MrPromey
Well-Known Member
As for #2, none of the major studios are using stock off-the-shelf stuff. Most (including Disney/Pixar) are using industry standard modeling and composite software like Maya and Nuke, among others, which offer APIs for deep levels or custom coding and they all have their own in-house render systems.
Pixar uses RenderMan (which they also lisence/sell), Disney studios uses Hyperion Renderer, Dreamworks uses MoonRay, Illumnation uses MGLR, etc.
The thing about Pixar is they usually go with a far less economical style of animation/rendering which requires a lot more work and hardware resources to pull off. A lot of their "breakthroughs" and innovations come from finding ways to produce that stuff more cheaply, not so they can make movies for less but so they can use more of that stuff in what they do.
I mean, look at Elemental. Most of the characters are translucent and/or lacking a solid form and nearly all are empirical to their environments. That kind of thing is super-expensive to pull off and it's basically every frame of the movie.
It seems obvious, a big part of the reason the Mario Movie was more expensive than other Illumination work is that they went heavier in that direction to make everything glow and sparkle a whole lot more than it does in most of their work.
They calculated that spending the bigger bucks to add more eye-candy to the movie would be worth it for that release because they'd been handed a gift of guaranteed success if they didn't whiff it and it looks like they made the right call to spend a little extra for that one.
The big difference with Pixar is they try to set the dial to 11 on animation and rendering for nearly every release*, even when the story-telling part may be lacking.
That ends up hurting them when something doesn't perform well.
Likewise, no matter how bad or lacking the story, Disney's animation is almost never in question in regards to the era it's released.
I know there were people that took issue with the color palette of Strange World, for instance (though there was a story reason for that) but I've never heard anyone complain that the animation/rendering looked bad or cheap.
*Luca feels like it might have been the closest thing to a "budget" release I can think of from Pixar. I loved that movie but to my eye, they made creative decisions with the rendering/animation to reduce costs, particularly in the above-water scenes. I mean, tell me how many individually animated strands of hair you see in that movie. Still beautiful, still Pixar but not at the same level as the visuals of say, Toy Story 4.
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