Friday, November 14, 2014
How Pixar Uses Math to Make Characters Look Perfect
gizmodo.com: It probably won't surprise you that Pixar uses some good old fashioned mathematics in the 3D animation process. What might surprise you is just how much they use math to ensure that their characters look and move perfectly. And Pixar researcher Tony DeRose is great at explaining just that.
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Wow, this caught my eye. It is so fascinating to think about how we as a human race have evolved in such a way that we now can create images of ourselves to go through life and have experiences and behavior just like we do. Not only that, but just as interesting is what we make them look like and how we go about making them. To my opinion, there is not one ugly character in all of pixar's movies. I admit there must be a witch created to have warts and be hunched over and seem displeasing, but even so the math behind her is extraordinary.
We can create what we view to be wonderful looking beings with math. From this angle, math could be viewed as the objectiveness of beauty. Sure, the way most people view it in the real world is just nature creating your look from the genes of both your parents combined. Even with this, there is a math behind it. But when you realize that math is in fact the objectiveness of beauty and nature's touch is the subjectiveness, the 3-D animations suddenly become what we strive to look like as humans. I see it this way because we as a human race applying the math to create people in animation take over the job of nature and apply our own subjectiveness to the objective.
And this leaves me with the question, what else do we try to control that nature has the control on? The answer is much larger than I first percieved it to be.
I always wonder why people get so amazed when they find out that math can be used in art. Math is all around us, and was really just created by humanity in an attempt to talk about the world around us. Thus, it only makes sense that we can use math to create art as math describes the world around us. The fact that you can use math for 3D modeling makes sense, as 3D modeling involves the manipulation of a mesh being manipulated in three dimensions. Math can be used to describe the location of each intersection of the mesh. Changing this will change how the resulting model looks.
It's crazy to learn how much accuracy goes into creating these characters! I've always wondered how the characters in all the pixar films looked so similar. Using math to develop characters is not only great in that Pixar has a system for developing every project that comes their way but also the have a system that helps keep their style of character in every project as well. I would be interested in learning more about the process that does into developing the full character though. How many people does it take to make the full figure of a character and how long?
Math is used to create pretty much anything--there is a formula for everything. Math has never come easy to me, but I appreciate its place in the world and its importance. My best friend from childhood has a huge interest in 3D computer modeling and game-making; I would spend hours making games with him and watching him make the characters and environment on the computer screen. Although I don't fully understand this process, it is familiar to me because I grew up with it.
When we can combine the scientific and the creative, we open ourselves up to amazing new possibilities.
It's really interesting to watch this video after looking at the work of Ray Harryhausen in a previous article. It provides a lot of perspective on how much animation techniques have changed and developed over the past 50 years. Coming into this video with very little understanding of the specifics of the mathematics that go into animation, I think the video effectively provided a small base of understanding into the kind of math that goes into digital rendering. It was really interesting to see the sculpted model of the hand from "Jerry's Game" and then see the digital rendering as introduction into how the process goes back and forth between artistic and mathematic techniques and minds.
this reminds me of the Talk with Louis Henry that was this past Friday. One of the things that he mentioned was how when artists are learning to draw the muppets there is a lot of calculation that goes into making sure the proportions of the face are just right. He said that the children who watch the show pick up right away if there is a discrepancy in the face or the body of a character. This is so interesting and so true. It's really easy to spot when someone has drawn a face or body that is not proportional, it's also incredibly difficult to actually get these proportions accurate. Pixar goes through that same process in making sure that their characters are perfectly accurate, that is what makes their movies so wonderful to watch. Without this attention to detail and mathematical calculation their characters would not resonate with so many people.
One of the things that I've missed most about being in a conservatory drama program is that I have not yet been able to take any of the math classes that CMU offers. I plan to correct this in my scheduling for next semester, however it is really amazing to see that in the real world there is a total marriage of theses two fields to create something universally excepted as awesome; Pixar movies. Using just a bit of calculus and higher math, this man who appears to me to be unbelievably brilliant can carve out really complicated objects just from starting from a square, or a cube, or some other geometrically simple shape. Now I didn't understand everything he went over in the video, which was no doubt simplified to be presentable to the target audience, but that concept of digital subtractive manufacturing is incredible.
I've had this subconscious knowledge that animation artists need to know about math, but never though about it in such detail. I have imaging computer artists as mostly using illustration to create their characters and scenery rather than numbers. I liked seeing this done because you could see how easy it is to mess something up because of the math involved. I think it's really cool how we have made numbers dictate the shapes and detail of characters in movies. The animation process is even more crazy and precise than I ever imagined.
Overall, I am not surprised that this is how the characters are made. Symmetry is pleasing to the eye and has always been since the very beginning.
Those of you who attended the Louis Henry Mitchell talk the other day will remember that he mentioned something called a character drawing sheet. Basically what these are are guidelines and protocols for precisely drawing each character. And all of the drawings and dimensions are based on math. Everything from the tilt of Grover's oval eyes or the precise head-to-body ratio of Tweety Bird's figure comes down to math.
Being that math is the only constant in the universe and governs most everything we interact with, it makes perfect sense that it would be the key to making Woody's cheeks look perfectly smooth.
This is very interesting. Of course, math is used in all sorts of arenas we don't automatically think of, but as Louis Henry Mitchell was saying on Friday, sometimes that is the most important thing in keeping characters consistent. I think it is very cool that we are able to combine logic and art so often, and that they are frequently quite dependent on each other. That's one of the cool things about Carnegie Mellon as well- we are able to have sort of the best of both worlds when it comes to art and technology, and I am quite proud to say I am a part of that environment, though I haven't been able to take full advantage of it just yet.
For the longest time I never thought about what design and thought was put in behind entertainment. As a kid I didn't care because to me the characters existed. Pixar did this so well and so did Disney and that is one of the many reasons they are so successful. They are able to mask design and technology, in this article math, with their powerful story. Reading this article made me go back to the day I decided to put in disc 2, bonus features, instead of the film on disc 1. That day changed my life forever, I was overwhelmed by the fact that people could build worlds, tell stories and travel between these stories for a living and for the rest of their lives. Looking behind the curtain, and discovering the magic tricks allows us to create our own magic for others.
As for math I often thought of it as being the opposite of art, mostly because it didn't require any opinion or innovation. I never felt like any part of myself was in a math problem, finished or unfinished. It always felt like a cold piece of time-frozen and wasted because it kept me away from what I loved to do. Now after designing and falling in love with theatrical sets, architecture, and theme parks I now know that it is the vehicle to my visions, what makes my dreams a reality for others. Every time we need to measure a wall, build a canvas, math often makes what is creative simply beautiful.
It always surprises me just how much math applies to the art world. I know that math can be found in almost everything, but that they use it so much to animate characters is very surprising. I was especially interested in the ways they use it to smooth the angular faces of the models that they produce, to create smooth motion and the textures of skin and plastic. I have always been very interested in the geometric properties of facets creating a smooth surface, and the ways in which scale changes that. It is also very interesting to get a glimpse of how Pixar creates their characters and makes them come to life.
This makes a lot of sense now. Growing up with Pixar movies setting the standard in not only the kind of cartoon animation I wanted and would only eventually see, but also the life lessons that would help me survive childhood and help me grow into a well caring and wise adult. It comes to me no surprise that behind all of the brilliant story telling magic is math. Very complex to wrap my head around math. The very same math that allows them to make all the some edges they need to embody a visually pleasing image. Because nothing in real life truly has hard edges as much as we'd like to believe. There is a curve in just about everything we see. I find it nothing but cooler that the head of this pioneering masterpiece of a company is a computer science major who created his own theory that the animator use. This only emphasizes the point that math is in everything
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