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Oscar-nominated 'Onward' featured some of the most technically complex animation that Pixar has done. Here's how Pixar revolutionized the way clothes are animated.
Business Insider
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11/18/2023
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Tech
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00:00
From their first animated short in 1997 to onward in 2020,
00:04
Pixar has evolved a lot.
00:06
Animals look more real.
00:08
We went from smooth fur to seeing every moving strand.
00:13
And human characters went from stiff
00:15
- Woody! Buzz!
00:16
- to natural and cute.
00:18
But there's another area of innovation
00:20
that you might not have noticed
00:21
in the 25 years Pixar's been around, clothes.
00:25
The studio has come a long way
00:26
since the suit jacket in 1997's Jerry's Game.
00:29
Such a long way that an entire character in 2020's Onward
00:33
is just made of a pair of pants.
00:36
To see just how far they've brought their cloth technology,
00:39
you just have to look at how they animated
00:41
the dad in Onward.
00:43
A central character in a Pixar movie
00:46
will have their clothing built from scratch,
00:48
starting with a whole set of sketches and concept art.
00:51
This design stage is especially important
00:54
when the costume figures prominently into the story,
00:57
as Dad's does in Onward.
00:59
The film's premise is that these brothers
01:01
use a magic spell to connect with their late father,
01:04
but are only able to conjure up
01:06
the bottom half of him, his pants.
01:09
They improvise an upper half for their dad
01:11
out of an old sweatshirt, some pillow stuffing,
01:13
gloves, and a trucker hat,
01:15
which meant all of this had to seem thrown together,
01:18
but in a funny, endearing way.
01:20
- He needs to be appealing, right?
01:21
We need to believe both that he could be a sweatshirt,
01:25
but maybe from the squinting out of the corner of your eye,
01:27
you're like, "Oh, that might be a real person."
01:29
- Once a character's wardrobe is designed,
01:31
all the art reference gets handed over
01:33
to Pixar's character tailoring artists,
01:36
who basically act as digital tailors for the film.
01:39
It's their job to worry about every single piece of clothing
01:42
you see in a movie like Onward.
01:44
Their first task is to bring the clothes into virtual form
01:47
by modeling them in the computer.
01:49
They build a 3D shape, or model, of each garment,
01:53
then fit it onto the character model,
01:55
also known as the skin.
01:57
As part of the fitting process,
01:58
they'll take the character through a series
02:00
of animated poses to see how the clothing fits.
02:03
This is where things got tricky with Dad.
02:05
His lower body was like a traditional character.
02:08
There was an animated skin underneath those pants,
02:11
but his upper half was supposed to be made
02:13
of cloth and stuffing,
02:14
with no skin or bodily structure underneath it.
02:18
Here's where the next stage, simulation, came in.
02:21
Simulation is a way to automate the movement
02:23
of elements like clothing, fur, and hair
02:26
that would take too long to animate by hand.
02:29
Pixar first used cloth simulation in 1997's Jerry's Game,
02:34
a five-minute short that was shown
02:35
before A Bug's Life in theaters.
02:38
At first, Jerry's baggy suit wouldn't fit
02:40
with his movement outside of a default T-pose.
02:43
When he lowered his arms, for example,
02:45
the fabric bunched up in his armpits.
02:48
Steve Jobs suggested they ask designer Giorgio Armani
02:51
for tailoring help.
02:52
Instead, they came up with a long-term solution.
02:55
Writing a software for a simulator
02:57
that would govern the jacket's behavior.
02:59
By 2001's Monsters, Inc.,
03:02
Pixar had set up a dedicated simulation department
03:05
and built a simulator engine called FizT,
03:07
which helped control the folding of Boo's loose T-shirt.
03:10
FizT is the same program used on Onward.
03:14
It basically functions like a computer,
03:16
calculating how cloth should realistically respond
03:19
to a character's movements and surroundings,
03:21
how it should move with the character's body,
03:23
and in response to different forces.
03:25
- For that, we need motion
03:26
from the animation department, not the character.
03:28
The character animator moves the lower body around
03:30
like they walk the legs around,
03:31
and we start simulating it.
03:33
- But because Dad's upper half is all clothes and no body,
03:36
simulation played an even more important role than usual.
03:40
- We had to make him believable,
03:41
like that it's really all the motion
03:43
is driving from his hips.
03:44
Since his arms don't have muscles in them,
03:45
they just need to kind of flop around,
03:47
which can be a really challenging thing to animate.
03:49
There are a bunch of shots in the movie
03:50
where the entire upper body,
03:52
the blue vest, the gray sweatshirt,
03:54
the hands, which are actually just like worked gloves,
03:57
and the hat and the glasses are all simulated.
03:59
There's a lot of sort of interplay
04:00
between the animation and the simulation there
04:02
and making it feel both kind of intentional,
04:05
but also believable that it's not really a person in there.
04:08
- Since Dad's upper half is basically a lump of stuffing,
04:11
it required what's called a volumetric sim,
04:14
a simulation for something that's thick and has volume.
04:17
To make the stuffing look nice and cushy,
04:19
they used technology from an unlikely source.
04:22
The octopus Hank from "Finding Dory,"
04:24
a film that Chris actually worked on.
04:26
The scene that introduced Hank in that movie
04:28
took a full two years to make.
04:31
And in the final version, a lot of Hank's charm
04:33
comes from his squishy, squashy motion.
04:36
- The volumetric simulation, the squishiness of Hank,
04:38
was the precursor to the squishiness for Dad.
04:41
- Another beloved Pixar film that Chris worked on, "Coco,"
04:45
also helped lay the groundwork
04:46
for the advanced level of cloth simulation in "Onward."
04:49
- The intense layering of cloth and complexity and detail
04:53
that we got from "Coco" made it possible for us
04:55
to make more complex and interesting characters on "Onward."
04:58
And just the speed of our simulator got a lot better.
05:01
So Dad wouldn't have been possible
05:02
without the work that was done on "Coco."
05:04
- As viewers, we have an intuitive understanding
05:06
for how clothes should move on a body.
05:08
And if simulation does its job,
05:10
those cloth dynamics will look natural on screen.
05:13
But when looking at clothes,
05:14
we also instinctively know how light should reflect
05:17
off a certain surface and where we might see scratches
05:20
or fraying threads or pilling.
05:22
That's where we get to the shading,
05:24
or surfacing, part of the process.
05:26
When Pixar's shading artists add highly detailed patterns,
05:29
tints, and finishes to make each garment look true to life,
05:32
we see a variety of different fabrics
05:34
on the characters in "Onward."
05:36
And each is treated differently by Pixar's shading artists.
05:39
They have the advantage of many years
05:41
of shading technologies,
05:43
developed for earlier productions like 2012's "Brave."
05:46
Back then, the challenge of shading
05:48
Merida's period dresses
05:49
and her father's 16 layers of costume
05:52
produced what the studio calls "loom technology."
05:55
This program basically weaves every strand of virtual fabric
05:59
into a shading software,
06:01
giving clothes richer detail and a more tactile quality.
06:05
Pixar also made breakthroughs in shading
06:07
with 2018's "Incredibles 2."
06:09
Since fashion is such a big part of the "Incredibles" movies,
06:13
one of Pixar's design goals for the second film
06:15
was to make their garment shading work better
06:17
with extreme character movements,
06:19
like those of the highly kinetic Elastigirl.
06:22
Pixar developed technology to preserve fine texture
06:25
and illumination details in the characters' super suits,
06:28
even when the fabrics were stretched or compressed.
06:31
In "Onward," shading really helps to sell the textures
06:34
of the clothes on screen,
06:35
the shiny leather of Dad's shoes,
06:37
the fuzziness of his sweatshirt,
06:39
and the puffiness of his vest.
06:41
Without any shading work,
06:42
that vest might look more like plastic
06:44
than the nylon material it's supposed to be.
06:47
Once the shading artists get all the materials down,
06:50
they add signs of wear and tear,
06:52
like scuff marks on Dad's shoes
06:54
and subtle stains on his vest.
06:56
When watching the movie,
06:57
you probably wouldn't actively notice these touches.
07:00
- But without them, without those imperfections
07:02
that are very specific, handmade imperfections,
07:06
it doesn't feel real.
07:07
- Another way to make the clothes look lived in
07:09
is through wrinkling,
07:10
which is usually a collaborative project
07:12
between the tailoring and shading artists.
07:14
If we take another look at the vest,
07:16
those bigger wrinkles and bumps
07:18
were modeled into the garment by Chris
07:20
as part of the tailoring process.
07:22
- The high-frequency, detailed wrinkles
07:24
were done in shading.
07:25
So the part where you could see the puffiness
07:27
cinched down into the seams,
07:29
those very fine wrinkles are shaded wrinkles.
07:31
- Wrinkle patterns are customized
07:33
for each individual garment,
07:34
depending on what fabric they're supposed to be
07:36
and where the artistic direction is going.
07:39
- The wrinkles on the face,
07:40
we wanted them to be wrinkly enough
07:41
that they felt like it could be a real sweatshirt,
07:43
but they couldn't be so wrinkly
07:44
that it looked like a scary monster.
07:46
For the tailor, what that means is we think about
07:48
how the wrinkles should develop.
07:50
So we'd have a bunch of different head-shaped poses,
07:52
head tilt to the left, head tilt to the right,
07:55
and the transition between those poses
07:56
to make sure that the wrinkles that we were making
07:59
felt right.
08:00
- Once every single garment
08:01
has the right amount of texture,
08:02
it should be looking like real-world fabric,
08:05
which means the clothing process is pretty much complete.
08:08
All that's left is rendering all of the shots,
08:10
the final step in Pixar's production pipeline.
08:13
The more advanced Pixar's cloth simulation gets,
08:16
the more power is needed to render each shot.
08:19
"Monster's Inc." for example,
08:20
required more rendering power
08:22
than Pixar's three previous features combined,
08:25
partly because of how complex the cloth
08:27
and fur simulation was relative to earlier films.
08:30
Luckily, the studio keeps developing
08:32
newer and faster processors to do the job.
08:35
It's Pixar's blending of state-of-the-art technology
08:38
grounded in hard math and physics
08:40
with imaginative fashion and art direction
08:42
that makes its costume design language so appealing
08:45
and lets an outfit like Dad's
08:47
play its very own role in the storytelling.
08:49
(upbeat music)
08:52
(upbeat music)
08:55
(upbeat music)
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