A Sharing of How to Make of Disney/Pixar’s “Soul” (1)

Pixar's latest movie "Soul" is an animated film directed by Peter Dougherty, dubbed by Jamie Fox and Tina Fey. The film tells the story of Joe Gardner, who dreams of becoming a jazz pianist, meets the world-weary soul 22, and they return to the real world to find the meaning of life.

This time, Fox Renderfarm, as your best render farm and cloud rendering services provider, will shares with you the process about how to make Disney/Pixar's "Soul" by 3d artists Carldrifter. And this is part one of the article.

Many audiences are curious about how the soul character in "Soul" is realized, which looks like volume, but how can the volume retain such a precise shape, including how to set up the binding animation? In fact, these are all technical challenges faced by Pixar.

I collected some information about how Pixar created such a form. I admire Pixar's challenge and breakthrough spirit.

The core process is to create a surface model to generate specific lines, such as contour lines and wrinkles → volume creation, that is a character is created by several parts of the volume → develop IDshader custom color shader based on normal control → USD cache rendering.

The core process uses Houdini. We can see in the detailed technical breakdown below.

The soul characters in Disney/Pixar's "Soul" all have a very special appearance, which is used to mark that they have entered a unique world. This setting brings many new challenges. Every production staff in the art department, including modeling, texturing, lighting in the VFX department, software development, etc. work together to bring these interesting characters to the screen. The world of "Soul" is abstract and ethereal. This requires a balance between visual clarity and design appeal.

Since the characters in the animation still use the surface for rigging and animation, a key challenge is to propose a new representation that meets our visual needs. In order to achieve the soft volume state and dynamically changing lines, the production staff established a system to generate this data in Houdini programmatically. They need to perform rigorous data calculations to get accurate values. They developed an automated system for managing this calculation in a configurable way while keeping the downstream rendering data in sync with changes in the character's performance.

Now please follow the best CPU & GPU render farm and cloud rendering services provider to our next part: A Sharing of How to Make of Disney/Pixar’s “Soul” (2).