20 ms·
Pixar in a Box
- beneater 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10129914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10129914
- Isamu 10y agoThe "Patterns" lesson is new, it's pretty cool. Check it out: Voronoi partition, Poisson disk process, Make your own dinosaur skin, Perlin noise. Very fun. My daughter really enjoyed this when it first came out. She was surprised to see the applications for math she had learned at school!
- gdubs 10y agoStarted watching last night and couldn't put it down. Really slick visual explanations and a great combination of practicality and artistry.
- britcruise 10y agoThat's so exciting to hear, thanks for this feedback
- climber_mac 10y agoI really recommend reading Creativity Inc. By Ed Catmull, one of the cofounders of Pixar. It's an incredible book full of insight on how Pixar fosters creativity to create hit after hit movie. It really helped me shift my mind during some difficult projects where I felt like I was working against impossible odds.
- jluk 10y agoYou really do get incredible insight into how they work up and tear down ideas in a setting that is both art and technology. Also fun to hear about lessons learned from iconic films such as toy story, finding nemo, and inside out.
- arafa 10y agoI read that book and it was so good I immediately read it again. Then I read it halfway through again before switching to another book. Really great read and, oddly enough, a great book on leadership (especially in creative organizations).
- greggman 10y agoI read the book. But it was after that that Mr. Catmull got caught apparently keeping is employee's salaries lower than market rates by making illegal non-poaching agreements. http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerges-as-central-figure-in-the-wage-fixing-scandal-101362.html http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerge... Also, he never covered why Cars was so awful. (or Cars 2) which I believe both came out before the book? Maybe you disagree they were bad but rottentomatoes and metacritic has them near the bottom of the list along with The Good Dinosaur, Brave, and Monsters University. I'd love to know what he thinks changed. What I liked most about that book was how much he acknowledged luck. Examples: Luck they didn't get sold/disbanded before Jobs bought them from Lucas. Luck that Jobs was willing to blow 70 million on them as a computer company before they switched to being an animation company. And he acknowledges lots of other luck.
- SeanDav 10y agoCars (first one) was good, agree that Cars 2 was complete rubbish. I love animated movies, always have - but I could not get through Cars 2.
- childifchaos 10y agoCars is not a bad movie, it did very well, it was just a little below normal Pixar quality but still above most other studios work. The good dinosaur, Brave and Monsters university all still good but not quite Pixar. Cars two is an absolute disaster though and it's a shame it wasn't covered in the book. Something clearly went very wrong with this movie and they redid most of it in ten weeks or so I read, it seems to go against all the values and things they talk about and it does feel as if the story they tell about themselves is perhaps worked as much as the stories they make.
- euyyn 10y agoWhat's not to like about Brave? I enjoyed it a lot.
- zem 10y agohere's my review from when i saw the movie: Finally went and saw Brave. And, I have to say, I was disappointed :( Oh, the movie certainly had its good points. It was technically gorgeous - both the artwork and the character animation were Pixar at the top of their very considerable game. And despite complaints of the story being overly Disneyfied it was satisfyingly subversive[0] of many of the tired tropes it referenced. I didn't even mind that it was predictable[1] - fairytale movies tend to be, and that is often part of their charm. No, what ruined it for me was that it was a fundamentally boring movie. The dialogue was bland, the humour was slapsticky (which tends to fall flat for me), the moralising was heavy handed, and there was no real tension other than that required for the linear development of the plot. Even the "jokes for the adults" that have practically become de rigueur for big-budget animated movies weren't all that funny (though I did blink a bit at the Wicker Man reference). All in all, not one of Pixar's best. [0] http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/just-another-princess-movie/ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/just-another-princess-movie/ [1] it was nice that it ended with her going her own way rather than finding a nice boy to marry, but it wasn't really what I'd call a plot twist
- mrmeemus 10y agoThanks for sharing this, it's so awesome!
- qz_ 10y agoWhy all the downvotes this person is obviously new here and he's just trying to be nice.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mintplant 10y agoI'll take this opportunity to ask: how do you learn 3D modeling? I tried just diving in with Maya and 3DS Max, but the tools are so complicated and I'm sure I was doing things the wrong way. I'm in college right now, but my university (UCSD) doesn't seem to offer any courses on the subject.
- nickclaw 10y agoCheck out blender. It's a fairly powerful, open source 3d modeling tool (also game engine, motion tracker, compositor, sculpter, and more). I used to use it quite a lot back in highschool. It also has a fairly high learning curve at first, but there's a huge community built around it[2]. Andrew price has some very high quality tutorials[3] 1. https://www.blender.org https://www.blender.org 2. http://blenderartists.org http://blenderartists.org 3. https://blenderguru.com https://blenderguru.com
- hbosch 10y agoIf you're, say, coming from a more Adobe-centric background I'd recommend Cinema 4D and the Greyscale Gorilla tutorials. You'll ramp up plenty fast, and have some cool renders after just 1 day. I've since switched to Modo (affordable indie licenses via Steam) but find both programs to be more modern and adaptive to my workflow than Maya and Max -- however, if industry standards are important to you, there is no avoiding the Autodesk Twins...
- soylentcola 10y agoThis is what I've done (albeit just messing around with it from time to time). I confess I used a cracked copy of c4d since a lot of the things I wanted to check out weren't included in any "lite" edition. Not sure I feel great about that but I treated it the way I treated Photoshop and friends for years: cracked copies while learning and then at some point I was using it enough that I bought a legit copy of CS6 through work at a discount. If I ever do more than fiddle around with C4D I'll look into buying a copy. It's just hard to come up with $1000 for the minimum version that supports global illumination (which I was trying to learn about). Moral and legal issues aside, though, I found it a lot easier to learn than others I'd tried and it even made some other programs like Unreal Engine easier to learn.
- djcapelis 10y agoIt's good to see Suzanne popping up in so many places! (Suzanne is Blender's monkey mesh primitive and logo. Blender uses it where other programs would use the Utah teapot. You see it in the character modeling icon on that page. Wikipedia about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Suzanne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Suzanne)
- amelius 10y ago> A single frame can take more than 24h to render What, really? I was under the impression that pixar had a render farm large enough to render frames in minutes or even seconds.
- drcode 10y agoI would suspect they can render a frame that's 99% quality in a minute, but then spend a day to get to 100%.
- far33d 10y agoUsually, a frame is rendered on a single processor.
- njloof 10y agoRendering is mostly I/O bound these days due to high complexity models and textures.
- berkut 10y agoThat's somewhat true for VFX in general, but not really for Pixar: They mostly use procedural textures (they use them a lot more than most other VFX studios can) so texture IO is a lot less, and is one of the reasons they can get away with starting to use a GPU preview renderer (i.e. the textures fit in VRAM). Regarding model complexity - that doesn't really matter these days - if you want to raytrace a scene, unless you want to do full-on deferred raybatching and geo paging (like Disney's Hyperion does), you need to fit the scene into memory, so other than at startup/ingestion time, model complexity doesn't really matter in terms of IO. Also, Pixar's base level subd meshes are really rough (compared to what you see in VFX in general - for VFX base levels are probably subdivided down 2/3 times more), so the geo given in in Pixar's case isn't actually that bad.
- tomvbussel 10y agoThere's very little info in the Disney paper on geomapping, do you have any ideas on how they do it? I guess that you don't want to page in full models (as you either need a very large amount of memory per thread, which means smaller ray batches, or you need to have a shared cache, which means waiting on other threads). So you'll probably need something similar to Toro (as described by Pharr et al.), which just doesn't seem very efficient to me (as grids have improved little compared to BVHs).
- jitl 10y agoIf you want to dive in, this first video has a cool overview of the Pixar-y things the course covers: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/start/introduction/v/pipeline-video https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/start/intr... I was disappointed that the landing page says practically nothing, and you have to go looking around to get a good overview.
- rawnlq 10y agoThe animation timeline controls used in these tutorials[1] are better than the ones used for by professional web developers[2]. [1] https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/animate/ball/p/squash-and-stretch-animation-with-bezier-curves https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/animate/ba... [2] https://greensock.com/timelinemax https://greensock.com/timelinemax I wish web devs would stop reinventing the wheel and just steal these UIs from animation software that are proven to work well for animators.
- abritinthebay 10y ago> just steal these UIs Look and feel may not be copyrightable but this would make a lot of people very uncomfortable in terms of possible liability (UI's can be covered under design patents, etc).
- abritinthebay 10y agolove how I'm being downvoted for pointing out a very real legal risk for software projects that attempt what was suggested. Keep on being terribly naive about legal matters HN, never change.
- moron4hire 10y agoUh, one is an editor UI, the other is an API. They're not exactly comparable.
- mattdw 10y agoThere are tools to go between the two (from http://cubic-bezier.com/ http://cubic-bezier.com/ to Flash's HTML5 export), but I don't think there's any general solution to go from a UI like that, to code. What if one of your points is a programmatic parameter that varies over time? What if you're changing ground level with every iteration? How does the bezier-based editing UI help with that?
- intoverflow2 10y ago> What if one of your points is a programmatic parameter that varies over time? What if you're changing ground level with every iteration? How does the bezier-based editing UI help with that? Check out how After Effects solves this, keyframed and scripted animation shares the same timeline and can reference each other.
- hmate9 10y ago"A single frame can take over 24 hours to render. And that's just ONE frame". There are about 150,000 frames in a movie. Not bad.
- njloof 10y agoRendering is a trade off between time, quality and artistic and technical effort. No frame needs 24 hours to render; it just means someone wasn't tasked with making it faster or cheaper.
- loco5niner 10y ago... or lower quality ;-)
- curiousgal 10y agoDisney used a 55000-core supercomputer to render Big Hero 6. http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]