October 23, 2000

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Pixar Animators Push The Limits Of Technology

By Tony Kontzer

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oday's animation shop bears a closer resemblance to the engineering department of a software company than to the drafting rooms where Disney animators created the hand-drawn images that became classics of the 20th century.

Pixar Animation Studios in Richmond, Calif., may be the model of this new animation factory. Stocked with the latest Silicon Graphics Inc. Octane workstations (soon to be upgraded to Octane2s) and powered by a so-called render farm of 100 Sun Microsystems enterprise servers, the staff behind 1999's blockbuster Toy Story 2 relied on technology to generate more than 130,000 frames filled with detail beyond anything seen before in animation: human characters whose muscles and bones can be seen moving under their skin, shirts that ruffle and wrinkle as if they just came off a rack at Macy's, and a computer-generated dog whose hair looks real enough to need a good brushing.

Pixar aims to raise the animation bar even higher with its current project, Monsters Inc., for which it has developed the most sophisticated version yet of its proprietary Marionette software. But not all the credit goes to the technology: While the software lets the animators explore new territory, they keep pushing the technology to its limits.

"We act like a gas--we expand," says Brad West, who served as shading supervisor on Toy Story 2. "If a machine works twice as fast, we see that as an opportunity to put twice as much detail into our shots. It's only because machines are advancing that we can continue to throw more complexity into them."

Just how much have the machines changed? Consider this: The 100 servers that Pixar used in its render farm for the original Toy Story (released in 1995) each contained one or two microprocessors. A few years later, each server had 14 microprocessors, resulting in exponentially more power from the same number of servers. Considering that these machines perform the computations that turn billions of bytes of data into the pixels that make up finished animated images, that additional power means substantially more detail.

And no matter how advanced the technology, the artists at Pixar are never satisfied. After each project, West says, the Pixar team analyzes its setup, deciding which technologies should be retained and which need updating. Without that process, he says, there would be nothing new to offer viewers from one film to the next. "We have this natural desire to continue pushing things," West says. "And we can only do that as long as the technology can accommodate us."

So far, so good.

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Illustration by Allen Crawford

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