First
Article:
Disney
Animation team pushes technical boundaries with Big Hero 6
New software that took two years
and 200 million computing hours to make creates the essence of "Big Hero
6."
Hiro rides Baymax, the huggable robot in "Big
Hero 6" wearing 3D-printed armor
Image: Disney
The real hero of "Big Hero 6" isn't Baymax,
the on-screen huggable robot that has charmed audiences worldwide, but the team
of artists and engineers that developed the cutting-edge technology that went
into the creation of this Disney Animation megahit.
The animated film is the first ever produced with
Hyperion, which is light-rendering software created by the Disney team. The
software took two years and 200 million computing hours to create, and no one
even knew if it would work when production began on "Big Hero 6,"
said Andy Hendrickson, CTO of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
"These films take about four years to make and we
wrote Hyperion in about two years and used it for a good year. The first year
of writing Hyperion was experiments to see if these new methods of rendering
would actually work for us and how it would be idealized and optimized,"
Hendrickson said. "We were writing it and using it at the same time.
That's not how ideally you'd want to do it. It's just like building a car while
you're driving it. It's not the best way. But the idea and the visuals it was
giving us on the screen were so awesome and compelling we were like, 'we've got
to make this happen.'"
Hyperion is what gives "Big Hero 6" its
beautiful cinematic imagery and depth. Until Hyperion was developed, Disney was
never before able to use light in such a way. The light is what gives Baymax a
transparent glow and allows light to bounce around inside of him, explained Don
Hall, who directed the film with Chris Williams. The duo had done tests to see
how audiences would react to a Baymax with a more skeletal structure visible
inside him, and they found he lost a lot of his character and appeal. He needed
to appear soft and glowing.
Light-rendering software gives Baymax a transparent
glow.
Image: Disney
"The look I wanted for the movie from the
beginning was to be very cinematic. This felt like a good opportunity to push
camerawork, to push lighting to cinematic realms and as much as we could to
approximate a live action camera while still maintaining our caricature,"
Hall said.
"We made this artistic stake in the ground: Our
details will be very rich and our characters will be very simple. Luckily they
had just finished Hyperion but we'd never tested it out. Everybody was very
keen to give it a shot but we really didn't know if it was going to hold up to
the rigors of our production schedule. This was a hard movie on all fronts. Not
only did it perform but it performed beautifully," Hall said.
But to create a movie without knowing for sure if the
software would work "was awe inspiring and terrifying at the same
time," Hall said.
Teamwork was an essential component
Williams said, "Animation is by far the most
collaborative art form there is. No one person can explain the entire process.
So we all really rely on each other. We can focus on the creative side but we
don't know much about the technical side and how it works."
Hall said, "We're like NASA. We're like the
janitors. These guys are so smart. It reminds me of 'Apollo 13' where they're
telling all the guys to duct tape the vents."
Both Hall and Williams deferred to CTO Hendrickson to
explain the technical details of how Hyperion works.
Hendrickson said, "Hyperion models in the
computer what rays of light do in the real world. As rays of light travel
around inside the room you're in, they interact with objects and we describe
accurately the interface that happens with those objects and the rays. It bounces
off the object when it hits it. If it hits a diffused surface it breaks the
light into hundreds, if not thousands, of lower energy rays. This bouncing goes
on and on and on. Hyperion does a really good job of organizing that, the ray
casting, the bouncing, over and over. It does a good job of organizing all
those actions into structures that are easy for a computer to understand. We
make efficient use of caches and memory. When we do that we find we can get a
lot more computation out of the computer."
It took 200 million computing hours to create Hyperion
because they were simulating the physics of light to illuminate each scene.
"That simulation is pretty CPU intensive, as you can imagine. In each
scene there are 10 billion rays of light bouncing around carrying light energy
around the scenes and interacting with objects in the scene and splitting and
turning into more rays of lights. That gives you kind of a softness and a depth
to the shadows and the kind of lifelike highlights in the scenes you don't
generally see in computer generated imagery. We're very excited about that and
the proof is in the visual," Hendrickson said.
As the team experimented, they kept a Plan B on hand,
which was to use the same RenderMan software from Pixar that was previously
used on "Frozen" if Hyperion didn't pan out.
"For a while we were on this idea of dual paths -
one like 'Frozen,' one like this - but after a while we abandoned the old style
and eventually everybody threw their hands in and said, 'This is how we're going
to do it. The visuals are going to be so good that we've got to make it
happen.' At the time it was kind of scary. It's about taking chances for us. We
like to put the maximum amount of innovation that we can on the screen that's
humanly possible. That's in story, the look and the technology we use to build
these worlds. All of that is considered equal innovation," Hendrickson
said.
There was an immense need for processing power to
produce the film. Three Disney rendering farms in Los Angeles and one in San
Francisco were connected to create a supercomputer of nearly 4,600 computers
running 55,000 cores. In comparison, "Frozen" used 26,000 cores.
Coda, which is an automated management system, guided the information being
processed from the four rendering farms.
"We do the projections by rendering a couple
scenes, turning a couple of the virtual worlds into pictures, that's what we
call rendering. Looking at the projections we needed this extremely large
machine to do these calculations. Given the time and complexity, we needed a
55,000 core machine," Hendrickson explained.
"The energy and the cooling it takes to run such
a machine doesn't exist at any one Disney site. I had to split the machine
across four sites and knit it all back together into one big machine and that
took quite a bit of engineering to get it all to run," he said.
Hyperion allowed the filmmakers to capture the busy
look of the mythical San Fransokyo.
Image: Disney
By having a supercomputer process the images, it means
that the artists can see their work the very next morning. "For the
artist, they submit their work to be processed and they come in the next
morning and see all the images. When we talk about the artists' submissions,
they're submitting all their work to be done which oftentimes includes all the
shots of all the scenes. We processed around 400,000 jobs a night. Day in and
day out, seven days a week. The heavy processing was all processed in 4 or 5
months," Hendrickson said.
Technology in real life
But is the technology seen in the film possible in
real life? Does microbot robotic swarm technology, for instance, exist in
today's world or just onscreen? Hendrickson said this is a frequent question
among those who have seen the film, where up to 20 million microbots swarm in
tandem and flow over each other in circuit-like waves to create structures and
shapes.
Microbot robotic swarm technology is featured in
"Big Hero 6."
Image: Disney
"Microbot robotic swarm technology - what the
microbots do now [onscreen] is currently not possible but then again, there's a
lot of technology in movies that's currently not possible but then becomes
possible. We like to think we give some inspiration. But then, microbots and
swarmbots are in development now. Self-assembling robot arrays are something we
definitely kept our eye on and ear to the ground. Hopefully we've set a new bar
for how to make robots appealing. Just [seeing] functioning exoskeletons is not
comforting. Baymax was taking the idea of the vinyl-skinned robot forward. It's
an active research idea," Hendrickson said.
Among those at Disney Animation, technology is
essential. "Technology is clearly not and hasn't been a sidelight. It is
part of our lives and so is moving that forward and imagining what the future
of technology can be. When I was a kid, flying cars and computers that did our
homework was what the world was going to be and that world still hasn't come
true. I think it's great that we allow ourselves to be kids and imagine what
the technology could be and maybe that technology will come true,"
Hendrickson said.
One area of technology seen in the film was 3D
printing, which obviously exists in real life, but not at the extreme level
used when armor is created for Baymax. "3D printing - that's a future
active topic. You'd love it to be the speed and quality and fidelity and
durability that it is in 'Big Hero 6' and it will get there some day. Imagine
some day kids can come home from school and dream it up and put it into a 3D
CAD system and make it come true," he said.
Another technology seen in the film is mind control
over robotics. Hendrickson said it "is an active research field and it's
starting to yield some fruit. In the movie it's very fluid, in the real world
it's not so fluid. Hopefully in the future humans will be able to interact with
machines and be able to transfer their thoughts to machines. It allows the
flexibility to control by using brainwaves to control the microbots." In
the future, this could work when someone simply thinks about how they want to
open their mail, and the robot immediately opens your email and reads it to
you, he said.
"The other thing about 'Big Hero 6' that I think
is fantastic is it's a world where technology is not evil. It's just there.
People make it, they use it, the kids harness technology, so technology is
something we use and something we use to make ourselves better rather than
technology used as some sort of evil overlord. I like the positive technology
message."
And the result of combining the positive message with
groundbreaking light-rendering software resulted in "Big Hero 6," a
film that has won over audiences worldwide since its November 7 release and has
already generated $190 million in worldwide box office ticket sales.
Hendrickson
said, "That's what audiences like to go see. They want to see something
fresh and new and something that makes your eyeballs go wow.”
Second Article:
Disney's 'Big Hero 6': a movie for all ages
There are a couple of primary themes in "Big Hero 6," Disney's
latest CGI kids' adventure movie, but it has a lot going on besides that.
There's action, adventure, a wonderfully diverse set of characters, and a
handful of lessons kids and parents can take away with them to talk about
later. Saying that a movie is for all ages is a little trite, but this one
really is. Kids too young to deal with some cartoonish action and the idea of
people dying are about the only ones who should sit this out.
"Big Hero 6" focuses on young Hiro (Ryan Potter), a child
prodigy with robotics who is failing to follow in his older brother Tadashi's
(Daniel Henney) footsteps. He's unmotivated, disinterested in going to college,
and so on -- until Tadashi brings him along on an errand to the lab he shares
with a group of fellow science students (plus the group's equivalent of Shaggy
-- Fred, voiced by T.J. Miller) at the nearby university. They all work on
wildly different projects, and before long Hiro has been convinced to take a
shot at getting into the school.
Things don't go as well as Hiro and the audience hope, of course, and
soon Hiro is recruiting his brother's medi-bot to help him investigate a crime.
Eventually everyone in Tadashi's lab gets recruited, each with their own snazzy
outfits and cool tools.
It's exciting to see a crew
of robotics geeks on the screen who are not only unabashedly excited about
their work but completely oblivious to the gender and race differences among
them. Two of the six members are women, one's a robot, and more than half the
humans are people of color - and it's just not mentioned. One of the women is
stereotypically femme, with long blonde hair and lots of pink, but her
inventions are just as useful and cool as those of the other gal, who's short
and pretty butch. It's a wonderful change from the CGI films of recent years
where all the women look like the same model with a few tweaks while the men
come in all sizes and shapes. "Big Hero 6" is teeming with people,
and they all look different.
The animation is a fabulous blend of the cartoonish and the
computer-based, just futuristic enough to make the high tech believable, but
with enough of the familiar to keep things a bit grounded. The voice acting is
solid, the writing is good, the composition of shots and scenes adds to both
the humor and the excitement without making things chaotic or unclear. Big
Hollywood action movies could stand a lesson or three from "Big Hero
6."
There's a lot to love here, including a sweet short animated film
preceding the movie, about a dog who loves people-food. If you don't like
movies with comic-book-ish or cartoonish feels, steer clear. Otherwise, if you
have any interest at all in a fun movie about young adults and kids teaming up
to defend their beloved city, go see "Big Hero 6."
Verb-ing as verb:
1. The first year
of writing Hyperion was experiments to see if these new methods of rendering
would actually work for us and how it would be idealized and optimized,"
2. We were writing
it and using it at the same time.
3. It's just like
building a car while you're driving it.
4. Everybody was
very keen to give it a shot but we really didn't know if it was going to hold
up to the rigors of our production schedule.
5. These guys are
so smart. It reminds me of 'Apollo 13' where they're telling all the guys to
duct tape the vents
Verb-ing as an adjective:
1. He needed to
appear soft and glowing.
2. But to create a movie without knowing for sure if the software would
work "was awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time," Hall said.
3. Hopefully we've set a new bar for how to make robots appealing
4. It's exciting to see a crew of robotics geeks on the screen who are not
only unabashedly excited about their work but completely oblivious to the
gender and race differences among them.
5. "Big Hero 6" is teeming with people, and they all look
different.
Verb-ing as a noun:
1. But to create a
movie without knowing for sure if the software would work "was awe
inspiring and terrifying at the same time," Hall said.
2. One area of
technology seen in the film was 3D printing
3. It allows the
flexibility to control by using brainwaves to control the microbots
4. Kids too young
to deal with some cartoonish action and the idea of people dying are about the
only ones who should sit this out.
5. Saying that a
movie is for all ages is a little trite, but this one really is.
RITA APRILIANI HARSOYO
16611286
4SA04
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