Art and Technology at Pixar (SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Course)

Ryusuke Villemin, Chia-Chi Hu, Sonoko Konishi, Hiroaki Narita, Magnus Wrenninge, David Yu

Abstract:

As described by this now famous quote "The art challenges technology, and the technology inspires art", technology has always played an important part in Pixar's movie making process. This course will show how we develop and utilize new technical advancements to tell more appealing stories, using real-world examples from our latest movie Incredibles 2. This is a direct refresher of the previous course from Siggraph Asia 2015. Since that time, Pixar's pipeline has been heavily restructured, switching its main rendering algorithm to pathtracing. We will describe how that technology has now matured, and how we were able to reintroduce complete artistic control in this new physically based world. At the same time, the pipeline kept evolving and we introduced a new stage that didn't exist before, in the form of deep compositing. Finally we'll focus on USD, OpenSubdiv and the Hydra render engine, to showcase how the whole pipeline is moving toward real-time feedback, not only for rendering, but also for many other departments such as animation, simulation and crowds.

Paper (PDF)

SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Course