
A Behind-The-Scenes Look at Pixar’s New Short Film “Piper” - wallflower
http://www.audubon.org/news/a-behind-scenes-look-pixars-new-short-film-piper
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berkut
"This amounted to 4.5 to 7 million feathers on each bird in Piper"

I'm pretty certain they mean "barbs/barbules for feathers", as in curves
(cylindrical tubes fit to curves in 3D space which are normally used to render
hair/fur/feathers) making up these feather elements. In other words each
feather is made up of hundreds of curve primitives.

4.5M actual feathers themselves on each bird would be absolutely ridiculous
and unnecessary.

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sp332
I would guess they count each frame individually, since the feathers in each
one have to be posed and rendered individually.

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berkut
They wouldn't count each frame individually, as that's not how it's done -
they'll have "guide feathers" which are manually keyframe animated, and the
feathers in-between are interpolated from the guide feathers (which is how
hair/fur is done).

Per frame this just results in different positions/shapes for the curve
primitives which make up the feathers.

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claystu
Watched "Piper" before "Finding Dory" the other day. We liked it better than
the feature film.

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stephenhuey
The rendering was beautiful, and you could tell instantly that it was above
and beyond anything seen before. A sweet story without dialogue that tugged at
my heart as well!

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aphextron
I find it incredible how they consistently out-do themselves with every single
release. There's some real magic going on in that studio.

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blevin
If anyone reading this is attending SIGGRAPH, several of us will be presenting
a production talk for Piper on Sunday 2PM.

[http://s2016.siggraph.org/talks/sessions/life-
shorts](http://s2016.siggraph.org/talks/sessions/life-shorts)

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rev_bird
Saw this a week or two ago -- was absolutely blown away by the quality of the
animation. Far and away the most realistic-looking animations I've ever seen;
the birds still had a little of that "a computer drew me" look, but the water,
the sand... it was breathtaking.

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ericclemmons
I haven't seen the short, but every bird clip reminds me of my favorite: Kiwi!
(2006) >
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs)

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petridishtowel
we saw finding dory yesterday with my son (3.5). it was his first ever movie
theater experience. after 30 minutes of previews of other cg animated films,
when Piper played it was almost like hearing the folks at Pixar say, oh nice
guys. and here's a little something we put together. amazing. my wife said it
was one of the best short films she's seen; I dally in 3D (Blender with Cycles
is absurdly fun), so understood the technical prowess behind such this lovely
film.

and my son was silently enraptured.

