You are viewing the course site for a past offering of this course. The current offering may be found here.
Lecture 17: Intro to Animation (18)
annieln

Pixar's Soul is impressive not only because the quality and lighting in this film shows improvement when compared to the previous animation examples in this lecture, but also because Pixar uses ray tracing technologies to produce such a realistic lighting effect throughout this film! Here's a fun video on how lighting plays such an important role in the storytelling of Soul (+ a brief overview of how lightning improves across different Pixar films over time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbYhW5PNdQ

reesiespeesies

The conversation throughout this point has been how do we make animation more photo realistic, and actually the reason I took this class was because I first got interested in animation styles used in Spider-Verse - they leaned away from photorealism. This is one of my favorite youtube videos https://youtu.be/l96IgQmXmhM. The graphics studio that worked on this film changed the game completely, and I really loved the movie and the stylistic choices made!

Staffjamesfong1

@annieln Yes, it is amazing how CG has advanced to the point where real-world lighting techniques are applied to fully virtual scenes. The pathtracing is just that powerful now.

A recent example of real-world optical techniques in virtual scenes appears in Toy Story 4. They simulated a special camera attachment called a "split focus diopter" just to get two characters in-focus at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcZ2OY5-TeM

tanjeffreyz

Just out of curiosity, are there wildly different optimization techniques used in movie production vs real-time scene/game rendering? I'd imagine movies use significantly more primitives (and with much denser meshes) than games do, but would the same optimizations and accelerations we've learned so far still be sufficient?

orenazad

@jamesfong1

What a great video. The split focus diopter is so interesting in real life and I can't believe they simulated it for the feature. I always assumed that at a certain point, they could just edit where they want the depth of field or what they want blurred to certain degrees. I suppose I never revisited that thought since having started this course. Now, simulating the diopter (although I presume very complex) seems like the most straightforward and sensible method. I also thought the note that they combined spherical and anamorphic lenses was quite interesting! Never picked up on that though the effect is clear in hindsight.

You must be enrolled in the course to comment