this is a shot from pixar's latest movie
soul even though it's animated
everything about how the fingers float
from one key to another
to the small details like tendons moving
in the hand
feels just as real as the reference
footage that inspired it
while pixar has used reference footage
since the beginning it could not have
pulled off a scene with movement this
nuanced and realistic
back in 1995 for toy story
and it took years of technological
breakthroughs
so how did pixar get here
first off they have an army of animators
and riggers
we talked to seven who worked on seoul
to see how far pixar has come
let's start over 26 years ago with the
technology built for toy story
getting a given character to move starts
in pixar's rigging and modeling
department
whenever you're thinking of a character
model before it's rigged it's in a
completely neutral pose there's no
expression on the face the arms and legs
are all straight
and so the controls that we put in
rigging lets
parts of the body move like you would
pose like a doll or a puppet
to get a clearer idea of the basics
let's start with this character model of
woody
the rigging department will add the rig
which is essentially an
inner skeleton throughout this rig you
can see all these controls called
animated variables
or avars which animators use to make
different parts of a character move
around
this early version of woody had 596 of
those controls
which may seem like a lot but by 2019's
toy story 4
woody had more than 7 000 to make things
a little more complicated
one control point is often connected to
other control points
so moving one in the eyebrow will move
the wrinkles on the forehead
adding more controls to these toy story
characters would have let them move with
more nuance
but back then pixar was making a brand
new rig
for every single character that would
change with toy story 2.
pixar introduced geppetto later updated
to presto
which allowed animators to reuse and
adapt rigs for multiple characters
this sped up the animation process and
gave animators more control over
movements and facial expressions
the new software provided a template of
two-legged and four-legged rigs that
could be altered depending on the
specific needs of the character
according to rigor jared fong the sea
lions in finding dory
were actually constructed from dog rigs
with legs
folded into flippers more control with
geppetto
also meant more expressive facial
movements as seen in 2003's finding nemo
to really nail the character's emotions
animators used
reference footage now fish don't have
eyebrows or eyelids
but eyebrows are so important for
expressing human emotions
so animators decided to add eyebrow like
lumps to characters like marlin and dory
and replicating real facial expressions
meant connecting more control points
with each other
you can see that with dory the control
points around her mouth are connected
with her eyes and her cheeks
giving her a more believable smile a
smize if you will
after making major strides with toys and
sea creatures the most
daunting challenge was yet to come
humans
mr incredible consisted of 426
primary controls 111 secondary animation
controls for more subtle movements
and 1061 modeling controls for sizing
and other adjustments thanks to geppetto
the rigging and modeling team could
perfect mr incredible and then reuse his
rig for other characters
and to really make his movements
realistic they used full body reference
footage
for example this clip where an animator
lifts up this exercise ball
was helpful for moments like this where
mr incredible lifts up an omnidroid
and the team didn't animate just a rigid
skeleton
on top of the skeleton was a layer of
muscles which could bulge and flex
and the skin on top of that would need
to respond realistically
so pixar developed a new system called
goo
this allowed the animators to see the
skin and muscles react in real time as
they work
allowing for greater flexibility and
movement and more control over how
humans move
boo led to breakthroughs and moving more
challenging body parts like the
shoulders
which were more primitive in earlier
films the buzz lights your shoulders a
ball and socket
woody's shoulder is just a stitch line
he's got no shoulders right that arm
just hinges
mr incredible has a big old
strong shoulder how you get a trapezius
muscle there in the shoulder and how it
moves into pictorial
really complex stuff the rigs built for
the incredibles were designed to let the
characters stretch
further than the average human which was
important for elastigirl
who needed to transform into all shapes
and sizes
and just like how superheroes needed to
react to forces like gravity
so too did the cars in pixar's next
feature
cars pixar extended its technological
boundaries yet again with a system
called
ground locking which made sure the cars
always stayed on the same path
regardless of terrain without animators
having to move them frame by frame
we had to have our characters be able to
follow the contours of the ground
without having to animate them like
up and down if it was like a rolling
hill so it's going to move along these
things and then we're going to animate
on top of that
because of ground locking lightning
mcqueen could now drive smoothly on a
flat road that turns into
a very windy path automatically this may
seem like a specific advancement just
for the cars movies
but it would be important for some of
the most memorable characters in seoul
by 2007 animators could have up to 150
controls in the human face
so they could give characters a much
wider range of emotion
perfect for a movie like ratatouille
which is largely set in the human world
all these intricate controls allowed for
the complex array of expressions seen on
chef skinner
look at how far chef skinner's mouth
extends as he's yelling at linguine
according to supervising animator mark
walsh the tech wouldn't have been able
to handle such a stretch in toy story or
finding nemo
the groundbreaking muscle work in the
incredibles allowed animators to give
linguine more spontaneous movements in
the scenes where he's controlled by remy
in the kitchen
by the time toy story 3 came out in 2010
pixar's animators had gotten such
precise control over how characters move
that it's surprising they'd want to take
a step backward
but they actually relied on fewer
controls to better replicate the
trademark toy movements audiences knew
and loved if a character has a limited
range of motion in its shoulder
what we'll do is we'll basically lock
off some of that range of motion and
then
that forces you to animate it in a
different way they still had room to
pick and choose what they would keep
about the old characters
and where to elevate them for example
they could have put
25 controls in each of buzz's eyebrows
but decided to keep them simple like
when he had just three per brow in the
original
while also giving spanish buzz these
complicated flamenco-like moves
there was one particularly hard toy to
animate
the octopus named stretch despite the
innovations and stretchiness from the
incredibles
making eight tentacles stretch and curl
was still
a daunting task we're fighting against
the computer the computer wants to make
things that are
that are solid that are perfect but it
was a challenge they would eventually
master
in finding dory the hardest part of an
octopus to replicate is the tentacles
which need to bend curl and unfurl you
can see early attempts at this with
stretch and this octopus-like monster
all the way back in monsters inc
in finding dory hank also needed to move
around quite a bit
and grab onto things like this coffee
pot hank
also had more than 350 suckers combined
on his tentacles
those were so unpredictable that they
had to be simulated
a process where movements are automated
using code
like with strands of hair and clothing
the tentacles themselves were so dynamic
that when one moved it would move
other parts of hank's body as well and
animators used an altered version of
this tentacle rig
on dante and coco giving the dog a long
twisty tongue
you can see it grab onto objects here in
the short film dante's lunch
but the biggest challenge for coco was
music
pixar had to figure out how to get
miguel to accurately play guitar
so they strapped gopros directly to
guitars giving themselves the closest
possible angle they would listen to the
guitar music and mimic
the exact finger and string movements it
looks
so authentic but pixar found it could
push this
even further and make playing music look
even more real
in 2020's soul as with previous pixar
films
some assets were reused from coco for
example the same rig built for the coco
guitars was repurposed for mijo's base
we modified it for four strings and just
kind of repositioned it to work for that
but for the scenes where joe plays piano
they went far beyond just matching the
music directly to audio
for reference footage pixar captured
john batiste playing piano at multiple
angles
then character technical director jason
davies and the rigging team built a
piano rig
which functions like a digital piano
davies fed the audio files directly into
the rig
and the piano would play automatically
in time with the music
if a key lit up blue the animators would
place joe's left hand there
and his right hand would be placed on
any key that turned red
they also tried developing a simulation
for joe's piano playing but it proved
tricky
as his finger was too heavy on the small
piano keys
so davies developed a finger contact rig
similar to one used on coco
just like in coco where fingers moved
the strings on guitars
dorothea's fingers could play the
saxophone and most importantly
joe could play the piano when their
fingers would
intersect the space where a key was so
it pushes down into the keyboard
it would calculate the proper angle that
that piano key needed to rotate
to make it look like he's pushing it
while the piano played on its own
the hands still needed to capture the
complicated motions of playing which is
why joe was equipped with
292 controls in each of his hands
that's about half the amount of controls
in woody's entire body in the first toy
story
the riggers added variables to joe's
hand that they had never used before
according to character model lead mara
mcmahon the team
even added a control for each tendon in
joe's hands
but that was something that could kind
of capture the tension in his hands as
he's playing the piano so there's a
control for each hand just to
make a tendon appear if the animator
wanted to really like
emphasize that particular pose these
state-of-the-art hand
and wrist controls weren't just useful
for playing music they also allowed for
flexibility
like linguine and ratatouille joe is
tall and lanky
and has a lot of frenzied movements that
had to be highlighted in scenes where he
is inhabited by 22.
for all this joe had 477 controls in his
face
and 789 additional controls throughout
his entire body giving him
1266 controls total
conversely they limited the movements on
dorothea to show her regal stature
they even went as far as removing subtle
blinks and knots it's all
in like the look you know how they you
know hold their head up and how they
just set their gaze upon whatever
but sometimes it's the simplest looking
actions or characters that prove the
hardest to control
take the counselors they look like
simple 2d lines
but they were the most complicated
characters to animate
doing the counseling characters for
seoul was was pushing our limits of what
we could do and it turned out amazing
that's building on 25 26 years of
history to get to that point terry
consisted of around 300 controls
a new tension control allowed animators
to sharpen or add an
angle by assigning it a higher value
this allowed terry and the jerry's to
randomly grow
fingers off their hands plus they were
able to easily transition between
terry's multiple forms using just a few
controls
pivotal in scenes where terry mutates
into objects on earth
like this handrail or this bag of chips
but of course
even something so new and unusual
couldn't have been made without looking
to pixar's past
the stretchy software that built hank
and dante's tongue
allowed terry to disguise herself in
elaborate ways
like in this heart monitor and this
brick wall and the counselors
couldn't just move the way a person
could posing another major challenge
since they don't have legs right they
just slide around on the ground the
closest analogy was actually cars
and that kind of stuff that meant they
needed to borrow from the same ground
locking technology pioneered in cars to
keep the counselors in motion
when you get so good at making things
move realistically
it's okay to sometimes let your
imagination run wild
we're not trying to make things look
necessarily perfectly real what we're
trying to do
is make sure that the emotions that are
coming out of the characters and what
they're thinking feel 100
real
you