Category
🤖
TechTranscript
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)