Adam He – Looking Outward – 01

I first encountered Pixar when I just got into elementary school. I had watched a lot of two dimensional cartoons. Animations were not really a special thing. But when I saw a Pixar movie, I was astonished. How can people make an animation in such realistic forms and movements. It seemed to be a magic to me that designers and computer scientists could generate such realistic and stylistic animation on computers.

Pixar began in 1979 under a group of talented people. Edwin Catmull and Steve Jobs, two of the most important figures, changed the whole animation  industry as well as the film industry. The GCI animations were just as realistic and complex as real man actings. With its unique concepts and messages hidden in each film, Pixar’s animations immediately became well-known starting from the masterpiece Toy Story (1995).

I am currently learning a lot about three dimensional modeling and renderings, and I started to formerly understand the complexity and difficulties behind just creating one three dimensional rendering. Pixar invented its own rendering software, Renderman, and contributed greatly to the virtual computer graphics in the recent decades. Pixar appeared to be a magic when I was little, but now, I am starting to grasp the tricks behind those magics.