Monday, April 14, 2014
Pixar gives a closer look at how it animates big hairy monsters
The Verge: The GPU Technology Conference isn't for everyone, but anyone can enjoy the inside look one Pixar engineer gave into the famed company's animation process. It starts with Presto, Pixar's internal animation system that allows the company to manipulate Monsters University's characters with an incredible degree of precision. The Pixar engineer illustrated how with a few clicks, an animator can move Sully's arms, legs, eyes, nose, and lips — 1500 animation controls in all — and do it in real-time without dropping a frame.
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3 comments:
This is one of the technological advancements that often get missed because only a "few" people are actually in and have contact with it. The processing power that used to be needed in order to animate every single hair wouldn't have been feasible. But it seems like computer technology is advancing exponentially so who knows what could be next.
This is really cool! I was always wondering how Pixar achieved such realistic and tangible textures on their characters. Sully is really interesting because his look it so based in his fur. It's really cool how they have facilitated the creation and animation of characters in order to speed up a process that would take even longer having to animate each individual aspect in each frame. The textures that have developed over the past few years, even between sequels, are amazing and I hope that we will be able to make even more complex and detailed things, faster in the near future.
The technology and everything that is involved in making an animated film is absolutely astonishing. For one thing, the animators are essentially creating something out of nothing, not to mention how realistic these this things can be. The advancements in processing and so forth that were shown off in the video were amazing, to be sure -- I can't really even begin to fathom how exactly all of it works -- but it also makes you appreciate how much more effort had to go into making even a single shot before that kind of technology was available. I would definitely love to learn more about it.
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