So that I can force the technology into a corner and the other people to have to do it. And here's the deep, deep story reasons why it has to happen. I keep myself very dumb, probably to a halt, and I just go, I would love to see this. We do it wherever we wanted to on this film. We could basically embrace the underwater like basically 100 percent now to what we would wanna see.Īs for how the improving technology impacts storytelling, the idea that a challenge can inspire creativity, Stanton says he "weighs way too heavy on the other side" for that to be an issue. And then going from the surface above water to cut through the water and then go below, we only did it once on Nemo, when the fishing net happens. To the point that we had to like get rid of sometimes what a refraction really does 'cause it kind of starts to mirror and does weird stuff.
#Renderman water for free#
We get that for free every shot now with this sophisticated software that we have. Like there's like one shot I think in Nemo where the camera goes around the bend of glass of a fish tank in the dentist's office and you kind of see a refraction happening on Nemo. This was done by hand for every shot of the tank that you see in that film. In Finding Dory, it's all accomplished automatically.Īs for all the new technology that Finding Dory has at its disposal, director Andrew Stanton says he appreciates it more because he fought so hard with the technology on the original Finding Nemo. On Finding Nemo, creating the look of water meant a lot of work by hand. Now all of that can be created automatically in the software. The software is also able to create foam, aeration inside the water, which adds another 100 reflections and refractions - all of which was not possible before this film. Fish tanks are very complicated, and in Finding Nemo Pixar had three or four people work for six months to add in the reflections on the tank and water surface. Finding Dory has a lot of water, and the software is also able to deal with reflected and refracted light in water, which impacts the color of the water. With something more complicated like a splash, the software is able to reflect and refract light on every single drop of water. Each shot in Finding Dory has billions of individual light rays per frame, with probably ten reflections and refractions in each ray.
This allows the lighting team to spend less time trying to mimic reality and more time making creative decisions. Finding Dory is the first Pixar film to use the RenderMan RIS architecture software, which is able to create both the direct and indirect light.