Computer whizzes at Pixar have created some of the most popular movies in recent years, from "Monsters Inc." to "Finding Nemo" to last year's "The Incredibles." But a Pixar official told a Duke audience Monday that it is people rather than computers that made those movies popular.
"At Pixar, we use computers to create a synthetic world," said Kurt Fleischer, a software engineer and technical director of Pixar Animation Studios. "Every single thing has to be created in the computer, but the story and characters drive the whole process," Fleischer said.
Fleischer spoke at the LevineScienceResearchCenter in a talk sponsored by Duke's Department of Computer Science.
Human animators use software tools to craft parts of the moving images in Pixar films, and engineers write simulations that automatically generate the rest, Fleischer said.
"Anything that has expression, the animators want to animate," Fleischer said. "The characters in 'Finding Nemo' are all anthropomorphic. Essentially they're human. The fins aren't just fins, they're hands. How do you make a fish swim sad? What do they look like when they're happy?"
Fleischer said simulation is for things no one wants to animate by hand, such as water splashing in "Finding Nemo" and the monster Sulley's blue-green and purple fur in "Monsters Inc."
"Simulations take a lot of effort and computer power so we write something to try to create as little of the picture as possible and still get the picture you want," Fleischer said. "For Sulley, the director insisted we get the fur just right because it was important for the character. Sulley was supposed to be a cuddly, soft monster instead of a big scary monster. Each little piece of fur is modeled in the computer as a spring responding to gravity with other layers on top of that. We refined the model until the simulation generated exactly the look the director wanted Sulley to have."