"Saying the computer does all the work in 3D animation is like saying the oven does all the work in baking" -Someone much smarter than me

When Sam started talking about a hypothetical Pixar movie with stock footage of a wall, I was sure he was going to suggest they make a film about bricks.

I once met a guy in university who studied game design, where they learn movie animations as well. The guy reserved the academy's special computer over night. He was proud to render just a couple of seconds of a patch of grass perfectly moving in a breeze in that time.

The lighting work they did in Toy Story 4 was OUTRAGEOUS.

Wanna know the best part? We don't just render films once in the film industry, in fact most shots for a film will have been rendered 10/20/100 times before we (or the client) are happy with everything. Plus, all of the departments that lead up to those final shots usually have to do their own renders too. I'm a lookdev artist (Part of surfacing) and it's very normal for me and most other artists to send renders every single night :D

My daughter is an animator (not with Pixar) and she said this is all pretty spot on. (And that “rigging is THE WORST! Don’t go into rigging (as a job)!!”)

Honestly the tech behind computer generated stuff like this is incredibly fascinating. Even "live action" movies have huge amounts of it at this point, to the point where the things actually shot often look almost nothing like the finished product. Unfortunately a lot of the details are kept rather tightly under wraps, so it's hard to learn most of the interesting details :(

My respect for animators has skyrocketed.

Even though you didn't explicitly say something incorrect about it, it's worth mentioning that the "p" in "1080p" doesn't stand for pixels, it stands for "progressive scan" (i.e. draw each row every frame), as opposed to 1080i, for "interlaced" (i.e. draw every other row each frame).

It's funny rewatching Toy Story 1 after watching Soul, Turning Red, & Lightyear then noticing how the humans in that movie look like mannequins when compared to these more recent films.

Thank you for the hotdog explanation. There is no possible way I could have comprehended the comparison if its not for the hotdogs. My gratitude is insurmountable.

This is one of those things I’ve never really thought about but makes instant sense. I do architectural renders and they can take 24+ hours for a single photo. Even if I send it off to a cloud service it can take a couple. Crazy what goes into everything.

i was in a CAD class in high school, and at one point we convinced the instructor to use some of that year's budget to buy what was effectively a box of multi-core Xeons with an ethernet port. being able to just Let It Simmer overnight was a huge morale boost

I remember seeing that Mainframe Studios, the people behind the show "ReBoot" were able to render in super-high detail & HD, but it just took way too long, so we ended up with much smoother & less-detailed sets. I saw a couple of the promo HD shots that they had rendered & they were pretty sweet. Allegedly, if the master files still existed, the whole show could be remastered, but, also allegedly, the master files have gone missing.

It's actually a multiple of that number of pixels, since many renders these days are done in layers that are then composited, so if something goes wrong you only have to re-render the wonky elements instead of having to rerun the calculations for every single element in the image. Also gives them more freedom when they're fine-tuning the color grading and other things later on.

For everyone who has seen Coco, remember the scene when they are going over the bridge, specifically the moment where Miguel looks up and sees the other side. When it was all put together, but not yet optimized for rendering, one frame took 22,000 hours to render alone. Each one of those lights is impacting the color of each pixel, and there millions of tiny lights there.

I have studied animation for years and this is the first time I feel like I understand what ray tracing means. Good stuff.

Sentient socks talking about nihilism is something I would definitely watch. Take notes Pixar!

I think that after this video the animators deserve to be fed as a reward

The stat about dying from extreme hotdog consumption was incredibly funny. I love Sam’s stupid jokes

Today's fact: A small population of Mammoths survived on the Wrangel Island until 1650 BC, about 900 years after the construction of The Great Pyramid of Giza were completed.

Wow, that's amazing. This is one of the best HAI videos in a long time. It's funny but still super duper informative. I NEVER understood ray tracing, but now I do! And I feel like a fool for not having understood it previously! And the insight into the 3D film process. It's a delight. What an excellent video. I hope Jet Lag gets the gold play button.

Wow! Just 3 yrs to render a film, imagine how much time it takes to just even make everything before it!

3:09 thanks for finding the perfect stock footage for the average expression of an animator. i felt every emotion that made me drop out of my 3D animation degree just looking at the screen

The hot dog analogy absolutely took me out 😂😂😂

listening to books on audible is my favorite way to protest pixar's rendering inefficiency, it amazes me you know your audience so well!

Also, sometimes scenes are rendered multiple times for different countries, usually to swap out textures on billboards, newspapers, etc., but sometimes models get swapped as well. For example, in Inside Out they changed toppings on pizza to reflect different tastes in those countries.

Then accidentally someone presses "stop rendering"

One thing you forgot to mention, When they came back to do TS3 all of the original models from TS1&2 were obsolete and had the muscle/joint points wrong, the models were so low on detail, the physics behind each character needed to be re-done. Andrew Stanton i think said it took them just a year of reworking the old models before they started the motion tracing or animating for 3. With 4, because of that work they were able to do on 3, they were able to subsidize a lot of the time normally spent on character creation/design into getting high resolution details and background objects. Albeit the technology from 1/2 to 4 has changed and grown considerably so take it as a grain of salt.

0:50 correction: HD is 720p, FHD (Full High Definition) is 1080p, Technically 1080p is "HD" but its not commonly known as "HD"

I love the idea of rendering can be turned into the phrase, “What color is this pixel?”

Out of all the hundreds of people who do the extremely hard and complex work that goes into making an animated movie, the highest pay in the millions goes to the few movie stars who read out their lines in front of the microphone while making funny faces, arguably the easiest job there was in the whole project.

It was only a matter of time until we got "the logistics of" videos on HAI as well.

0:49 HD is 720p (1280x720), whereas 1080p is called Full HD for clarification.

you never really respect the writing of this channel until he simplifies something you understand in depth. this is a great explanation of an incredibly complex process that honestly anyone could understand

1080p technically stands for 1080 pixel height progressive scanning (video/monitor ). Not a resolution like 1920x1080 or 1280x720.

a minor detail is that movies generally use path tracing and not ray tracing. They are similar but not really the same

You want a NASA computer? Na.. *You want a Pixar Rendering PC*

3:35 Better yet, talking socks overcoming "nylonism"

0:56 Man, never thought I'd have to say this. You described FHD here, HD is 720p, and FHD is 1080p. It's hard to understand, bullshit and I genuinely can't blame the sweatshop worker you have locked up in the basement for getting this wrong.

Honestly not a bad explanation of the basic path tracing algorithm for the layman. good job sam! Did a course as part of my masters covering how to program these things. Really fun to play with, if a bit frustrating with all the subtle ways you can mess it up.

1:24 So 268,738,559,999 hotdogs is the limit... okayy.

I was so excited to see this topic, I literally centered my college capstone project on basically this question! Pretty much spot on

Even rendering photos takes ages. I turn portfolios into slideshows for my school art gallery's digital frames and the number of times I have to explain that, unless the school wants to buy me a really nice computer, there is no possible way I can get them a slideshow in 3 hours is astonishing

The title should be the insane logistics behind 3d movie rendering

2:41 I’m dead dude😂 I love those little notes hahahaha

I'm a visual effects & CG generalist, this video gets the basics of it very well. But, with everything, it's a deep rabbit hole.

Love your videos. Currently learning some basic coding. Nowhere near this level, but it’s still helpful.

To clarify for anyone who was slightly misled, the p in 1080p does not stand for pixels. It means progressive. As opposed to 1080i, interlaced.

1:30 nice comparison 🥴

As for 1920x1080P in the video. The P doesn't stand for Pixels, it stands for Progressive. Once upon a time, video was interlaced with every other line as the laser beam blasted the tube per frame. This switched back and forth given the illusion of a full frame image with no gaps.. Now the tech for outputting video has come so far, that interlaced is a thing of the past, now full-frames are rendered. Every modern video is progressive and monitors and TVs support this as well. Basically the P is a relic, but saying 1080P is still correct if you are referring to Progressive video.

Breaking news: Pixar makes a super computer which beats NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer in order to render movies 1 day faster.

It's nuts that we get to do a cut down approximation of this stuff at 60fps in videogames - throwing seemingly-infinite compute offline at something is impressive but to me I'm always astounded by what a laptop can kick out at a stable frame rate, especially as the industry is beginning to adopt proper raytracing even

WRONG! at 0:54 you refer HD to 1080p, but colloquially 720p is referred to as HD, and 1080p is referred to as FHD, or Full-HD. "But wait!" I hear you say, "HD can technically referred to either 720p or 1080p!" And well yes, you're correct, but we all know that definitions shift all the time and the fact that no one means 1080p when they say HD in fact means HD does not mean 1080p. Checkmate!

You just told me all the stuff I’m learning about blender in like 5 minutes

2:30 I also refuse to smile until Jet Lag reaches 1 million subscribers as it's the best series ever created

Wait, wtf?!?!?! Since when did 720p get downgraded from HD to not HD?! And 1080p FHD to normal HD??!!!! Dafaq?!?!?!

This is a great summary, though there's so so much more depth that breaks down why Pixar takes several years and gigantic teams of artists to make these movies happen. Just the surfacing part alone is fascinating. Surfaces are broken down into many many different qualities, so even after an object has been modeled they might add displacement maps to add height to very fine details that would be impractical to model by hand like scales or wrinkled skin, normal or bump maps that add subtler texture like the surface of an orange or pores on skin, specular reflection & roughness, metalness, subsurface scattering (like how red light transmits through skin) and many more. Each of these qualities is applied with a particular function with different constraints you can manipulate, you can actually apply black/white or color maps to most of them to get variation in specific parts of a surface. So the computer has to calculate all of this and how it influences the color of each pixel - and that's before lighting. Pixar movies will have many lights in a scene, often a sky dome/diffuse lighting and several area or spot lights. Each of those has a different color, intensity, shape, and size that will influence the environment around them differently. And when you render, the camera has many settings, there's a million render settings (you can set sample values for several qualities. Like upping subsurface sampling by 1 greatly increases render times), how you output your image varies (raw, sRGB etc colorspaces, Gamma), the type of file (for things like transparency), and finally after all that they have to open it in another software to color correct it for different display types because computers, TVs, theaters, etc all have different color spaces and they need to basically recalibrate all of those rendered images for each of those display types. And then after that when it's all being edited, there is even more color correction and effects added in post. And even this is a gross oversimplification

Nice video Mr. Sam! Can you make a video (either half as, or, fully interesting) on how ILM rendered the ABBA on stage? I enjoyed your hops, jumps and chases throughout Europe! Regards from the UK, Anthony

the answer to the question is really that thats how long they decided was a reasonable amount of time for the new movie to take. if the higher ups at pixar wanted it to only take 1 year they could cut down on some of the effects or use 3x as powerful a computer there are probably things they could have done to slightly improve quality which would have resulted in it taking 10 years rather than 3 on current hardware but someone decided that wasnt worth it

For clarification, HD is 720p, FullHD is 1080p

One thing you missed is that just because a movie takes a year (e.g. 365 days) to render, doesn't mean that they do. If you just split the workload into 365 machines, then it will render in a day. Split it into 3650 machines and it will be in an hour. There is a sweetspot where it makes economic sense. So, we call it GPU-years instead of just years. ChatGPT for example most likely took thousands of GPU-years to train.

“If I ate 268,738,560,000 hotdogs I would die”. Thank you. That really made me truly appreciate how big of a number 268,738,560,000 really is.

The title is misleading. The acutal rendering doesnt take 3 years. They have as you said huge renderfarms that renders several frames at the same time. The making of all the things you mentioned takes years yes. modeling, texturing, lighting, animating.

DCI spec for theater projectors maxes at 4k, or 1,146,617,856,000 pixels for your 90min example.

I finally understand what ray tracing is. Thank you.

As someone offering freelance rendering services but who has dabbled with it with architectural designs in college way back as well as for personal projects, it's pretty nuts both how you can make tons of detail, but inversely that detail can start to add up. Crank all the settings and layering to the extreme for big movies and it's no wonder they take so long to render.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that the render farms are responsible for rendering lots of different frames at the same time which drastically reduces the render time. If they rendered every frame of Toy Story 4 one after the other every 30 hours it would take about 26,000 years to render the whole movie.

HD is not 1080p. It is 720p. You can't even do basic research, just like when youtube stopped showing 720p as HD, showed 1080p as HD, also showed 1440p as HD, but (mostly) correctly shows 2160p as 4k, despite it not matching the naming convention of the other resolutions and UHD being the correct term.

This video is spot on, especially the part about the hot dogs. But honestly, despite being an animator for over a decade I learned something 😉

Fun fact: Pixar renders movies in HD (actually Full HD 1920x1080) and then upscales them to 4K. It speeds up things a lot. Since Turning Red, Pixar has also been using a new AI Denoiser that comes with RenderMan 25, which allows them to render final frames even at 64 samples, which is crazy low.

Bro thats alot of work for a 1 hour long movie, mad respect for animators.

Dude, 1:33 you would die from much fewer hotdogs. This analogy does not land. Awesome vid💯

Recently, render times have been improved by machine learning algorithms called denoisers that can drastically reduce the samples per pixel needed. Rather than needing enough samples for each pixel to individually average out to a correct image, denoisers use data from surrounding pixels (as well as additional data provided by the renderer) to guess the missing samples. This is also the technology that makes real-time raytracing possible, since raytraced games can only afford to use a few samples per pixel.

I refuse to smile until jetlag gets a gold play button 😭😭😭😭

Adam getting a W outside of Jet Lag by making Sam say "ooey gooey sticky icky"

HD is 720p, Full HD is 1080p

Interesting video, my respect for the animators in the industry definitely rose after looking into this.

I know from experience that managing a render farm is really fun. And by really fun I mean excruciatingly time consuming and the sort of thing you will lose sleep over because if you don't something is gonna break the render farm

🎶 268,738,560,000... 🎶 Nope. You can't make a bad musical out of that number!

Loving the animations in this video!

Fun fact: Pixar recently made its rendering engine Open Source.

The advancement of Graphics cards when it comes to rendering time from Seconds/minutes per frame to Frames per second which is a huge improvement.

"If I ate 268,738,560,000 hot dogs, I would die." Sam does not have what it takes to become the Trombone Champ. 😔

Correction Pixar usually use BxDF but most shader use BSDF(reflection and refraction) there some particular shaders having only BRDF(only reflection) and very few having BTDF(refraction) only. After rendering there is compositing which is like photoshop but for many frames.

and this stuff is why video games typically use raster lighting, getting raytracing to look right in something that renders in real time is insanely difficult. Almost no games that have raytraced lighting, exclusively use raytracing. Most use a mix of raytracing, raster lighting, and fancy algorithms (called denoisers) to approximate what a fully raytraced frame would look like... and still deliver it at 60+ fps with a PC that doesn't cost $200,000. But the fact that raytracing is the standard for animated films, and has been for many years, is why people who say "raytracing is just a gimmick" regarding video games, make me roll my eyes.

That hot dog analogy really did help put the number in perspective, thank you

They could just use an Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon has an endless supply. Each time I click create I get a new one.

It's crazy cause as a design student sometimes I have to render stuff and even my 1080p images with surely not as many details as a pixar scene it takes me half a hour

That's just not true. While it certainly takes years to create a full length animated movie für obvious reasons, the rendering progress itself takes a few days at most. It's also not a single machine that takes care of rendering the final product, but a cluster of synchronized computers, using hardware which is highly specialized and built for this particular task.

A ton of reasons why animated movies should be highly appreciated. I'm now in the process of finishing up my Motion Graphics Master's program and the final project, which is only 30 sec, is taking a lifetime to render and it's making me suffer and almost regret the decision to execute the idea I had in mind lol...I'm now worried about being able to submit on time, so just imagine the shitload of work it takes to work on a 90min movie, geezz! 3D animators are wizards

The reason it takes so long is they decided to keep the time constant and increase the quality to what the technology would allow. They could render it in a lot shorter time if they wanted to.

HD is actually 720p. 1080p would be Full HD. ...this is why nobody uses the stupid names below 4K

i actually didnt know that all of that time was because of rendering. i actually thought they take forever not because of the rendering aspect but the stuff before it, and that rendering was the fast and easy part.

I never really realized just how much two-hundred-sixty-eight-billion-seven-hundred-thirty-eight-million-five-hundred-sixty-thousand is until now.

Just for your info: Toy Story 1 Rendertimes were approx 3 minutes per Frame as mentioned by Pixar itself in their paper "The Reyes Rendering architecture". Many people believe that their rendertimes vary between 1 hour and 24 hours but please activate your brain. Just with 1 hour rendertime they would need one whole day to render just 1 second of movie (24 fps) and a movie has approx. 7200 seconds making it 7200 days of rendering which are over 19 years. And don't come with the argument of "They render in parallel" cause that means they need to spread their render performance onto multiple tasks making every task slower then one task running in parallel on all machines.

What they did with the hair on Merida continues to amaze me.

Thanks for the Blender tutorial, much appreciated

yeah, well, technically, every sample is asking the "what color is this pixel" question. And you´ll need a few thousands of those samples per pixel at least to get a smoothe result. If you want something more special like caustics or very tiny light sources, sample count per pixel can get up into millions

When are the fuzzy brown doods going to be available on the store as plushies?