No matter how old we get, we always love a good Disney/Pixar movie. Animation has come a long way over the years, but how does this process work? How do we get our favorite characters like Woody, Mike Wazowski, and Nemo?
First, an artist draws the characters. Once the characters have been drawn, animators use the computer to draw a skeleton inside of the characters body. When they move the skeleton, the software makes the body move with it. Initially, the characters are just a wireframe, without color or texture, made up of individual cubes and spheres. Then they are given as many as 100 hinges, called "avars", that animators use to make the character move, which you can see below. Animators use a computer software that allows them to move the characters, almost like puppets, into key positions or poses. Then the computer creates the frames in between the key frames to connect them. The characters movements are programmed into the computer, to transform the 2D still pictures into 3D moving characters. It starts as a rough cut and then the images get smoothed out to become more fluid.
There is also specialized software that synchronizes the character's mouth with the dialogue where the technician works one syllable at a time to choose the mouth shape that best fits. They also cut and paste the characters onto the backgrounds. Once they create the original image, they use shading, lighting, and other techniques to make the animation more realistic. You can see the differences below.
This is the original animation:
Followed by the shading:
Then finally the lighting:
Rendering is when all the information that makes up a shot (the lighting, texture, etc.) is translated to make a frame. Pixar's program for rendering is called RenderMan (creative!). This program "draws" the finished image by computing every pixel of the image. It takes approximately 6 hours to render a single frame. In a Pixar film, there are an average of 24 frames per second (fps). For an average film, there are almost 130,000 frames, hence why it takes 3-4 years to create these animated films.
Check out this cool video that shows the steps in the animation process!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_V752_-8F0&feature=youtu.be
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1eb8O9j1M
http://pixar-animation.weebly.com/pixars-animation-process.html
It's so cool to see how far animation has come since the days of Snow White and Cinderella! I wonder what Walt Disney would think about all the recent animation in movies! Does the RenderMan program do it automatically or do the animators need to tell it how to "draw" the lighting and improve the texture? Cool article!
ReplyDeleteDo you think that computer animation takes away the artistic element of animation? People used to need to draw each and every frame by hand -- no easy task. Are all movie studios just greedy conglomerates eager to replace quality work for a quick buck? What do you think?
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