The Science Behind Pixar!

A few weeks ago was my 4 year anniversary with my boyfriend, Sean; and, as tradition would have it, we attend the geekiest spot every year to celebrate – The Franklin Institute museum! So naturally, we took the trip to Philadelphia to see The Science Behind Pixar exhibit, and it was UH-MAZING! Seriously, it was literally a dream come true (not sure which one of us was more stoked for it… it was probably me, though.)

The exhibit was about different Pixar studio techniques, such as lighting, rigging, textures, and CGI animation. As a lover of arts, it was really interesting to see how the animators bring the characters and sets to life, and how they make the landscapes look so real in their films!

My favorite things from The Science Behind Pixar were the lighting techniques used in Finding Nemo – I enjoyed learning about how the animators went diving to see how the light bounced off different elements in the waters, like rocks, sand, and how the depth of the water altered the lighting. I also enjoyed the expression techniques we got to mess with, such as with Jessie from the Toy Story trilogy.

Below, you can see us messing around (horribly) with Jessie’s face! We were trying to make her look as terrifying as possible; she ended up looking like she had one too many all-nighters in Andy’s room…

We also got to see some of the early animation art processes for Inside Out from concept art, to CGI finished! We were also able to play with the Pixar lamp, Luxo Jr. in a stop-animation interactive display, which was really fun (and time consuming!)

Another thing we got to do was mess around with simulation for the movie Brave. Here, we got to control different elements of the scene, like the grass and trees, gravity, clothing, Angus the horse, and even Merida’s hair!

Realistic hair is one of the most difficult things that Pixar has been trying perfect over the past decade, manely (see what I did there?) with Sully from Monsters, Inc., who has over 5 million individual particles of hair on his body! 

Here, you can alter the thickness of Merida’s hair on her scalp, all the way into her final rendering with a total of over 116,000 individual hairs!

These are some renditions of the Pixar characters in clay model form, such as Mike, Heimlich, Remy, Nemo, and Russell, just to name a few! Characters will start as clay models and become CGI characters later by using their weighted average. Each point in the clay shape is given a weight, and each point’s individual weight will determine how it will interact with each other (ie: if they will be lighter/heavier than the other, will rise up/fall lower than the each other, etc…)

 

 

 

We had a really great day playing at The Science Behind Pixar exhibit, and celebrating 4 years together! Here’s to 4 more years filled with Disney trips & nerd excursions! Love you, dork. xoxo