THE MAKING OF TOY STORY 1 AND 2

 

The Animation Process : A Closer Look

 

Introduction
In order to make these films, employees at Pixar used over 100 high powered computers (provided by Sun Microsystems) to create a cluster where over 60 animators could work together. Each of the 20 workstations contained at least 2 microprocessors, which allowed them to 'render' each of the 114,000 frames in the 79 minute movie.

 

 

Rendering
Rendering is the process in which lighting, texture, shading etc. are corrected and applied to produce realistic images. Also, all the data in the scene such as set, character movement, etc. are placed on to a single frame of film. Pixar used their own groundbreaking RenderMan softwar to do this. Combined with the computers that they received from Sun Microsystems, Pixar created what is now known as the RenderFarm

 

RenderMan™
Pixar's state-of-the-art RenderMan technology allows for the scenes in Toy Story 1 and 2 to achieve their fluidity and smoothness, as the technology uses 3D motion blur and other tools to create stunning depth-of-field. RenderMan has been integrated with live action footage (in films such as The Mummy) to create visual effects.

 

RenderFarm™
The RenderFarm is comprised of 87 dual processor and 30 four-processor Sun workstations, as well as one eight-processor stations. This allowed for the execution of 16 billion instructions per minute. If they had used one processor, it would have taken them a total of 43 years to make the movie ! Still, it was not quick process. The movie (which consists of 1500 shots and 114, 000 frames) took approximately 800,000 computer hours to create. Each frame used approximately 300 mega bytes of data, and took 2 to 13 hours to create.