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Lighting and visual effects artists worked with Pixar's RenderMan RIS to create compelling scenes in Disney . Pixar's Cars 3 BY BARBARA ROBERTSON Action, Lights n Cars 3, Disney/Pixar's third film in the popular series, Director Brian Fee sends Lightening McQueen to training school to recapture his edge, races him in an unexpected demolition derby, and in the film's climax, wheels him into a dramatic race against his new neme- sis, Storm. There is also one major road trip in the film that takes Lightening McQueen back to the past. But this film is all about the future. The fu- ture for racing legend Lightening McQueen, and of lighting and effects at Pixar. This is the second film at Pixar to use the new path-tracing soware RenderMan RIS. Director of Photography for Lighting Kim White led a team in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 lighting artists who lit the fast-mov- ing, colorful film in eight and a half months. Visual Effects Supervisor Jon Reisch led the team of effects artists who applied RIS to volumes of dust and mud. "Finding Dory was the first film at Pixar to use RIS, and we learned from what the crew on Dory did," says White. "We learned from things they didn't expect. We saw things they had done and standardized them. We learned about things they couldn't solve and maybe fixed that. "But, they were underwater," she adds. "They didn't have shiny cars." The path-tracer gave Cars 3 a different look than the previous Cars features, which relied on Pixar's Reyes soware. "In the past, we would have had to cheat the reflections," White says. "Now, the lights behave like real lights. We had real reflections. There are certain shots I've seen a bazillion times where I see Sally and McQueen reflected in each other's paint, and I still love watching for it. Before, that would have been a big deal, but we didn't even have to worry about it." But, the other side of not having to cheat is that it was difficult to cheat when they wanted to. "The good news is that most of the time the lighting worked fine, but when we needed to cheat something, it was a chal- lenge," White says. "A different challenge than in the past. We had more hoops to jump." For example, reflections sometimes landed in awkward places on the charac- ters' faces, and the artists wanted to keep the reflections off the characters' eyes, in particular. Thus, iris and eye highlights were hand placed; they didn't come from lights on the set. "If one character is talking to another, it's cool to see the reflections on the car paint, but on the eyes it's distracting," White says. The crew ran tests before making that de- cision, one in which McQueen talks to Mater via the Cars 3 version of FaceTime or Skype. "We saw this weird square reflection on McQueen's eyes," White says. "We decided, OK, let's not do that." I Images ©2017 Disney•Pixar