1. Making Movies

2. Making Movies Concept Storyboarding Sound Character Development
Layout and look
Effects
Animation
Lighting

3. Concept
Pixar’s Lasseter is a genius – “Nothing gets in the way of the story”

4. Storyboarding Explicitly define Used as guide by animators Scenes
Camera shots
Special effects
Lighting
Scale
Used as guide by animators

5. Sound Voice recording of talent completed before animation begins
Animations must match the voice over
A puppeteer once told me that the voice makes or breaks a character

6. Character Development
300 Drawings

7. Character Development
40 Sculptures

8. Character Development
Computer Models

9. Layout and Look
Build scenery
Match colors

10. Matchmoving CG camera must exactly match the real camera
Position
Rotation
Focal length
Aperature
Easy when camera is instrumented
Hard to place CG on moving objects on film

11. Matchmoving

12. Matchmoving
Square patterns in live action made it easier to track – furniture, wall paper
2D – 3D conversion in Maya

13. Water

14. Particle Sim and Indentation

15. Tools

16. Compositing

17. Compositing
Lighting

18. Facial Animation

19. Facial Animation

20. Fur

21. Cloth

22. Buttons and Creases

23. Texture

24. Companies Pixar Dreamworks SKG Disney Tippett Studios Sony Imageworks
4/21/2017
Companies
Pixar
Disney
Sony Imageworks
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)
Rhythm and Hues
Pacific Data Images (PDI)
Dreamworks SKG
Tippett Studios
Angel Studios
Blue Sky
Robert Abel and Associates
Giant Studios

25. Toy Story (1995) 77 minutes long; 110,064 frames
800,000 machine hours of rendering
1 terabyte of disk space
3.5 minutes of animation produced each week (maximum)
Frame render times: 45 min – 20 hours
110 Suns operating 24-7 for rendering
300 CPU’s

26. Toy Story Texture maps on Buzz: 189 Number of animation ‘knobs’
(450 to show scuffs and dirt)
Number of animation ‘knobs’
Buzz – 700
Woody – 712
Face – 212
Mouth – 58
Sid’s Backpack - 128

27. Toy Story Number of leaves on trees – 1.2 mil Number of shaders – 1300
Number of storyboards – 25,000

28. Toy Story 2 80 minutes long, 122,699 frames 1400 processor renderfarm
Render time of 10 min to 3 days
Direct to video film

29. Toy Story 2
Software tools
Alias|Wavefront
Amazon Paint
RenderMan

30. Newman! Subdivision-surfaces Polygonal hair (head) Sculpted clothes
Texture mapped on arms
Sculpted clothes
Complex shaders

31. Devil’s in the Details Render in color Convert to NTSC B/W
Add film effects
Jitter
Negative scratches
Hair
Static

32. Images

33. Images

34. Images

35. Stuart Little 500 shots with digital character 6 main challenges
Lip sync
Match-move (CG to live-action)
Fur
Clothes
Animation tools
Rendering, lighting, compositing

36. Stuart Little 100+ people worked on CG
32 color/lighting/composite artists
12 technical assistants
30 animators
40 artists
12 R&D

37. Shooting Film For CG Actors practice with maquettes
Maquettes replaced with laser dots
lasers on when camera shutter is closed
After each take, three extra shots
chrome ball for environment map for Stuart’s eyes
white and gray balls for lighting info

38. Match-moving Film scanned Camera tracking data retrieved
3D Equalizer + Alias Maya to prepare (register) the digital camera
Once shot is prepared, 2D images rendered and composited with live action

40. Final Fantasy

41. Final Fantasy Main characters > 300,000 polys 1336 shots
24,606 layers
3,000,000 renders (if only rendered once)
typically 5 render revisions
render time per frame = 90 min
Most layers per shot 500
934,162 days of render time on one CPU
they used 1200 CPUs = 778 days of rendering

42. Final Fantasy Renderman (Pixar) used for rendering
direct illumination
many hacks to fake global illumination
Maya used for modeling
Hair
Modeled is splines
Lighting and rendering complicated as well

43. Making Movies
Production Team
Production Line
Special Effects

44. Production Team Directors Modelers Lighting Character Animators
Technical Directors
Render Wranglers
Tools Developers
Shader Writers
Effects Animators
Looks Team
Security Officer
Janitor
Lackey

45. Render-Farms
High Density • Up to 132 Processors for every clusters. • Up to 66 cluster nodes with room for networking & switches
Pixar's new RenderFarm :
1024 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors (5 times faster old RISC processors).
Inside of eight new clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software.
2 terabytes of memory
60 terabytes of disk space.
First product: "The Incredibles"
RackSaver
BladeRack
Systems