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This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also ha

This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.

mcast 5y ago
When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
- diskzero 5y ago
  You won't find a lot of polygons, but you would find many interesting surface textures, shaders, lighting effects, simulations and more.
  - Arelius 5y ago
    Correct, Pixar is notorious for using fairly low detail SubD surface control cages for almost everything.
    - mcast 5y ago
      Cool, that led me to a really good article on Pixar's open source project: https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfaces.html https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfa...
      - nineteen999 5y ago
        Support for these were added into Blender via OpenSubdiv in Blender 2.8: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1025067227530362883?lang=en https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1025067227530362883...
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  Sounds interesting. Do you know any link to this talk? Edit: I could not find similar to here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/
  - donarb 5y ago
    It looks like Apple didn't offer that video after the talk. https://asciiwwdc.com/2018/sessions/111 https://asciiwwdc.com/2018/sessions/111 The engineer's name is Danielle Feinberg and she did a similar TED talk two years before WWDC (even the titles are similar). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1R1z9ipFnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1R1z9ipFnM
    - mcast 5y ago
      Unfortunately I couldn't find the video either but it was fairly similar to the TED talk you linked (just longer and had slightly more "internal" details).
shadowgovt 5y ago
There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?" ... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.
- gumby 5y ago
  I don't really follow computer graphics much less SIGGRAPH and yet after Luxo Jr was shown there even I heard about it. It really was a huge deal.

mcast 5y ago

When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.

diskzero 5y ago
You won't find a lot of polygons, but you would find many interesting surface textures, shaders, lighting effects, simulations and more.
- Arelius 5y ago
  Correct, Pixar is notorious for using fairly low detail SubD surface control cages for almost everything.
  - mcast 5y ago
    Cool, that led me to a really good article on Pixar's open source project: https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfaces.html https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfa...
    - nineteen999 5y ago
      Support for these were added into Blender via OpenSubdiv in Blender 2.8: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1025067227530362883?lang=en https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1025067227530362883...
iamcreasy 5y ago
Sounds interesting. Do you know any link to this talk? Edit: I could not find similar to here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/
- donarb 5y ago
  It looks like Apple didn't offer that video after the talk. https://asciiwwdc.com/2018/sessions/111 https://asciiwwdc.com/2018/sessions/111 The engineer's name is Danielle Feinberg and she did a similar TED talk two years before WWDC (even the titles are similar). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1R1z9ipFnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1R1z9ipFnM
  - mcast 5y ago
    Unfortunately I couldn't find the video either but it was fairly similar to the TED talk you linked (just longer and had slightly more "internal" details).

shadowgovt 5y ago

There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?" ... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.

gumby 5y ago
I don't really follow computer graphics much less SIGGRAPH and yet after Luxo Jr was shown there even I heard about it. It really was a huge deal.