It's when a modeling artist subdivides a hard-edged shape enough times that it appears as a smooth surface. So in 'A Bug's Life,' Pixar's artists applied a modeling technique they used on their Oscar-winning short 'Geri's Game.' This was called the subdivision technique, which one of Pixar's founders helped invent. That made some characters come out looking patchy, like Andy in 'Toy Story,' whose hand isn't smooth like a human hand should be. For years, 3D models, both in CG-animated movies and video games, had been mapped with polygons. In 1998, 'A Bug's Life' presented a different challenge: creating characters with a smooth texture and fluid, lifelike movements. In fact, it became the industry standard for rendering and the first software product to be awarded an Oscar. Since then, RenderMan has been the final step in the production pipeline behind every single Pixar film, and many non-Pixar films, too. And the only way Pixar could render the whole movie was with RenderMan, which shows how this software revolutionized animation. 'Toy Story' wasn't the first movie to use RenderMan, but it was the first-ever 3D-animated feature film. In the late '80s, some of Pixar's top researchers got together to design RenderMan, a program that combines all the 3D assets created for each frame of a movie and translates them into a film-quality, photorealistic final image. Rendering is when a computer takes all the info about an animation - the different algorithms for color, motion, pattern, light, shadow, and effects - and basically films the movie. Let's look at how every Pixar movie brought animation into the future.Ĭomputer graphics were around in the '80s in small doses, but to make fully animated movies like 'Toy Story,' the industry needed software that could render complex animations. Every single Pixar movie brought at least one groundbreaking innovation, each changing the future of animation and moviemaking as a whole. Pixar would later use the same system to simulate realistic fur on animal characters, like Remy the rat and Dug the dog. Narrator: See these hairs on Sully's arm from 'Monsters, Inc.'? Instead of animating each hair one by one, Pixar computer scientists created a program called Fizt, which would automate the movement of Sully's hairs based on what's happening in any given scene.

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We break down the progress the studio has made in areas like shading, ray tracing, fur and cloth simulation, and muscle movement on human characters.

This episode of 'Movies Insider' looks at how Pixar pushed the boundaries of computer animation with every one of its movies from 'Toy Story' to 'Cars 2.'.

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