“OOOOO Energy: Adding Dynamic Shading and Lighting to Environments on Pixar’s Elio” by Torre and Thompson
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- OOOOO Energy: Adding Dynamic Shading and Lighting to Environments on Pixar's Elio
Session/Category Title:
- No Shade, High Energy Lighting and Shading
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
The production design for Pixar’s Elio (2025) called for complex and dynamic elements throughout the “Communiverse” environments of the film. In this talk we showcase several of these effects and discuss the differences in implementation to acheive specific visual goals, workflow efficencies and render optimizations. Many of these approaches blurred the lines between traditional disciplines and departments such as modeling, shading, lighting, dressing and animation. We leveraged features in Houdini, and USD, as well as custom shader solutions in Pixar’s proprietary look development environment Flow to achieve the dynamic features in the film.
References:
[1] Alec Bartsch, Colin Thompson, and Fernando de Goes. 2023. A Procedural Approach for Stylized Bark Shading. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Talks (Los Angeles, CA, USA) (SIGGRAPH ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 10, 2 pages.
