How Pixar Utilized "An Unprecedented Amount of New Technology" To Create FINDING DORY
I wrote a big preview piece about Pixar’s Finding Dory that included interviews with the directors, producers, and more, but I also wanted to highlight a couple of the more technical aspects of the new sequel’s production.
When I visited Monterey, California a few months ago, the other journalists and I spoke with a ton of people who walked us through every aspect of making the film. Steve May, Pixar’s Chief Technology Officer, explained that this film contains “an unprecedented amount of new technology,” and he broke down the production pipeline for us, showcasing how programs like Katana and a new version of RenderMan are used to bring the movie to life. There have been massive improvements in tech since the days of Finding Nemo, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the way that the production created light for the sequel.
May spoke about two kinds of light: direct and indirect. Imagine you’re sitting at home on a sunny day. Direct light, May said, is the light you see when the sun streams through an open window. Indirect light is basically all of the other visible light in the room — it’s not as bright as pure sunlight because it doesn’t come purely from the source, but bounces off the floor and fills the rest of the area with less powerful light. Back in the Nemo days, Pixar could only afford to create direct light and had to have animators fake all of the indirect light by placing less powerful lights just out of frame, but with this new version of RenderMan, the process is automated, leaving the lighters and animators much more time to think about how to make the film better from an artistic standpoint instead of a sheerly practical one.
This may not sound like a big deal, but it makes a huge difference in the final movie. May showed us a screenshot of what Dory, Marlin, and Nemo would look like without indirect light floating under some seaweed near the ocean floor, and it was almost terrifying because of how dark it was and how shadowy they were. But with the indirect light that the new RenderMan provides, everything brightens up considerably because the “sunlight” shining down from the surface doesn’t have to be directly on them — the light can filter through seaweed and kelp, making the whole thing feel much more natural, with particles floating through the water catching rays of light here and there and really giving the scene an organic feel.
Steve May addressing journalists in Monterey Bay, California.
This new technology also plays an astronomical role in how light reacts to the surface of the water, which, as you might expect for a film like this, is a pretty big deal. Things like splashes, bubbles, and foam look jaw-droppingly good now because all of the reflections and refractions happen automatically instead of being created manually. "On Finding Nemo, making things look like water had to be faked because they couldn’t actually afford to calculate all of those things in the renderer. So there [was] a lot of work by hand," May said. "But on Dory, the new RenderMan can basically calculate all of those things automatically." That’s something viewers would never think twice about, but we saw a bunch of tests detailing tons of iterations to make sure it looks perfect, and extrapolating that concept out to the amount of people that worked on this movie and all of the aspects that had to be considered and perfected was mind-boggling. Also astonishing: May said "there are billions of those individual light rays happening" in each individual frame. "Generally we do about ten levels of reflections and refractions for each one of those rays, so it’s in the order of billions per frame."
Finding Dory concept art depicting light particles in water.
Fish tanks also gave the animators hell thirteen years ago, but that’s no longer the case. "We had three or four people work for six months to figure out how to fake reflections on the tank for Finding Nemo. The result was we had to make three of these special texture maps for each wall of the tank and the water’s surface, and they had to be done by hand, and those had to be created for every single frame of animation. So it was a ton of work. Now on Finding Dory, a lot of that — the reflections of the walls, the water — is largely done automatically."
If you’ve ever rendered anything in editing software, you know that process can be excruciating. You basically make your changes, hit a button, and sit there and wait as the machine does its job to show you what it looks like. If you’re a professional lighter on a film like this, you used to have to move a digital light within the scene and wait for the render to finish before it showed you what the result of that change was. Now, using Katana, lighters can digitally move a light and almost instantly see how the shot is affected. After a light is moved, a preview window shows up with a noisy version of the new image that progressively gets clearer — it’s not picture perfect right away, but you can at least see the basics of what the change does to the shot. This instant feedback saves hours of time and speeds the process along tremendously.
I’d been to one of these press events for an animated movie before (a few years ago for Wreck-It Ralph), but I’d somehow forgotten the sheer amount of work it takes to conjure a movie out of thin air and completely create every single aspect of it — from character motions to scuff marks on the walls of a digital set — in a computer. Pixar is constantly wrestling with (and inventing new) technology in order to harness it to tell stories the best way they can, and something May said during the presentation summed up that relationship for me and seems like a good place to end:
"The majority of the time, the content of the films drives the technology. For [Monsters Inc. character] Sullivan, we needed to figure out how to make fur. For Nemo, water was a brand new thing for us. But we also think that interesting results happen when we create technology, because we’re looking ahead, that isn’t necessarily needed by a movie right now, but if we do that, that often will inspire the art to say, ‘Hey, that’s kind of a cool technology. I wonder how we could use that?’"
Finding Dory hits theaters on June 17, 2016.