Seems like a simple enough scene, but you can catch in the background the hint of the advancements of rending clouds.

BD: Any interesting technical breakthroughs?

SK: The effects team brought in Erdem Taylan, who took the standard generic Maya fluid sims and improved upon it by writing his own atmospheric shader. Gary Bruins added to this. When we made those clouds, it wasn’t just with Maya and Maya’s fluid boxes, but we were able to model and render the clouds with volumetric rendering and it was gorgeous, such as the airplane flight through the clouds. The clouds were the set, so we had to work very close with animation on that. If Brad wanted us to do something with physics pretty easily, we could use Maya, but if it was very specific, like an explosion that goes really fast the first two frames and then slows down, we’d force the animated explosion to be what he wanted.

We weren’t just making dynamics. The cartoon world meant that we had to modify all of our real world simulations in the cartoon world physics. Brad was animation directing the simulations, which brings shivers to the spines of guys that do simulations.

BD: Brad, what did you impart to Pixar during all of this?

BB: When I first talking to animation supervisor Tony Fucile about coming up with me to Pixar — he supervised Iron Giant and worked on Family Dog and is someone I really admire and trust — he said, `I don’t know anything about CG… what am I going to show these guys?’ I told him to forget all that and we spent the next 15 minutes talking about everything we admire about Pixar films — the design, the original stories and so on. After that, I asked him what he would change about the way Pixar makes movies. And we talked about what we wanted to see in 3D animation but had only seen in 2D. There’s a graphic quality to it, there’s a stretchy, squashy feel to good 2D animation. It’s in CG, but doesn’t feel as pushable as it is in hand-drawn animation.

We broke down all of the things we wanted to see, controls we wanted to have. And when we came up there, we built the characters from the inside out to do all of these things. I think that some people up there had only worked on CG films, and I tried to incorporate some of the things I was taught from the old Disney guys that none of the crew at Pixar had ever emphasized. It’s tough to pull off humans, and it’s not about making stuff move realistically; it’s about making it move convincingly. People love to do zipmation… it’s like little hummingbirds… if you’re goal is to only be funny, it’s a very useful tool. But if you’re doing a feature and you require the audience to feel something more, then you have to acknowledge the way weight moves through space.

For instance, when you floor a Chevy Suburban, you can feel the engine working to take this huge amount of bulk and weight. At the same time, if you try hitting the brakes, you feel all the momentum of this huge hunk of metal moving through the air and it wants to continue to move. And the brakes are really being taxed. OK, if you have a really big character, he cannot make fast movements without there being some residual movement when he changes direction. So what you’re trying to do, especially in a superhero movie, is have them do things that are patently unrealistic but believable to the eye. Whether it’s 2D or 3D, you’re stylizing the world in order to catch a distillation of a feeling or a moment or a character.

BD: Do you think The Incredibles would’ve made a good 2D film too?

BB: Definitely. We wouldn’t be able to do some things as good as a CG film, but others things would’ve been a little more graphic and more pleasing to look at. I’m not one of those people that think 2D is becoming outmoded or is too old-fashioned. I think it’s as modern as you make it. If you did a really great, stylized, adventurous hand-drawn film, it could be as good as anything done. And when you push the stylized aspect just a little bit like 101 Dalmatians did, it looks as fresh today as it every did. And graphically it looks like it was made yesterday. That’s me. I don’t think 2D is dead and I don’t think anybody at Pixar does.

BD: Rick, do you think Pixar would’ve tackled CG humans on its own without the outside influence of Brad?

RS: No, it would’ve been several projects out. He gave us an awesome kick in the ass that we sorely deserved, so I’m very grateful.

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.