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The Tech of Pixar: Piper (2017)
- macintux 7y ago2017. Didn’t understand most of it, but it is a jaw-droppingly beautiful short, and the stills in the article are well worth the skim.
- joezydeco 7y agoPixar shorts have always been test beds for techniques and technologies that show up in their feature films in the years afterward.
- berkut 7y agoIndeed. And rumour is they've stopped doing them now. On the VFX side of the industry we were often jealous of Pixar and Dreamworks being able to do shorts, in terms of having the scope and ability to test out new tech / pipelines.
- wolfd 7y agoAny idea why they might have stopped?
- mlyle 7y agoThey're still doing them, but they may not be featured before pictures anymore. They've found different distribution channels (YouTube, Disney+, Disney Channel, etc).
- KaiserPro 7y agoYeah, but then you realised why they were doing them, because they were using their own in-house tools. Pixar was the last holdout for maya, they only converted in the last few years
- ahaferburg 7y agoAre you saying that Pixar is using Maya now? For which parts of the workflow?
- rimliu 7y agoCreativity Inc. is very worth reading. A guy has a dream and spends his life inventing things that bring his dream to reality.
- froindt 7y agoI saw this when I saw Finding Dory. The sea foam was so good! I geek out about digital animation and was absolutely blown away. I'm not ashamed to admit I teared up a bit at how good it was.
- Angostura 7y agoI thought the sea in Moana was even better.
- froindt 7y agoI'm very much behind on movies. It's on my list though.
- Operyl 7y agoThis trailer[0] has a few shots of the sea. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKFuXETZUsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKFuXETZUsI
- AareyBaba 7y agoSony Imageworks did waves in Surf's Up back in 2007 https://youtu.be/e96_1NxL9no?t=98 https://youtu.be/e96_1NxL9no?t=98
- milleramp 7y agoIs there a HDR render of this available?
- Animats 7y agoThe approach is straightforward. "Every shot in Piper is composed of millions of grains of sand, each one of them around 5000 polygons." With enough compute power, you don't have to fake as much.
- Joeboy 7y agoUnless you're looking at it very, very closely, does 5k polygon sand look any different from 500 polygon sand, or even 50 polygon sand? Even the very close ups in the article look like they'd be much the same with a lot fewer polygons.
- epse 7y agoPresumably the difference is in light reflections on the sand? I don't know
- have_faith 7y agoThat was my first question. They mention in the article the high number is for close ups.
- Joeboy 7y agoAlso says: > Every shot in Piper is composed of millions of grains of > sand, each one of them around 5000 polygons. I'm guessing the article is just confused. The important point, I think, is about using real geometry for sand particles rather than the beach being a surface with a displacement map.
- hathym 7y agoRemind me of this https://empwaynek.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/draw-an-owl.png https://empwaynek.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/draw-an-owl.pn...
- spongeb00b 7y agoThis is absolutely amazing. When I first saw Piper I assumed they were cutting real video of the water and beach is was just so realistic.
- wmertens 7y agoThis was a fascinating and humbling read, and only after reading did I realize this was almost 3 years old… What are they animating now? Snowstorms with individual unique flakes?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fenwick67 7y agoThey already generated ~2000 different flakes and a snow simulation system for Frozen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(2013_film)#Technology_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(2013_film)#Technology_...
- anibalin 7y agoThe sand is mind blowing. Every grain is a mesh itself.
- zuhayeer 7y agoAfter a certain threshold of processing power, you can just use earth as it is, pretty amazing
- knodi123 7y agoAfter a certain threshold, earth as it is can be seen as a tool for powerful processing. At least, that's what a little white mouse told me.
- unnouinceput 7y agoAnd this was 2017! Imagine what Pixar have in stores now. I, for one, can't wait to see what they come up with next, in term of shorts I mean.
- knolan 7y agoThe article makes the point that it became inefficient to use displacement maps due to their size ballooning beyond '36 times' what they would normally use. So this means that the ground displacement map was just not detailed enough and pushing it to higher resolutions didn't scale. Instead they used Houdini to generate sand grains, I presume Houdini used some sort of displacement map per grain? The final result is a mesh nevertheless. They also mention that, "this result was driven by a combination of culling techniques including camera frustum, facing angles and distance, creating a variance of dense to coarse patches of sand for optimum efficiency." So while they had grains each of ~5000 polygons available to them and positions that they could occupy, they cut down on that polygon count using a combination of techniques (many common in games too) to make it all work. So the polygons of any grains outside the camera frustum were ignored. The faces of the grains point away from, I presume, any light source and therefor not contributing to the path tracer were ignored and also some soft of LOD to reduce polygon count as distance. As an amateur blender user I'm reminded of microdisplacement as a way for us mere mortals to achieve something in this space: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-microdisplacements https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-microdisp...
- willis936 7y agoDoesn’t aggressive culling present issues with ray traced lighting? If you remove an umbrella that’s behind the frustum then a shadow in the scene is missing. Even harder is if you cull a second layer of sand grains then you don’t get the light that reflects off of them (assuming partial transparency of grains).
- knolan 7y agoYes, so I presume they only remove the faces that are not exposed to any light bounce.
- Gravityloss 7y agoBut what about the plastic?
- thomasjudge 7y agoIs the beach shared somehow shot to shot? Is there a database storing each sand grain?
- mroche 7y agoDon't forget Part 2: Finding Dory - making waves https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-finding-dory-making-waves/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-...