Pixar & Beyond
Pixar Animation Studios will release “Toy Story 3,” its 11th feature film, on Friday, each new movie is an opportunity both to notch huge box office numbers and to break new ground in the technique of using computers in digital animation.
With “Finding Nemo,” the studio had to figure out how to use its technology to craft believable underwater scenes. With “Monsters Inc.,” the challenge was animating the characters’ lush fur. In “Cars,” it was determining how to use procedural animation to avoid having to manually animate each of the 300,000 fans in a giant stadium. Last year’s Oscar-winning “Up,” proved challenging such that thousands of helium balloons hoisting the main character’s house needed to take on the characteristics of realistic physics without having to manually animate each and every one of them.
With the fantastic “Toy Story 3,” Pixar has yet again set out to use its expertise to solve a huge computing problem, one that by necessity takes the place of what otherwise would be an impossible animation task. In the case of “Toy Story 3″, the challenge was to figure out how to craft a very complex scene in which the movie’s heroes–Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Jessie, Hamm and Rex-have to navigate their way down a conveyor belt inside a trash processing facility, on which thousands and thousands of small pieces of ground-up garbage are moving toward a giant blast furnace.
“It’s very difficult to create all those organic shapes. [Garbage bags] have to fold in and tumble out of the garbage trucks and go up on the conveyor belts,” Anderson said, “and the garbage gets chopped into tons of little pieces, and then our characters are running through piles of garbage, and it would be impossible to hand-animate any of that.”
It had to be done with technology.