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Practical lighting on Toy Story 4

Published: 28 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Since the adoption of Global Illumination on Monsters University and Renderman RIS on Finding Dory, Pixar has pushed closer and closer to photorealism with physically-based lighting and shading. With each show, Lighting artists have needed to create, organize, and creatively balance more and more light sources of increasing complexity. Because Pixar has also traditionally worked with a "fixed" camera exposure, the light colors and intensities chosen by the artist would also drive the overall brightness of the final image.
Toy Story 4, which takes place in both an antiques mall and a traveling carnival, was a challenge to this workflow. The large variety of light sources in the antiques mall would be difficult to group into uniform categories; complex light animation on carnival rides required light intensities driven by upstream assets; and seeing the same lights under day and night illumination meant that production-wide choices for light intensities could not be made under a single, fixed exposure. We needed assets that behaved like in the real world and just worked when placed together in a scene.
We developed a method on Toy Story 4 for tagging modeled assets with physical light properties that would automatically be converted into functioning light sources in a shot by a script called Bakelite. This pipeline gave the Lighting department more time for creative iteration with minimal setup, allowed pre-lighting visualization of shots by upstream departments, and ensured a final image that was both rich in surface detail and also accurate in HDR.

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  1. Practical lighting on Toy Story 4

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGGRAPH '19: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Talks
    July 2019
    143 pages
    ISBN:9781450363174
    DOI:10.1145/3306307
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 28 July 2019

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    1. HDR
    2. light instancing
    3. lighting
    4. procedural animation
    5. shading

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