At Pixar we have developed a set of tools to resurrect more than 33,000 previously-unusable set & prop models from our old films to be used as a studio-wide resource for previs, set dressing, cameos, automated testing, shader library development test ...

Last year, SIGGRAPH '17 featured Smash and Grab: Off the Rails Filmmaking at Pixar [Serritella et al. 2017], kicking off the results of a new, experimental storytelling initiative at Pixar Animation Studios. This initiative enables new creative voices ...

A shading pipeline which allows us to be able to provide the immediate basic shading for the BG human skin and hair at creation, while adapting and evolving to show needs and artistic direction. Along with our new hair system in Presto, we also had new ...

We describe key steps in the process by which an animation and VFX studio (Animal Logic) integrated Pixar’s Universal Scene Description™ into a large existing legacy pipeline. We discuss various architectural choices, as well as software systems ...

The VFX and animation industry is widely adopting Pixar’s USD (Universal Scene Description) format to describe and manipulate scene information throughout production of CG content. A key part to a complete description of a scene is the representation ...

To make a short animated film in a brief period of time is in itself a challenge. To make a short animated piece using tech you haven't developed and assets you haven't created for a unmovable deadline is beyond terrifying. While we had a general plan ...

As described by this now famous quote "The art challenges technology, and the technology inspires art", technology has always played an important part in Pixar's movie making process. This course will show how we develop and utilize new technical ...

Typical cache-based non-procedural methods can have downsides within a production studio. Modifications to pre-cached data can introduce an expensive feedback loop between departments (e.g. Layout pushing work back to FX). Proceduralism solves this by ...

We introduce Animal Logic’s advanced 3D matte painting toolset AL_USDNuke, which seamlessly integrates Nuke into our USD-centric pipeline. We detail the integration of numerous components such as our path-traced GlimpseViewport for instant ...

This paper presents how we built scalable and evolutive USD pipelines on distributed architecture at Ubisoft. We use BPMN as a nodal representation to allow our supervisors to build new or modify existing workflows. Our processes are designed using ...

The Peter Rabbit movie features 5 hero characters and dozens of secondary characters animated across more than 1100 shots.

We introduce some practical and production-proven solutions to integrate Pixar^™ Universal Scene Description (USD) into Autodesk ...

As an indie animation studio for Secret Magic Control Agency (SMCA), we moved to Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) as the backbone of our pipeline. To make this possible, we introduced our in-house application framework, Wizart DCC Platform as ...

On Luca, we extended the procedural vegetation and debris system, called Moss, which has been in use at Pixar since Brave, with capabilities to create lush underwater seascapes. The Moss system was modernized for Onward to be OSL (Open Shading Language)...

Animal Logic recently overhauled its outmoded lighting workflow for the film Peter Rabbit 2. Since Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) was being adopted as the primary scene description format throughout the studio pipeline, this technology became ...

This work presents recent updates to volume rendering in RenderMan, the production renderer used at Pixar. With the advent of increasingly complicated volumetric assets such as those seen in Pixar’s films Soul and Elemental, our aggregate volume ...

We want to start from scratch and explain what USD is and isn't.

We introduce Bond, a proprietary deformation system able to load geometry data directly from Pixar™ Universal Scene Description (USD) and to compute complex deformation chains on the GPU using NVIDIA® CUDA®. Bond also integrates tightly with Autodesk ...

This work presents the most recent updates to the cloth tailoring pipeline at Pixar. We start by reviewing the evolution of cloth authoring tools used at Pixar from 2001 to the present day. Motivated by previous approaches, we introduce a structured ...