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Title: New technology revs up Pixar's 'Cars 2'
EMERYVILLE, Calif.--We all know what the reflections off cars or the roiling of the ocean are supposed to look like. So if you are tempted to believe that what you'll see in "Cars 2" proves that Pixar has made its first live-action film, think again.
This is the hit-making studio that breaks new technological ground with most of its new films, and "Cars 2," which opens Friday, is no exception. Where its technicians applied real physics to the escape of thousands of balloons in "Up," or true lighting effects to the rolling and pitching of plastic garbage bags in "Toy Story 3," Pixar has once again pushed its computing powers to the limit--and gone well beyond them.
With "Cars 2," as the film's director and Disney chief creative officer John Lasseter pointed out at a recent event in San Francisco, the filmmakers invented several new ways to handle common effects, and though innovating for the sake of innovating isn't the studio's style, it seems to come with the territory of making a new Pixar film.
And creating new effects doesn't come cheap. According to Apurva Shah, the supervising technical director on "Cars 2," Pixar had to triple the size and scale of its legendary render farm in order to achieve the computing power its new effects required for the film. But don't expect the studio to rest on its computing laurels for its next movies. Given its penchant for upping the ante with each new project, it's a good bet that even more new Dell render blades will be making their way to Pixar's headquarters here soon.
Water effects
When the team members behind "Cars 2" began working on the film in 2006, they realized that because one of the biggest sequences in the film takes place on and around an ocean-based oil rig, they wanted to step up their approach to animating open water. Already, Pixar had taken the industry in new directions with its underwater effects for "Finding Nemo." But now, Shah said in an interview in his office, the team hoped to improve on the current industry best for an ocean's choppy surface.
With "Nemo," Shah explained, Pixar had come up with a "softer-looking water," but with "Cars 2," the team felt that audiences would be expecting the oil rig sequence to feature edgier, stormier water.
EMERYVILLE, Calif.--We all know what the reflections off cars or the roiling of the ocean are supposed to look like. So if you are tempted to believe that what you'll see in "Cars 2" proves that Pixar has made its first live-action film, think again.
This is the hit-making studio that breaks new technological ground with most of its new films, and "Cars 2," which opens Friday, is no exception. Where its technicians applied real physics to the escape of thousands of balloons in "Up," or true lighting effects to the rolling and pitching of plastic garbage bags in "Toy Story 3," Pixar has once again pushed its computing powers to the limit--and gone well beyond them.
With "Cars 2," as the film's director and Disney chief creative officer John Lasseter pointed out at a recent event in San Francisco, the filmmakers invented several new ways to handle common effects, and though innovating for the sake of innovating isn't the studio's style, it seems to come with the territory of making a new Pixar film.
And creating new effects doesn't come cheap. According to Apurva Shah, the supervising technical director on "Cars 2," Pixar had to triple the size and scale of its legendary render farm in order to achieve the computing power its new effects required for the film. But don't expect the studio to rest on its computing laurels for its next movies. Given its penchant for upping the ante with each new project, it's a good bet that even more new Dell render blades will be making their way to Pixar's headquarters here soon.
Water effects
When the team members behind "Cars 2" began working on the film in 2006, they realized that because one of the biggest sequences in the film takes place on and around an ocean-based oil rig, they wanted to step up their approach to animating open water. Already, Pixar had taken the industry in new directions with its underwater effects for "Finding Nemo." But now, Shah said in an interview in his office, the team hoped to improve on the current industry best for an ocean's choppy surface.
With "Nemo," Shah explained, Pixar had come up with a "softer-looking water," but with "Cars 2," the team felt that audiences would be expecting the oil rig sequence to feature edgier, stormier water.