Pixar

Intro

Hi! Here are some of the projects I worked on at Pixar this summer. Most of these projects were done in a day, with the exception of the group project and my final project. I tried to include a short description of what actually went on in case you aren't familiar with the 3D process. Thanks for looking and don't worry, I worked on other projects during this summer as well, these were just some of the ones that were approved for me to show. Note - none of these projects actually ended up in production, they were all just personal projects to help me learn about the 3D process.

Modeling

Our first week was modeling. 3D modeling is a lot like working with clay - only on the computer. You are trying to get the basic shape of the object and you aren't too concerned with the lighting or the colors of the model, just the form. Our assignment was to model an interior of a room, and like everything at Pixar I tried to achieve the style that is somewhere between realistic and cartoon.

Lighting

Lighting in 3D is literally placing virtual lights around the virtual world and defining their intensity, color, direction and shadows (among many other things). For example, the sun has a high intensity and is a yellow-orange color with hard shadows. Fluorescent light is closer to white/blue/green, usually less intense and can have a variety of shadows. Reflected light takes on the color of the object it was reflected off of, is usually very low in intensity and doesn't really contribute to shadow casting. Here is an image of a scene I re-lit using assets from CarsToons (short movies run on the Disney Channel featuring the Cars characters). The lighting of the piece is supposed to make you feel like it's early morning/dawn.

FX

Special FX mostly includes anything that needs to be simulated based off of real-life physics (although, there is another separate department for working with the simulations of hair and cloth). Examples of FX would be: fire, water, simulating gravity, dynamic interactions between objects, explosions and smoke/fog. Here is a video I worked on that shows the destruction of a column.

Working in groups of three, we had four days to work on whatever we wanted (as opposed to the other projects where we only had one day). Here is a video of the group project we came up with. It is supposed to be reminiscent of an Italian villa on the river at night. All of the models, textures, lighting and rendering was done from scratch.

For our final project we had two weeks to work on any project we wanted individually. I chose to re-light a scene from Toy Story 3. I chose a pre-existing scene from the movie so I could just concentrate on making the lighting look good and not have to worry about the models, animation, simulations or textures. I started by deleting all of the pre-existing lights from the scene and choosing a color palette to work from. I chose to do a scene at sunset. I wanted to match the colors in Bonnie's room to the colors that are on Bonnie. The green on the walls was emphasized to match her green shirt, the blue/purple sky color matches her purple cape and the red/orange sunlight matches her skin tone. Also, since Bonnie is a cute little kid I wanted to keep the lighting really soft and playful.

My lighting is on the left, the lighting from Toy Story 3 is on the right.

The two weeks worth of work culminated into this video - a second and a half clip of Bonnie playing with Woody.