1995

Toy Story Animated Movie

The year 1995 was impressive for engineers working in the movie industry. The film Jumanji featured a herd of animals running through town, and all of those animals were computer-generated. The movie Casper had the world’s first computer-generated main character. The movie Babe used seamless and realistic computer-generated effects around each animal’s mouth to make it look like the animals could talk.

And then there was the film Toy Story—the world’s first completely computer-generated feature-length film. Every single image seen in the movie—all of the characters, all of the sets, all of the props, all of the scenery—came from 3D artists and animators working with computer software.

This was Pixar’s first feature-length film, and the production involved the collaboration of hundreds of people. Software engineers, network engineers, and hardware engineers played key roles. The software engineers wrote the code that made it possible for the animators to create the movie. Hardware engineers and network engineers built the server farm and storage systems that would render the movie frame by frame and put all of those frames together.

The amount of computing power necessary to make a film like this is staggering, and it keeps growing. Something like Monsters Inc., in which a main character is covered in fur and the software has to compute the motion of the fur frame by frame, is a great example. Toy Story, even with its simplicity, took hours to compute each 300-megabyte frame of the movie.

How do people create movies like Toy Story? One part of the process involves the characters created using PhotoRealistic RenderMan, which is a program produced by Pixar to render all of their 3D animated movies. A character like Woody or Buzz Lightyear has an internal skeleton. Each piece of the skeleton has sliders that control its exact movement. The face has dozens of sliders to control lips, eyes, and eyebrows. The animator manipulates the sliders for each frame to make the character move in exactly the right way. Then the character appears in a digital scene with other characters and objects. Virtual lights and a virtual camera give the director complete control.

Engineers create an imaginary universe populated with imaginary characters, and with them filmmakers bring amazing stories to life.

SEE ALSO 3D Glasses (1952), Virtual Reality (1985), Doom Engine (1993).

Toy Story represented a number of major software engineering innovations.