Pixar broke new ground when it created "Toy Story" in 1995, but from there it still had a long way to go to perfect 3D animated characters.- New simulations for muscle movements and skin allowed for Pixar to create a fully animated human cast in "
The Incredibles ." - Animating long human hair is especially challenging, which is why Pixar's animators had to get really creative when animating Violet in the "Incredibles" movies, Colette from "Ratatouille," and Merida from "Brave."
Following is a transcript of the
This is Andy from 1995's "
Showing off a 3D-animated human was a groundbreaking achievement at the time, but he clearly lacks details when compared to someone like Dash from 2018's "
When Pixar embarked on its first feature-length film, it still had work to do to figure out how to make 3D-animated human characters. When animators tried, some of their digital models came out stiff, so they came up with some creative solutions where they could. Lighting was one clever way to hide those imperfections, shrouding human characters in darkness, like in this scene at Pizza Planet. But in order to avoid showing bodies completely, they staged many shots so you could only see feet and hands, like this shot of Andy's mom walking in the room. Creating a variety of different people of all shapes and sizes, and especially the clothes that they would wear, was especially time consuming. So instead of customizing every individual, they Frankensteined it, copying body parts from some humans and creating new humans out of those parts, while changing little bits and pieces of their physical appearance.
But even in that first feature film, they did have an early breakthrough. Animators needed to distinguish between the look of the toys and the look of the humans. One way to do this was through movement. Head animator Pete Docter observed, for example, that Woody was floppy and loose. Therefore, he would have quicker movements. On the other hand, humans were bigger and heavier, meaning they had to slow their movements down.
1997 "Geri's Game" was the first Pixar project to feature a human character as its lead. This four-and-a-half-minute short was basically an experiment. One of the most prominent features to focus on for Geri was his skin. Human skin needs to be smooth. Prior to "Geri's Game," human models were built in patches. Skin sometimes came out looking more plastic. This is where math came to the rescue. Enter the subdivision technique, which is when an animator subdivides a hard-edged shape enough times that it becomes a soft and smooth surface. Thanks to subdivision, Geri's hand looks much smoother, like a human hand should. This method has been used on every Pixar movie since, smoothing out everything from humans to bugs to buildings. That work allowed Andy and the rest of the human characters to spend less time in the shadows in 1999's "Toy Story 2."
Another tool that pulled humans out of the shadows was a RenderMan shader. This let animators paint on details to the basic character renderings like pores, veins, and blotches. There is no better example of this advance than toy collector Al. You can see the skin imperfections on his face and even a 5 o'clock shadow. And this shader tool would be used all the time. It's how they made sure Mamá Coco had such distinct facial details compared to other characters in "Coco," but we didn't see that until 2017.
At the precipice of the new millennium, Pixar was inching closer to giving animated humans even more screen time. [television crashes] Boo: Uh-oh. [Mike and Sulley screaming] Narrator: There were still a few hoops to jump through, which you can see in 2001's "Monsters, Inc." One of the biggest issues with human characters continued to be their clothes. Boo, the movie's only human character, wears a big flowy shirt. Prior to "Monsters, Inc.," characters wore clothes that moved automatically with them. A new simulator called Fizt enabled them to animate Boo and her shirt separately. Look at how much more natural the movement of Boo's shirt looks compared to Sid's sister's shirt in this moment from "Toy Story," where the shirt barely moves as she does. And while Fizt allowed for both better clothing and all the fur you see on Sulley, it couldn't do everything. Director Pete Docter wanted to give Boo long hair, but to do that, the animators would have had to animate in pieces instead of in one block. So to save them the trouble, they gave her pigtails instead, which were easier to manage.
Now that Pixar could create skin and make clothes move, it was time to make a feature-length movie entirely populated by human characters in the form of 2004's "The Incredibles." One of the first tasks? Conquering long hair. Director Brad Bird insisted Violet have the long hair that Boo didn't have. Animators already had to deal with a lot of hair collisions on a normal head of hair, so you can imagine how much they dealt with it for Violet, especially with how many different situations she finds herself in and all the times she plays with her hair. The team developed a core simulation engine that handled all the collisions caused by long hair while keeping it moving and flowing, as well as the tools that gave animators more control over the placement and velocity of her hair. Figuring out how to properly animate and then render Violet's signature hair took six months of work, but Violet wasn't the only character pushing the way Pixar physically builds humans. Mr. Incredible is all muscle, and none of Pixar's human characters resembled him. For that reason, animators used a software called Goo, which allows the skin to react to moving and sliding muscles, making a character's movement look a lot more natural.
While many of the developments created for the making of "The Incredibles" were specific for certain characters, the studio wasn't done perfecting the look of human skin. See, human skin is actually somewhat transparent. Some light needs to go through the skin, scatter around, and then reflect back. If the skin looks too solid and no light gets in, it won't look natural. So animators used subsurface scattering to render skin. With subsurface scattering applied, skin no longer just looked like a rigid surface. They actually found inspiration for the skin in an unlikely place. The tools used to make the "Finding Nemo" fish look translucent were used to scatter light off the skin of humans here. But with these advancements, the studio never forgot that the skin couldn't look too realistic, despite the capabilities that the shader and the subsurface scattering now allowed. If a human were to look too real, then they would enter into the realm of the disturbing uncanny valley. So while details like follicles and pores could have been added, they were purposely left out.
Pixar has been able to build convincing humans that don't follow all the basic rules of human anatomy throughout the years. For example, Carl Fredricksen from 2009's "Up." His head was deliberately designed to have massive, boxy proportions, and instead of adding every tiny skin detail, they focused on the most defining wrinkles in an old man's face. Skin and bone aren't the only things that make up a human. Pixar constantly strived to make humans more expressive. By the time "Ratatouille" was in the works, Pixar would have 150 controls just on a character's face. These controls allowed for the varying movement speeds between toys and humans in "Toy Story" and got even more sophisticated over the years, granting animators the ability to slow down and minimize the movements of an elderly character like Carl in "Up." Control points also allow for the complex expressions of a character like Chef Skinner, as well as more subtle and varied body motions, like Linguini's slapstick movements. Meanwhile, Violet's long hair paved the way for Colette, who had 176,030 hairs on her head. Advanced simulations had to be applied to make sure strands would not merge into each other.
Despite the sophistication of Colette's hair, Pixar still had hair challenges, specifically mastering curly hair. According to Pixar's chief technology officer, Steve May, curly hair needs to be soft while still holding a curly shape. So in 2009, simulation supervisor Claudia Chung and her team developed a new simulator called Taz for 2012's "Brave," which built Merida's hair as coil-like locks to imitate the movement of real curly hair. But the curls would completely unwind, so the animators added invisible core springs underneath them, allowing the locks to move with more control.
The better Pixar's animators got at creating humans, the easier it was for them to play around with their form and literally deconstruct them. 2017's "Coco" features a cast of skeleton characters that were based on humans. Animators were able to use the same rigs they would use for humans covered in flesh and muscle, but with some changes, as the bones needed to move in ways that you wouldn't normally see in human characters. For one, the skeletons were able to detach their bones, so the rigs were altered to allow for this. A tool called Kingpin made the bones appear looser by adding jiggle to them, which you can see here.
Pixar then put all the skin and muscle back on for "Incredibles 2," a sequel 14 years in the making. Even with all the strides made back in 2004 with the first "Incredibles," there was still so much more that Brad Bird and the
And speaking of hair, there were further hair breakthroughs. In the past, animators would only be able to work with scant guide strands of hairs, just guessing what the finalized hair would look like. That would have made it tough to animate Elastigirl on her motorcycle as her hair flows in the wind, or Violet blow-drying her hair. But now, animators had full access to what these characters' hair would look like at every stage of production before rendering, allowing them to sculpt better hairstyles and even catch mistakes early on.
Another subtle difference between the two "Incredibles" movies: in "Incredibles 2," the city streets are more heavily populated. According to producer Nicole Paradis Grindle, Bird thought the urban backdrops looked too sparse during major moments. Crowds are hard, as you have to animate, simulate, and render a lot of individual people. So the crowds team actually started using some motion capture. It was used in "Coco" on some background skeletons and made way for better filming of background humans in "Incredibles 2."
You can really see just how far human animation had come by the time "
From subdivision surfaces to hair-bending simulations to breakthroughs in cloth and realistic crowds, mastering the elements of human beings allowed Pixar to populate its worlds and expand the kinds of stories it was able to tell. And, most importantly, animators know when to give characters enough detail that they seem human, but enough exaggeration in their form that they're still part of an animated universe. Pixar's next chance to show us all the hard work it does on human characters: the upcoming "Soul."
Ian Phillips: Hi! Thanks so much for watching. If you'd like to see more videos just like this one, remember to hit the subscribe button. What other aspects of Pixar's animation process do you wanna learn more about? Let us know in the comments.
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