ANIMATIONWorld — February 2017
‘Piper’ and the Development of Pixar’s Presto Sculpting Brush
By now, most of the world has already met Piper, the world’s most adorable Sanderling and the star of Pixar’s Annie Award-winning short film that played in theaters ahead of the studio’s Finding Dory feature this past summer. Now, take a look at Presto, one of the in-house tools developed at Pixar in order to bring the photorealistic yet stylized sandpiper to the screen.
Produced by Marc Sondheimer and directed by Alan Barillaro, the supervising animator on Pixar features WALL•E and Brave, the six-minute short follows hungry hatchling Piper, who must overcome her fear of the water in order to eat. An allegory about the way children learn resilience — from their parents and from each other — Piper is a story about conquering one’s personal fears.
Taking more than three years to complete, the project began as a series of tests conducted to create more painterly CG animation tools that would allow artists greater flexibility during the design process.
“I was testing a sculpting tool. What I mean by that is computer tools are getting more and more visual. I want to see it go all the way. The computer is just a tool. It does nothing for you until you pick it up and start driving it artistically. To me, everything in computer technology is about giving the artist the same quickness and ability as a pencil. They pick it up and they express themselves as soon as possible. The more the technology is hidden at Pixar, we feel the more expressive the art will be,” Barillaro says of the process. “I grabbed the wise woman’s crow model from the film Brave and started shaping it into a sandpiper. I just did a little test. It was just to say as an artist, ‘That’s how quick it should be. You should be able to shape something really quickly, express yourself, throw it at an idea and not have to go to any other departments.’ That’s how artists should talk to each other visually.”
The resulting tool, which works with a Wacom tablet, was dubbed the Presto Sculpting Brush. It allows 3D artists to apply sculpting shape refinements on top of a posed or un-posed model, using brush controls familiar to any Adobe Photoshop usersuch as radius, strength, falloff and erase. Within Presto, sculpts are set up into layers, so artists can stack together multiple sculpts and mute or enhance them to see their effect. Sculpts sit in a timeline, so they can be animated and blended, and a magic silhouette brush lets users sculpt the model by redrawing regions of the silhouette in order to clean up shapes or achieve lines that the character rig doesn’t provide. (Read full story…)