Lecture 17: Intro to Animation, Kinematics, Motion Capture (11)
nebster100
Something really cool about Toy Story that I learned a while ago: The reason why the minds at pixar decided to make a movie about toys is because graphics engines weren't good enough to render really realistic animations yet. Everything looked kind of plasticky, so they ran with it!
tyleryath
Check out the trailer for Toy Story 4 to see the most recent advancement's Pixar has made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmiIUN-7qhE
sandykzhang
Cool fact from the first comment! Am wondering how this affected rendering for the non-toy objects within the movie (i.e. furniture, plants, etc)
gprechter
Waiting for my measly project 3 images to render made me curious as to how long the original Toy Story took. It turns out that it took a very long time to render, "Toy Story was originally rendered back in 1995, and to our best estimate probably had frame render times which averaged in the range of 4 hours or so." I also read in a post from a pixar employee that it took months for the entire film to finish rendering, and that today it takes significantly faster. Craig Good, a former pixar employee said: "Our render times per frame have stayed pretty much flat for the last 30 years. When machines get faster we just ask them to do more."
Carpetfizz
It'd be really cool to learn about the cutting edge systems engineering that goes into distributed rendering that studios like Pixar may use. As we have learned there are different "granularities" of parallel computing for rendering. We could parallelize at the ray level, at the frame level, or maybe even a mix of the two. What if we are rasterizing, how do we parallelize that? People behind this technology face the same kinds of problems that people behind a popular website might face (load balancing, etc.) More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_rendering
chenwnicole
I didn't know Toy Story was the first CG feature film - that's pretty cool! I wonder how much research went behind making the characters' movements realistic (what did they base it off of?). But seconded, the fact from the first comment is pretty cool.
Something really cool about Toy Story that I learned a while ago: The reason why the minds at pixar decided to make a movie about toys is because graphics engines weren't good enough to render really realistic animations yet. Everything looked kind of plasticky, so they ran with it!
Check out the trailer for Toy Story 4 to see the most recent advancement's Pixar has made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmiIUN-7qhE
Cool fact from the first comment! Am wondering how this affected rendering for the non-toy objects within the movie (i.e. furniture, plants, etc)
Waiting for my measly project 3 images to render made me curious as to how long the original Toy Story took. It turns out that it took a very long time to render, "Toy Story was originally rendered back in 1995, and to our best estimate probably had frame render times which averaged in the range of 4 hours or so." I also read in a post from a pixar employee that it took months for the entire film to finish rendering, and that today it takes significantly faster. Craig Good, a former pixar employee said: "Our render times per frame have stayed pretty much flat for the last 30 years. When machines get faster we just ask them to do more."
It'd be really cool to learn about the cutting edge systems engineering that goes into distributed rendering that studios like Pixar may use. As we have learned there are different "granularities" of parallel computing for rendering. We could parallelize at the ray level, at the frame level, or maybe even a mix of the two. What if we are rasterizing, how do we parallelize that? People behind this technology face the same kinds of problems that people behind a popular website might face (load balancing, etc.) More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_rendering
I didn't know Toy Story was the first CG feature film - that's pretty cool! I wonder how much research went behind making the characters' movements realistic (what did they base it off of?). But seconded, the fact from the first comment is pretty cool.