When creating the virtual worlds that their characters live in, technical artists at Pixar look to the natural world for inspiration and mimic it using mathematical formulas. This lesson dives into the math that was used to create the landscapes in "Brave," starting with a single blade of grass.
We aren't done! Pixar in a Box is a multi-year project. We are already working on the next set of lessons with hopes of publishing brand new content every few months.
To make the surfaces of characters or objects seem believable, artists at Pixar take basic patterns and use computer graphics to make those patterns more random. You’ll get to use randomness in this lesson, when you make your very own dinosaur skin!
Overviews of Pixar in a Box for students and teachers.
Pixar effects artists create explosions, fire, and water by breaking them down into millions of tiny particles and controlling them using computer programming. In this lesson, you’ll use basic physics to create mini-special effects like flowing water and exploding fireworks.
Whether it’s hand-drawn or done using a computer, animation always has the same goal: to take a series of images and play them back in a sequence. At Pixar, computers help fill in the gaps in those sequences, using mathematical functions – and you’ll get to try this too, by animating a bouncing ball.
Just as dialog, acting, and music are tools filmmakers use to convey meaning and emotion, color can be used to the same effect. But determining “color” is not as simple as saying “red” or “brown” because there are endless shades of color in the visible spectrum. In this lesson, you will learn how color is determined partly by the physics of light and partly by how our brains perceive it.
Just as live-action movies are made using cameras, Pixar uses virtual cameras to “film” their movies, with lenses that act like the real thing. In this lesson, you’ll experiment with different camera settings like F-stop, focal length and focus to create cool effects in scenes from “Inside Out.”
“Rigging” is what Pixar artists call the process that gives characters movement, and it’s a crucial step in making them more realistic and human (even if they’re not actually humans). In this lesson, you’ll get to use the same toolbox that Pixar uses to animate a desk lamp and make a snowman smile.
“Rendering” is the final process of a movie, when the technical directors at Pixar calculate the color of every pixel in every frame of every shot in the film. If that sounds incredibly time-consuming, it is! But Pixar gets help from some mathematical equations.
Live-action filmmakers make sure that every object in a room or environment is in the right place before they film a scene, and Pixar filmmakers do too, with virtual sets, props, and characters. Practice using geometric transformations to stage your own Pixar scene!
To get Pixar characters to not look so “computer-y,” artists turn to modeling, creating virtual 3-D shapes on the computer. To smooth those shapes out and make them look even more real, they use a simple algorithm called “subdivision,” and you’ll get to try it, too.
If you need to fill a scene with characters – a school of fish, a mob of monsters, or a cast of robots – you need to design a bunch of simple body parts that can be combined in different ways. Try making your own robot from parts – and share it!
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