Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay about how Pixar animated real-looking lighting in their latest film, Soul.
Automation has become a much larger aspect of animation over the last ten years. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Algorithms can take on busy, detail-specific busywork, freeing up animators to focus their attention elsewhere.
We’ve spoken before on this column about FizT (pronounced fizz-tee, short for “physics tool”), an animation software tool developed by Pixar that allows the studio to automate everything from shading to cloth dynamics. I first became aware of FizT and the idea of automated animation in the behind-the-scenes of the studio’s fourth film, Monsters, Inc. Learning that all three million of Sully’s hairs were simulated kind of blew my mind.
I felt a similar kind of awe while watching today’s video, which is all about Pixar’s latest film, Soul, and its use of ray-tracing technology, known in-house as the Global Illumination lighting system. Before 2013’s Monsters University, the studio animated lighting effects like reflections and shadows manually. As you can imagine, this was both labor-intensive and frustrating.
As the video essay below explains, ray tracing technology automatically accounts for visual physics every time an artist deploys a new light source. And while Pixar has been working with ray tracing for almost a decade, Soul is perhaps the best example of how beautiful and believable light has liberated artists with a new thematic language.
Watch “Pixar’s Soul: A Masterclass in Fake Light“:
Who made this?
This video essay was created by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor Thomas Flight. He runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Thomas Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube here. You can follow him on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- Here’s a video from Queue favorite The Nerdwriter on how (and why) Toy Story 4 faked a split diopter shot. The title of this piece is one hundred percent indebted to them.
- Here’s another sample of Thomas Flight’s work, on the gentle editing of Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow.
- And here’s another taste of Thomas Flight: What Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet can teach us about the limits of exposition.
- And here’s another video essay from Thomas Flight, on how the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit makes chess feel interesting.
- Here’s a video on how Pixar animates realistic clothing.
- Here’s an exploration of the sound design of Pixar’s Toy Story.
Related Topics: Animation, Pixar, Soul, The Queue
