Narrator: See these hairs on Sully's arm
from "Monsters, Inc."?
Instead of animating each hair one by one,
Pixar computer scientists created a program called Fizt,
which would automate the movement of Sully's hairs
based on what's happening in any given scene.
Pixar would later use the same system
to simulate realistic fur on animal characters,
like Remy the rat and Dug the dog.
Every single Pixar movie brought
at least one groundbreaking innovation,
each changing the future of animation
and moviemaking as a whole.
Let's look at how every Pixar movie
brought animation into the future.
Computer graphics were around in the '80s in small doses,
but to make fully animated movies like "Toy Story,"
the industry needed software
that could render complex animations.
Rendering is when a computer takes
all the info about an animation --
the different algorithms for color, motion,
pattern, light, shadow, and effects --
and basically films the movie.
In the late '80s,
some of Pixar's top researchers got together
to design RenderMan,
a program that combines all the 3D assets
created for each frame of a movie
and translates them into a film-quality,
photorealistic final image.
"Toy Story" wasn't the first movie to use RenderMan,
but it was the first-ever 3D-animated feature film.
And the only way Pixar could render
the whole movie was with RenderMan,
which shows how this software revolutionized animation.
Since then, RenderMan has been the final step
in the production pipeline
behind every single Pixar film,
and many non-Pixar films, too.
In fact, it became the industry standard for rendering
and the first software product to be awarded an Oscar.
In 1998, "A Bug's Life" presented a different challenge:
creating characters with a smooth texture
and fluid, lifelike movements.
For years, 3D models,
both in CG-animated movies and video games,
had been mapped with polygons.
That made some characters come out looking patchy,
like Andy in "Toy Story,"
whose hand isn't smooth like a human hand should be.
So in "A Bug's Life,"
Pixar's artists applied a modeling technique
they used on their Oscar-winning short "Geri's Game."
This was called the subdivision technique,
which one of Pixar's founders helped invent.
It's when a modeling artist subdivides a hard-edged shape
enough times that it appears as a smooth surface.
"A Bug's Life" was the first feature film
to use subdivision, which worked especially well
on hard-bodied insects like ants
to create glossy textures.
And the team was able to experiment with one soft creature,
a Bavarian caterpillar named Heimlich.
See all his smooth curves and rolls?
That's thanks to subdivision, which made it possible
to create this type of plump, squishy bug.
This technology would eventually be used
for almost every object in Pixar films,
and like RenderMan,
subdivision became a standard technique in the industry,
later helping to create CG characters
in live-action movies,
like Gollum in the second and third "Lord of the Rings."
If you look back at Andy in the original "Toy Story,"
you'll notice his flesh looks a little too similar
to the plastic surfaces on his toys.
It lacks detail.
For "Toy Story 2," Pixar wanted to give Andy,
his mom, and the new humans in the story
more natural skin,
so the studio created a major addition to RenderMan:
a shader.
This added tool set helped
Pixar's shading artists paint layers of detail
over the basic renderings of characters.
Like real-life makeup artists,
they could now give humans unique skin characteristics
like pores, veins, sweat, redness,
whiteheads, moles, whiskers, or a 5 o'clock shadow,
making them look less plastic and more alive.
Pixar had to create some very furry monsters
for "Monsters, Inc.,"
including the 8-foot-tall Sullivan,
who had nearly 3 million hairs on his body.
Animating every strand of hair one by one
would've been impossible,
especially since Sully appears in over 600 shots.
So Pixar set up a department dedicated to simulation,
a way to automate the movement
of elements like hair, fur, and clothing.
The team also built a simulator engine called Fizt,
which calculates, for example,
how hair moves with a character's movements
or how hairs collectively respond
to forces like gravity, wind, or snow.
Pixar has used Fizt
on every one of its movies since then
to give realistic movement
to everything from human flesh
to the suckers on an octopus.
Pixar moved underwater for "Finding Nemo,"
so the studio had to nail the appearance
of light passing through objects in the ocean,
like the several thousand jellyfish in this sequence.
These jellies called for different shading
than any other creature Pixar had worked on.
As CG supervisor Lisa Forssell said,
the team didn't want the jellyfish
to look transparent, like a window,
or translucent, like a shower curtain.
Their membrane needed to resemble bathroom glass,
where "you can see through it,
but it's all distorted and blurry."
So Pixar wrote a whole new shading system
called Transblurrency,
which blurred the background of objects
based on their depth and distance from the viewer,
calculating camera position and optical light paths
into the equation.
You can see how the background is most blurred
in the middle of the jellyfish
and least blurred on the edges of its bell.
That's true to the way light refracts
through a jellyfish's membrane,
and it captures that bathroom-window effect
they were going for.
"The Incredibles" was Pixar's first movie
with an entirely human cast of characters,
and when it came to building those characters,
none of them were harder, literally, than this one.
Bob, better known as Mr. Incredible,
would be the most muscular character Pixar had ever created.
So the studio came up with a completely new approach
to his layers of skeleton, muscle, and fat.
The team designed a type of muscle rig called Goo
that let a character's skin
respond to their moving muscles.
Better yet, animators could see this response in real time
as they moved their character around.
This led to breakthroughs in body parts
that had always been problematic in animation,
like the shoulders.
Until this point,
Pixar had stuck with characters
that have more primitive shoulders.
Look at Buzz, whose shoulder consists of a ball and socket,
or Woody, who just has a stitch
where his arm hinges off his body.
Using Goo, animators could master the tiny details
of Mr. Incredible's much more complex shoulder movement,
like how his trapezius muscle affects his pectoral muscle.
Once the rigging and modeling team perfected Bob,
they could use his skeleton as a template,
reshaping the muscle rig to fit other characters
and giving them equally complex motion.
In real life, a car would look weird
if it didn't have any reflections on its surface.
But translating this on screen can get complicated,
especially for a movie like "Cars."
See, shiny cars reflect other shiny cars,
which makes for a lot of reflections at play
in scenes like this one.
The only way Pixar could master
all these reflective metal surfaces
was with ray tracing,
a technique of mapping out
all the rays of light in a scene
as they bounce off walls, objects, and characters.
Pixar first used ray tracing
in two shots of "A Bug's Life"
to create the reflections on a glass bottle,
but it only became a main part of the rendering process
with "Cars," where it was used to create the sharp shadows
and detailed reflections the filmmakers needed.
Ray tracing transformed animation.
It even ended up on CGI elements in live-action movies,
like this Transformer or Iron Man's suit.
And it set the stage for even more complex lighting
in future Pixar movies, like "Monsters University."
In "Ratatouille,"
all the dishes had to look absolutely delicious.
So the shading, art, and lighting teams
studied food photography to figure out
what exactly makes food look good on camera.
They determined that a lot of a dish's visual appeal
boils down to the appearance of softness,
which comes from light passing through the food.
See, a lot of foods are actually kind of translucent,
which means some light will go
through the surface of the material,
scatter around, and then reflect back.
Pixar already had a way of replicating this effect,
a technique for rendering translucent materials
called subsurface scattering.
This tool modeled light scattering outwards,
through the surface of the food.
But the filmmakers were still going
for a more translucent look
and wanted to show light
going straight through the food as well.
So they developed a new type of light called Gummi,
based partly on the gummy-bear-like quality
of Marlin and Nemo in "Finding Nemo."
Take this shot of cheese, grapes, and bread.
The cheese in this first shot has no lighting.
With the subsurface scattering,
you can see the outer edges and top layers illuminated.
And finally, with Gummi,
the light permeates every layer of the cheese
to give it a soft, diffused glow.
They used this approach on entire shelves
of cheese and vegetables,
as well as on liquids like wine.
Together, subsurface scattering and Gummi
created a two-part translucency effect
that made sure no food item would look
waxy, hard, or plastic on screen.
On the old Pixar camera,
any tilt or pan was a two-dimensional move
without any change in perspective.
But "WALL-E"'s filmmakers wanted
the viewer's perspective to shift
when the virtual camera did,
so it'd feel like the camera was actually moving in space.
So they rebuilt their camera system,
modeling it on the way an anamorphic camera would move
and consulting with a live-action cinematographer,
a first for any Pixar film.
The first act of the movie went for a loose, handheld feel,
designed to look like it was shot
from a camera operator's shoulder.
The second and third acts are supposed to look
like they're shot with a Steadicam.
And since a camera never moves perfectly in real life,
director Andrew Stanton said his team
spent "probably 90%" of their time
putting little imperfections into the virtual camera.
There are shots where the focus lags,
tracking shots with a little bump in the camera movement,
and scenes where it feels
like the cameraperson sees something
and catches it a few frames later.
The result is perfectly imperfect.
In "Up," Carl's canopy of balloons
is central to the storyline.
It involved thousands of colorful balloons,
each attached to the chimney of Carl's house by a string,
with thousands of collisions going on at any given moment.
And when one balloon bumped into another,
the second one would bump into a third balloon, and so on.
At the time, Pixar's physical simulator
could only handle about 500 balloons,
so the effects department wrote a new program
to run under the simulator.
Using Newton's laws of motion,
the computer accounted for forces
acting on the balloons in every shot
and then decided how each balloon should move.
It also made sure that all the balloons were buoyant,
that their strings were attached,
and that the wind was blowing through them
in a realistic way for every single frame of animation.
Ultimately, Pixar's simulator was powerful enough
to handle 10,297 balloons.
"Toy Story 3" brought together
a bigger cast of characters --
three times as many as in the original movie.
Costuming all of them wouldn't be easy,
especially when introducing characters like Bonnie,
who wears three different outfits in the movie,
or Ken, who changes costumes in every scene.
To dress them all,
Pixar needed a faster way of making clothes.
Traditionally, the studio used
a 2D garment-tailoring system
that required artists with special tailoring skills
to cut out pieces of cloth
and stitch them together in the computer.
"Toy Story 3" used a new 3D cloth system
that let any modeling artists,
not just expert digital tailors,
sculpt garments like a tailor would in the real world
and then turn those garments into simulatable clothes.
Since more modelers could build garments,
Pixar's artists could dress
over 300 animated characters for "Toy Story 3,"
compared to the 76 in the first movie.
The filmmakers behind "Cars 2" envisioned it
as a "Jason Bourne"-style spy movie
where the cars would race around cities
from London to Tokyo.
They wanted to reproduce those settings
with a level of detail
that was 10 times what Pixar had put into any other film.
For one of the movie's biggest sequences,
that meant making specific improvements
to the way Pixar depicted waves.
Technology from "Finding Nemo"
was best suited for calmer waters,
but in "Cars 2," the filmmakers wanted to show
rough, high waves slamming into the sides of the boat.
They came up with an ocean generator called Tessendorf,
which used algorithms to simulate sharper, "cuspier" waves
that captured the danger of an ocean's choppy surface.
With this, Pixar could better convey
the physics of the natural world
and pushed its water simulation to the next level.
Detailed, realistic simulation
became the company's calling card,
continuing with the curly hair in "Brave."
We'll get to that in part two.