A Learning Night talk by Owen Wang on how a Pixar film goes from conception to the big screen

1. The Pixar Pipeline
The incredible yet unnoticed happenings

2. “It takes a tremendous amount of effort to
make something look effortless”

3. Story & Art
- Initial concept art to convey idea
- Plot, pacing, shot angles all fine tuned at this stage
- All rough sketches with voice overs

4. Modeling
- Make sculptures (maquettes) to get feel for characters
- Scan a neutral posed sculpture to convert to 3D model
- Turn model into meshes for usability

5. Rigging
- Create a virtual bones + joints structure for a model
- Allow animators to pose character with simple controls
- Modeling + rigging takes up to 1 year per main character!

6. Surfaces
- Apply colors, textures, reflectiveness, sparkly-ness, etc

7. Sets
- Build out the virtual environments for the scenes

8. Cameras
- Point imaginary cameras within the scenes
- Replicate real world cameras - angles, focus, etc

9. Animation
- Using the rigs, move the characters within the scenes to bring them to life

11. Simulation
- Animate the things that would be hard to do by hand with programming
- Grass in A Bug’s Life, crowds in Cars, hair in Brave, garbage in Toy Story 3

12. Lighting
- Apply imaginary light sources within the scenes
- In Inside Out, Joy is made up of particles, each of which is a light source!

14. Last Step
- ??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
- Profit

15. “It’s the small details that the audience
isn’t consciously aware of that sell the
believability”