixar's movies are the product of computer animation, you might be surprised by the amount of technology that was necessary to make them possible. In fact, Pixar is largely responsible for some of the most significant developments in computer graphics history. [00:00:40] Speaker 3: A lot of people look at the product and they say, "Oh, it's the artwork," and so they focus on that. But they don't understand what went behind it. [00:00:49] Speaker 1: It's a blend of the technology and the art that really makes it work. [00:00:54] Speaker 2: Behind every one of Pixar's films and the visual effects of many iconic movies that have come out in the past 30 years is a piece of software called RenderMan. RenderMan is a renderer, the final tool of the end of a production pipeline that compiles all the 3D assets created for a film. It's what translates the virtual camera the artists work with during an animated or visual effects production into the final image that we see of the movie. [00:01:15] Speaker 4: There's lots of tools that companies and Pixar write to do the 3D modeling, the animation motion, camera definitions all flow into the very end of the software pipeline and that's the render. [00:01:32] Speaker 2: Pixar got its start during computer graphics' infant stages and the most advanced CG images were primitive polygon shapes. At this time, animation was strictly done through illustration. It was an artist's medium with every frame drawn by hand and photographed into a film reel. But in the late 70s, that began to change. [00:01:50] Speaker 3: In 1979, after the success of Star Wars, George Lucas wanted to bring high technology into the film industry. And he was the only person in the film industry who thought this was a good thing to be spending money on. [00:02:05] Speaker 2: Ed Catmull was part of a small group of people in the industry who recognized the potential of computer graphics to create animated films. He joined Lucasfilm to head its computer division and set to work solving some of the challenges in CGI, such as motion blur. The engineers had to start at Square One, developing all the software and tools needed to create characters and animations, everything that's commonplace today. During this process, they developed a precursor to RenderMan, called Reyes, which stood for "Renders Everything You Ever Saw." [00:02:32] Speaker 1: They built this renderer, and that's what we used on the early films, like "Star Trek II," "Wrath of Khan." We used it on "Sherlock Holmes." We used it on our early short films, "Luxo Jr." [00:02:45] Speaker 2: Lucas' group eventually spun off as an independent company purchased by Steve Jobs, which marked the beginning of Pixar. They would continue to go on making animated shorts, creating the iconic "Luxo Lamp" characters, and receiving the first Academy Award for a computer-generated short. With each and every project, they slowly evolved their tools and the Reyes renderer, eventually creating "RenderMan," which would go on to have a monumental impact in animation and visual effects. As part of the sale to Steve Jobs, Lucas had the rights to use Pixar's technology for their VFX projects, using it to create the groundbreaking CGI scenes for the Genesis sequence in "Star Trek II," "Wrath of Khan," "The Pseudopod Creature in "The Pseudopod Creature in the Abyss," "The T-1000 and Terminator 2 Judgment Day," and "The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park." [00:03:28] Speaker 3: When Jurassic Park came out in 1993, it changed everything. Within about a two-year period, this industry, which had been very digital-averse, threw the switch on everything. Digital audio, digital video, and computer graphics. People thought of it like this overnight phenomenon, but in fact, we've been working on it for 20 years. And then "Toy Story" came out two years later, which changed animation history. [00:03:59] Speaker ?: To infinity and beyond! [00:04:04] Speaker 1: We always knew from day one, we wanted to do a feature. We wanted to get into that arena. We did all the short films because that was our stepping stone towards that. So when you finally got "Toy Story" out there, that was sort of like, "Ah! Did it!" And then you go, "Well, what's next?" [00:04:23] Speaker 2: Toy Story was a knockout success and launched the once-struggling company into a future filled with box office hits. Pixar focused its efforts full-time on making more animated feature-length films, and with that came a slew of demands to push its animation technology to new heights. [00:04:37] Speaker 4: Every film represents both the directors and the artists wanting to push in some new technical direction. And so the rendering technology and indeed all the tools are sort of structured in a way that they can be remade and remade and remade over time to meet the artistic requirements that the directors and artists bring to the table. New and more elaborate ways of specifying crowds or foliage or fur on animals. That stuff is constantly changing. [00:05:04] Speaker 5: Renderman is basically our artist's tool to create the images that we want. Every new thing they come up with, it makes all these different images and worlds possible. It's just sort of like making the paintbrush better and better. A film like Monsters Incorporated, it's like, "Okay, we want the main monster to have hair on him. Sullivan should have hair on him." And everyone's like, "Yeah, we don't know how to do hair." "Okay, so we're gonna have to do a R&D project to figure out how to do hair." And then, and then the next one's Finding Nemo and it's like, "Underwater, uh, how do we do underwater?" "Okay, let's figure out underwater." There's these huge hurdles that you're getting over because none of those movies were possible in the beginning and there's this big R&D project to figure it out. [00:05:44] Speaker 2: Making an animated film is an extremely time and labor intensive process that draws upon the talents of hundreds of artists and computer engineers. [00:05:52] Speaker 3: It's on the order of 20,000 person weeks. We shoot for lower than that, but we've had, we've had much worse actually. [00:06:03] Speaker 2: Once the story is figured out for a film, which can take months, even years itself, artists start by creating all the different digital assets needed. Every character, prop, and location must be sculpted and modeled. From there, the surfacing team adds all the relevant textures. Objects that are wood or metal are given the appropriate materials that reflect their composition. Clothing is given a fabric appearance, skin, an organic look, and so on. Character models have controls attached to their limbs, so they move in a realistic way. Once all of these assets are complete, animators bring the characters and world to life, conveying the story through personality and action. Completed shots are then passed on to the lighting department, which gives the film its cinematic look and style. [00:06:39] Speaker 5: This is before lighting, and you kind of get a sense of what the world looks like a little bit, but then we throw the lighting in there, and all of a sudden you can see WALL-E, where before you can't even really see WALL-E, but you start to pull WALL-E out. Someone like me, the lighting DP, might go on three years before it ever comes out in theaters, and we create a whole three-dimensional world inside the computer. And if we don't put lights in, it actually comes out black, because the computer is trying to mimic real life, and that we have little icons of lights, we move around. So if it's sunset, I put the sun in, and I can make it kind of orange, and put it at the horizon, and start sort of building the scene up that way. [00:07:15] Speaker 4: The Coco set at Pixar was, I think, one of the most complicated that we've ever put into a film, and it was difficult because the cameras that they chose to fly through the world of the dead, or through the giant main Grand Central train station, or the big cemetery, each of those sets were hugely complex. One scene in Coco, there was eight million light sources illuminating in this sort of interesting glow, kind of candlelight, and other light sources. If you have more than a dozen lights, it's often a problem, and so to scale that up into thousands and millions was a huge challenge for rendering. [00:07:51] Speaker 5: This is the shot where we have eight and a half million lights, and it's like, I don't know, that's probably eight and a half million lights. I don't know, that's probably eight million more lights than we've ever done in a scene before. [00:08:00] Speaker 2: Because the assets being worked with are extremely resource intensive from a computing perspective, artists must work with low resolution versions of the film. The actual final image and look isn't known until it's processed through RenderMan, taking all the lighting, shading, and data aggregated into an image, and turning it into a finished 2D frame. Compiling all these digital assets and processing them into their final form is an extremely intensive computing task. [00:08:22] Speaker 4: A typical frame takes hours to render. If you were going to render them all on your home computer, it would take a couple hundred years probably to make one of these movies. And so we solved that problem by having whole networks full of computers that all render simultaneously different frames at the same time. [00:08:37] Speaker 2: The sequences being rendered by Pixar are so complex, even with state of the art machinery, it can take days. [00:08:43] Speaker 3: An image is anywhere between 50 hours to 100 hours on modern computers. [00:08:48] Speaker 2: That roughly translates to around 1,200 to 2,400 hours of rendering for every second of a movie. [00:08:54] Speaker 4: I always try to remind people that we're not pushing a button and a movie comes out the back end. The huge number of people involved from fine artists through the engineers that are writing RenderMan. It's a very human intensive task making one of these films. [00:09:09] Speaker 2: The influence of Pixar's work in computer animation had a profound impact on the industry. But its applications spread far beyond just entertainment. [00:09:21] Speaker 1: From the beginning, when we started building the renderer, we were thinking about commercializing it, making it available to anybody who wants to use it in doing visual effects, to doing animation, to doing scientific kind of exploration if they want to make images. It's basically a way of making images. [00:09:38] Speaker 4: There's a big advertising market. People use it in architecture, visualization. One of our longest standing customers is NASA. There's a group there that is tasked with visualizing some of the huge amounts of data they get back from their satellites. [00:09:55] Speaker 2: Over 30 years ago, Pixar started as a hyper-technical software company pioneering advances in computer graphics and animation. [00:10:03] Speaker 5: We're able to tell the story we want to because the technology enables us to. Ultimately, what we're doing here is really this amazing combination of art and technology that we pull them apart. They aren't as strong as when we combine them here. [00:10:16] Speaker 1: In the early days, we sort of had to hold it back. I had to tell John Lasseter, no, I just can't let you try to make it rain in this sequence. We can't get it done in time. We don't want to make those restrictions anymore. We want to try to make it be whatever you want. It shouldn't be the renderer that's holding us back. We'll be back.