Imagining the Great Before

ABSTRACT

During the making of Pixar’s 2020 animated movie Soul, we were tasked with having to create a brand-new world, the Soul World, which posed as a challenge to design and express within traditional art forms. As with most animated features, we had to execute within in a limited amount of time, while responding to an ever-evolving storyline. In order to achieve this goal, we had to approach it unconventionally. One method that helped greatly, was expanding an in-house texture development tool into a real-time look development environment. This new tool enabled us to iterate much more quickly and frequently, which in turn, helped us receive more timely feedback from the Director and Production Designer in order to hit the look they were after.

We also used more established tools to explore new looks. Maya, for example, allowed us to effectively and quickly mock up entire environments with enough color and lighting information to make broad decisions. Since one of the new worlds we were building had to emulate a child’s playground while incorporating symmetry, we were able to establish the language quite effectively thank’s to Maya’s familiar interface. For the parts of the set that were unfamiliar to us, like ‘etherial Pavilions’, we turned to Houdini to try capture something fresh and new. We achieved the look of these by freezing motion blur into still kinetic forms. All three techniques, whether using new tools or existing, ended up contributing to the ‘not-of-this-Earth’ look, desired by the Director and Production Designer on Soul.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Animation