
Pixar's Library - DanielRibeiro
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/
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dpcan
Hair rendering always blew my mind. I remember seeing Monster's Inc in the
theater, and the first shot of Sully was when he was asleep in his bed
breathing heavily, and you could see the individual strands of hair on his arm
flowing back and forth. I felt the world of animation change right at that
moment for me, and now I wait with great anticipation for every new Pixar film
that comes out. For me, "Up" was the only real let-down.

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rhizome
I've noticed a kind of arms-race in most of the Pixar/Dreamworks movies I've
seen (not nearly all), where in the first 5 or 10 minutes there will always be
some new technique being foregrounded. Sully's hair is a great example, they
lay the new tech out right away both as a "we're cool" (in a positive sense!)
signal to other animators and as a far point of expectations for the animation
to the rubes like me. "If this goes over, everything else falls into place."
I'm a little sad to see you neg "Up," though, because I thought the technical
gambit there was much more sophisticated: conveying emotion convincingly from
what is basically a cartoon. I think they succeeded in spades on that one.

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asolove
Early animated movies mostly did well, and resonated with people, because of
excellent voice acting from recognizable actors. (Think Toy Story.) Up's
gambit is to show that well-orchestrated music and animation can surpass that.
It isn't technically superior, but it is far more important.

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rhizome
I think what "Up" succeeded was even more significant than that: they took
animation into the affective territory of live-action movies. Frankly, I don't
even really remember the voices.

Making cartoons (which I sincerely believe 3D has been) has been one-upmanship
of technology that pretty much builds its own history in lockstep, but to
combine that with writing and the animation choices for something that can
bring a tear to the eye of an adult is truly great work. The first act of "Up"
really is a landmark to me.

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DrStalker
Up also made excellent use of 3D to add to the emotional feeling; the way they
handled "depth" in the sad introduction was different to the way they did it
in the fun scenese or action scenes.

It was subtle, but it was there.

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riprock
this reminded me of pixar's "university" that teaches technical skills for all
their employees (particularly see page 2):
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/business/yourmoney/29pixar...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/business/yourmoney/29pixar.html?_r=2)

"Pixar University is at the center of Mr. Nelson's agenda. The operation has
more than 110 courses: a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting,
drawing, sculpting and creative writing. "We offer the equivalent of an
undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking," he said.
Every employee — whether an animator, technician, production assistant,
accountant, marketer or security guard — is encouraged to devote up to four
hours a week, every week, to his or her education."

sounds like an exciting place to work and grow

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saturdayplace
Back when I wanted to be an animator, I bookmarked that article for this
quote:

>The skills we develop [at Pixar U] are skills we need everywhere in the
organization,” Mr. Nelson said. “Why teach drawing to accountants? Because
drawing class doesn’t just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more
observant. There’s no company on earth that wouldn’t benefit from having
people become more observant.

That show how much they've got this "being an employer" thing down. Can you
quantify "people becoming more observant"? Probably not, but they reap
enormous benefits out of doing things that other companies wouldn't justify
because of the costs. Seriously, at what other company can you essentially
attend an undergraduate degree's worth of instruction _related to that
company's industry?_ Seems like a no-brainer once you think about it.

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SandB0x
If you like this you should check out Ron Fedkiw's research at Stanford and
with ILM: <http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fedkiw>

The images on his page link to videos, publications list is about 3/4 of the
way down.

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JabavuAdams
Tried to code up one of the hair papers. Realized I need to math up.

~~~
apl
Never been great at keeping correlation and causation separate, but maybe you
should _muscle_ up instead?

[http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/photos/bodybuilding_arms...](http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/photos/bodybuilding_arms_small.jpg)

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aschwo
Disney Animation also posts its papers online:
<http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/list.html>

I can't find similar pages for PDI/Dreamworks or Blue Sky.

If this stuff interests you, check out the SIGGRAPH 2011 papers:
<http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2011.html>

~~~
davvid
We've also been putting stuff up on github:

<https://github.com/wdas>

<http://ptex.us/>

~~~
aschwo
Ptex is awesome! Any chance Disney's hair tools will get open sourced?

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kleiba
Ohh.... it's a library as in "read", not as in "include".

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Traz0r
The Pixar office tour is one of my all time favorites -

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/veerles-
blog/461586084/in/photo...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/veerles-
blog/461586084/in/photostream/)

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StavrosK
> <bound method Paper.GetName of <paper.Paper instance at 0x2aaaab9f12d8>>

Sounds like someone forgot their parentheses.

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karolisd
Do they have a library for storytelling, characters, and creative writing?

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jorkos
\- visiting pixar with my roommate who worked there at the time was a great
experience; the environment they've created for their team is the best i've
seen anywhere

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guscost
Awesome!

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williamdix
I think Ratatouille may in fact be the most productive academic endeavor in 10
years. 7 papers from that film! Did Ratatouille produce more papers than the
LHC? I hope so.

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Ruudjah
Please use [PDF] when linking to paper oriented documents, so we can skip
those links, tnx.

~~~
Tiomaidh
I'd always thought [PDF] was a warning about a direct link to a PDF--some
people don't like having PDFs download or open without warning.

