How Pixar's Movement Animation Became So Realistic | Movies Insider

this is a shot from pixar's latest movie soul even though it's animated everything about how the fingers float from one key to another to the small details like tendons moving in the hand feels just as real as the reference footage that inspired it while pixar has used reference footage since the beginning it could not have pulled off a scene with movement this nuanced and realistic back in 1995 for toy story and it took years of technological breakthroughs so how did pixar get here first off they have an army of animators and riggers we talked to seven who worked on seoul to see how far pixar has come let's start over 26 years ago with the technology built for toy story getting a given character to move starts in pixar's rigging and modeling department whenever you're thinking of a character model before it's rigged it's in a completely neutral pose there's no expression on the face the arms and legs are all straight and so the controls that we put in rigging lets parts of the body move like you would pose like a doll or a puppet to get a clearer idea of the basics let's start with this character model of woody the rigging department will add the rig which is essentially an inner skeleton throughout this rig you can see all these controls called animated variables or avars which animators use to make different parts of a character move around this early version of woody had 596 of those controls which may seem like a lot but by 2019's toy story 4 woody had more than 7 000 to make things a little more complicated one control point is often connected to other control points so moving one in the eyebrow will move the wrinkles on the forehead adding more controls to these toy story characters would have let them move with more nuance but back then pixar was making a brand new rig for every single character that would change with toy story 2. pixar introduced geppetto later updated to presto which allowed animators to reuse and adapt rigs for multiple characters this sped up the animation process and gave animators more control over movements and facial expressions the new software provided a template of two-legged and four-legged rigs that could be altered depending on the specific needs of the character according to rigor jared fong the sea lions in finding dory were actually constructed from dog rigs with legs folded into flippers more control with geppetto also meant more expressive facial movements as seen in 2003's finding nemo to really nail the character's emotions animators used reference footage now fish don't have eyebrows or eyelids but eyebrows are so important for expressing human emotions so animators decided to add eyebrow like lumps to characters like marlin and dory and replicating real facial expressions meant connecting more control points with each other you can see that with dory the control points around her mouth are connected with her eyes and her cheeks giving her a more believable smile a smize if you will after making major strides with toys and sea creatures the most daunting challenge was yet to come humans mr incredible consisted of 426 primary controls 111 secondary animation controls for more subtle movements and 1061 modeling controls for sizing and other adjustments thanks to geppetto the rigging and modeling team could perfect mr incredible and then reuse his rig for other characters and to really make his movements realistic they used full body reference footage for example this clip where an animator lifts up this exercise ball was helpful for moments like this where mr incredible lifts up an omnidroid and the team didn't animate just a rigid skeleton on top of the skeleton was a layer of muscles which could bulge and flex and the skin on top of that would need to respond realistically so pixar developed a new system called goo this allowed the animators to see the skin and muscles react in real time as they work allowing for greater flexibility and movement and more control over how humans move boo led to breakthroughs and moving more challenging body parts like the shoulders which were more primitive in earlier films the buzz lights your shoulders a ball and socket woody's shoulder is just a stitch line he's got no shoulders right that arm just hinges mr incredible has a big old strong shoulder how you get a trapezius muscle there in the shoulder and how it moves into pictorial really complex stuff the rigs built for the incredibles were designed to let the characters stretch further than the average human which was important for elastigirl who needed to transform into all shapes and sizes and just like how superheroes needed to react to forces like gravity so too did the cars in pixar's next feature cars pixar extended its technological boundaries yet again with a system called ground locking which made sure the cars always stayed on the same path regardless of terrain without animators having to move them frame by frame we had to have our characters be able to follow the contours of the ground without having to animate them like up and down if it was like a rolling hill so it's going to move along these things and then we're going to animate on top of that because of ground locking lightning mcqueen could now drive smoothly on a flat road that turns into a very windy path automatically this may seem like a specific advancement just for the cars movies but it would be important for some of the most memorable characters in seoul by 2007 animators could have up to 150 controls in the human face so they could give characters a much wider range of emotion perfect for a movie like ratatouille which is largely set in the human world all these intricate controls allowed for the complex array of expressions seen on chef skinner look at how far chef skinner's mouth extends as he's yelling at linguine according to supervising animator mark walsh the tech wouldn't have been able to handle such a stretch in toy story or finding nemo the groundbreaking muscle work in the incredibles allowed animators to give linguine more spontaneous movements in the scenes where he's controlled by remy in the kitchen by the time toy story 3 came out in 2010 pixar's animators had gotten such precise control over how characters move that it's surprising they'd want to take a step backward but they actually relied on fewer controls to better replicate the trademark toy movements audiences knew and loved if a character has a limited range of motion in its shoulder what we'll do is we'll basically lock off some of that range of motion and then that forces you to animate it in a different way they still had room to pick and choose what they would keep about the old characters and where to elevate them for example they could have put 25 controls in each of buzz's eyebrows but decided to keep them simple like when he had just three per brow in the original while also giving spanish buzz these complicated flamenco-like moves there was one particularly hard toy to animate the octopus named stretch despite the innovations and stretchiness from the incredibles making eight tentacles stretch and curl was still a daunting task we're fighting against the computer the computer wants to make things that are that are solid that are perfect but it was a challenge they would eventually master in finding dory the hardest part of an octopus to replicate is the tentacles which need to bend curl and unfurl you can see early attempts at this with stretch and this octopus-like monster all the way back in monsters inc in finding dory hank also needed to move around quite a bit and grab onto things like this coffee pot hank also had more than 350 suckers combined on his tentacles those were so unpredictable that they had to be simulated a process where movements are automated using code like with strands of hair and clothing the tentacles themselves were so dynamic that when one moved it would move other parts of hank's body as well and animators used an altered version of this tentacle rig on dante and coco giving the dog a long twisty tongue you can see it grab onto objects here in the short film dante's lunch but the biggest challenge for coco was music pixar had to figure out how to get miguel to accurately play guitar so they strapped gopros directly to guitars giving themselves the closest possible angle they would listen to the guitar music and mimic the exact finger and string movements it looks so authentic but pixar found it could push this even further and make playing music look even more real in 2020's soul as with previous pixar films some assets were reused from coco for example the same rig built for the coco guitars was repurposed for mijo's base we modified it for four strings and just kind of repositioned it to work for that but for the scenes where joe plays piano they went far beyond just matching the music directly to audio for reference footage pixar captured john batiste playing piano at multiple angles then character technical director jason davies and the rigging team built a piano rig which functions like a digital piano davies fed the audio files directly into the rig and the piano would play automatically in time with the music if a key lit up blue the animators would place joe's left hand there and his right hand would be placed on any key that turned red they also tried developing a simulation for joe's piano playing but it proved tricky as his finger was too heavy on the small piano keys so davies developed a finger contact rig similar to one used on coco just like in coco where fingers moved the strings on guitars dorothea's fingers could play the saxophone and most importantly joe could play the piano when their fingers would intersect the space where a key was so it pushes down into the keyboard it would calculate the proper angle that that piano key needed to rotate to make it look like he's pushing it while the piano played on its own the hands still needed to capture the complicated motions of playing which is why joe was equipped with 292 controls in each of his hands that's about half the amount of controls in woody's entire body in the first toy story the riggers added variables to joe's hand that they had never used before according to character model lead mara mcmahon the team even added a control for each tendon in joe's hands but that was something that could kind of capture the tension in his hands as he's playing the piano so there's a control for each hand just to make a tendon appear if the animator wanted to really like emphasize that particular pose these state-of-the-art hand and wrist controls weren't just useful for playing music they also allowed for flexibility like linguine and ratatouille joe is tall and lanky and has a lot of frenzied movements that had to be highlighted in scenes where he is inhabited by 22. for all this joe had 477 controls in his face and 789 additional controls throughout his entire body giving him 1266 controls total conversely they limited the movements on dorothea to show her regal stature they even went as far as removing subtle blinks and knots it's all in like the look you know how they you know hold their head up and how they just set their gaze upon whatever but sometimes it's the simplest looking actions or characters that prove the hardest to control take the counselors they look like simple 2d lines but they were the most complicated characters to animate doing the counseling characters for seoul was was pushing our limits of what we could do and it turned out amazing that's building on 25 26 years of history to get to that point terry consisted of around 300 controls a new tension control allowed animators to sharpen or add an angle by assigning it a higher value this allowed terry and the jerry's to randomly grow fingers off their hands plus they were able to easily transition between terry's multiple forms using just a few controls pivotal in scenes where terry mutates into objects on earth like this handrail or this bag of chips but of course even something so new and unusual couldn't have been made without looking to pixar's past the stretchy software that built hank and dante's tongue allowed terry to disguise herself in elaborate ways like in this heart monitor and this brick wall and the counselors couldn't just move the way a person could posing another major challenge since they don't have legs right they just slide around on the ground the closest analogy was actually cars and that kind of stuff that meant they needed to borrow from the same ground locking technology pioneered in cars to keep the counselors in motion when you get so good at making things move realistically it's okay to sometimes let your imagination run wild we're not trying to make things look necessarily perfectly real what we're trying to do is make sure that the emotions that are coming out of the characters and what they're thinking feel 100 real you

Channel: Insider

Views: 2,960,383

Rating: 4.9579329 out of 5

Keywords: Insider, Movies, Films, Filmmaking, Design, Art, Animation, Toy Story, Pixar, Disney, The Incredibles, Soul, Disney+, Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, Cars, Monsters Inc., Coco

Id: QbhsMLD9Hb0

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/thechimbleysweep]

Fully expected to skip to the end on this one; Glad I didn't

Thanks for posting!

[u/Zillamatic]

As a musician it's really satisfying seeing animations that actually line up with the music. Normally they don't and it's really jarring. It makes the characters feel more authentic and believable, and musicians aren't distracted by the rigging being totally off. I'm sure non-musicians pick up on it, even subconsciously. I heard in an interview they tried this level of detail for Coco so children watching could maybe learn the songs from watching the performances in the film. Neat stuff

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/FAIMl]

I guess this is what we have instead of flying cars.

[u/BigDaddyCarl68]

Sooo good. Thanks for sharing!