The following presentation was more our speed. It was about tailoring the clothes for human characters, hair rendering, and creating appealing characters.
The clothing on Ratatouille seemed to be created in the same way as the clothes for the Shrek films. The majority of the presentation focused on getting the chef outfit on Gusteau who had the waist size equivalent to that of the fattest man on the planet. A lot of new scripts had to be written to get him outfitted. They had been working on him for about a year when Brad Bird announced that he would be killing off his character and that he would only be a sprite now. Needless to say that pissed off a lot of teams working on him and thankfully their hard work didn't go to waste! Everyone agreed that killing him off was one of the best things Bird brought to the script.
The Rat hair was something I was looking forward to seeing. I was expecting to hear a hellish account about the man hours needed to create the fur. Needless to say the hair system on Ratatouille had been derived from Monsters Inc and perfected the year before on the Incredibles and only needed minor tweaking. Creating the wet hair was a simple as adding a specular layer. And here we thought there was some sort of Pixar magic going on. To achieve hair on the main characters all the modelers had to do was create guide hairs along the surface in the direction they wanted Remy's (or any rats) hair to go. A simple script allowed for adjusting the clumping factor and wala, instinct Rat Hair. Of course the scripting was the most difficult task to overcome but as I said, I don't know advanced calculus so you'll never see me in the technical department. (Which is actively hiring!)
Another cool tidbit about the rat fur. Rat fur was rendered depending on the motion blur and distance from camera the rat was. If a rat was in the foreground all it's 500,000 hairs were rendered. Middle ground rats were only rendered with about 1000 or so hairs and background rats were basically just a colored texture. This saved countless of dollars in render time and space. Pixar demands that scenes being rendered do not exceed 4 gigs. By reducing the hair on rats based on spatial location the render time of scenes with hundreds of rats went from 7 gigs to around 100 something mb. It goes to show that cheating truly does pay off!
Lastly was a discussion on creating appealing shapes for the characters in Rataouille. As you can see each character has it's own unique silhouette, even the rats!
The talk focused on Remy who, before Brad Bird, looked too cartoony and cute to even be considered appropriate in the realistic environments. They remade him to look more realistic, more rat like, and be able to switch from biped to quadruped.
Also Pixar used Massive for Ratatouille. You might know Massive as the software designed by WETA for all the crowd scenes in Lord of the Rings. It's been used on Narnia, Happy Feet, 300 and a bunch of other films. Here's a link to their site, Massive. For Ratatouille animators realized there was a need for Massive in order to overcome scenes with hundreds of rats. But Pixar still wanted variety in their background rats so by combining animation from their animators Pixar then plugged those movements into Massive. Instead of letting it choose at random which movements were executed Pixar turned yet again to their technical department to write addition plugins for Massive in order to control which rats executed which movements and run cycles. This gave them a control over the program that saved them the time and effort of animating each background rat individually.
After double session ended we hit up the floor again as it was closing at 3:30. So we met up with the Pixar guys again and lingered around a while after the bagpipes signalled the end of the exhibition.
There was a session later that day about water effects in Pirates, Surf's Up, and 300. But we had already seen the Surf's Up effects and due to attending so many parties we had already seen the Pirates and 300 effect presentations. So we skipped those to instead head to La Jolla for an enjoyable last evening in San Diego.
Next year Los Angeles! If your interested in attending SIGGRAPH next year but , like all college students, find yourself short on funds check out the volunteer option. We meet some students in the program who were telling us how wonderful their expirence was, especially the free copies of Maya 8.5, Cinema 4D, and Zbrush. Here's what SIGGRAPH has to say about volunteers.
Full-time students from any discipline who will be 18 years old or older at the time of the conference are encouraged to apply. Volunteers dedicate either 18 or 30 hours of service during the week of the conference. Volunteers who commit to 30 hours of service are also eligible to apply for complimentary housing in San Diego during SIGGRAPH 2007. Students who live outside of the San Diego area may also apply for a Travel Assistance Award to assist with some travel costs.
And here's a link to SIGGRAPH's 2008 volunteer page. Volunteer 2008.
Volunteer or not I hope to see some of you at SIGGRAPH L.A. next year! If not come to events for a chance to win some cool swag inculding Ratatouille posters, mini flip books and Renderman Teapots!
- Alexis
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