Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1144162
s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 c g w 3 5 CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTS The film features two sets that were particularly complicated. The antique mall contained a significant amount of geometry that built up quickly, along with a lot of glass and reflective material, while the carnival had to feel alive, and its nighttime lighting enchanting. There are some major visual changes between Toy Story 3 and 4, and while the latest release is a continuation of the original story and world, the imagery is noticeably richer and the environments have a higher degree of realism due to global illumination. "We've gone through a whole new renderer overhaul that you first saw in Finding Dory, but I think it has really come into its own for Toy Story 4. You're going to see that the global illumination and lighting on this film is absolutely gorgeous," says Moyer of using Pixar's RenderMan 21 for the film. "We spent a lot of time calibrating every lightbulb and light source in the film so they all interact with the set in a way that is believable and effective for extended dynamic range." Adds Reeves, "With the renderer, we could do some pretty realistic environments, where the light is bouncing off all the glass and surfaces – bouncing, not just reflective. It's very subtle, but it makes [the scene] rich and believable." Whereas the original look of Toy Story was stylized shapes, realistic materials, and theatrical lighting, the crew on Toy Story 4 took that even further. "We made sure the shading felt as detailed as possible, and our lighting department gave it the theatricality we were looking for – bright colors and a lot of atmosphere," Moyer explains. "We hesitate to call it 'realism' though, because we're still making an animated movie. But we talked about how to push things back using techniques like depth of field and atmosphere so [audiences] could focus on the action as opposed to how many objects were in the scene." Like the rainstorm sequence, scale – at the toy level – was important in these environments. "We really dug in on char- acters, sets, and effects to make the world at this scale a tactile, beautiful quality that you wouldn't see at the 6-foot-tall human scale," he adds. AT THE ANTIQUE MALL Nearly immediately, the crew began work on the antique mall. This included visits to antique stores, where they observed all types of nooks and crannies just the right size for toys to explore – behind shelving units, underneath low tables, and so forth – that would be interesting from a toy's point of view. That's what we see in the film. Cooley also observed that such stores have a history of ownership; no antique store is constructed specifically for that purpose. In the film, the mall is an enormous open warehouse filled with tons and tons of various pops. A large portion of the film takes place here, and it quickly became one of the filmmakers' biggest technical challenges. The store contains approximately 10,000 items, all hand-built and hand-dressed. Not to mention, the set is full of glass, resulting in reflections, and has a multi- tude of chandeliers and lights reflecting off various types of objects: metal, wood, cloth. "Every item was reflecting off some- thing else," says Cooley. "We realized we could render it if we did some cheats. Then we filled it with 10,000 unique items, and added dust and spiderwebs on top of that. And, it actually worked!" According to Moyer, the team built the space into a hierarchy of subsets, where roughly each booth was a separate set, and then those were all pieced together into areas, and those were used to build out the mall. "We could activate, deactivate, and cut out pieces, sometimes even down to the individual geometric primitive level of visibility," Moyer adds. To move the sequences through the pipeline more easily, the crew used USD (Universal Scene Description), which baked down all the set and prop information into a simple scene description so animators and lighters could work within these larger seg- ments and not bog down their machines. "There are sometimes millions and even hundreds of millions of curves in a scene, and we had to smartly move all that geometry through the pipeline and into lighting without killing our lights or our renderer," says Moyer. To that end, an automatic pruning system was devised that was able to work with all the refrac- AT LEFT SHOWS THE DUST DETAIL AT FULL STRENGTH; AT RIGHT IS THE FINAL FRAME WITH ADJUSTED DUST DETAIL. SECOND CHANCE ANTIQUES IS A MASSIVE SET WITH THOUSANDS OF OBJECTS.