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Pixar in a Box
Course: Pixar in a Box > Unit 8
Lesson 1: Geometry of dinosaur skin- Start here!
- Introduction to Patterns
- What are shading packets?
- Shading Packets
- Voronoi Partition
- Constructing a Voronoi partition
- Distributing sites randomly
- Poisson disc process
- Modeling dino skin
- Make your own dino skin 1
- Getting to know Ana
- Getting to know Beth
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Introduction to Patterns
Brief overview of what we'll cover in this lesson.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is this graphic animation?(28 votes)
- I believe you meant graphic animation. Graphic animation is a variation of stop motion consisting of the animation of photographs (in whole or in parts) and other non-drawn flat visual graphic material, such as newspaper and magazine clippings.
The type Pixar does is more derived from "cel animation", and is called "computer animation" or "CGI". It is also 3D, unlike graphic animation. See this article for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_animation(33 votes)
- So did you have to take a while to find the right look to bring out the right look and texture of a real dinosaur?(20 votes)
- Yes, when you're done settling those points and textures, you have to look at them for a while to know your dinosaur's skin has the right looking.(1 vote)
- Why don't the animators use real life objects in their animations? Can't you just take away some of the real life textures, light sources, shadows, Etc. to make a super good looking animation? Or, is that just really weird?(14 votes)
- The future is NOW!! We got 3d printers, hoverboards, and people who believe the Earth is flat! But at least we will have self-driving cars and nanotechnology. We also got drones and are getting more and more advanced by the minute.(2 votes)
- Patterns are amazing, and surprisingly ubiquitous. Look around at almost anything and you can see a pattern, not just things made by humans but stuff in nature, trees, plants, the sky, anything.(5 votes)
- What happens when the video is not worrking(3 votes)
- Do you need any artistic skill to do this? Or is it all mainly computer-generated?(3 votes)
- The computer does a lot of it, but you need some sort of artistic skill or maybe access to other people's designs to be able to tell the computer what to do.(1 vote)
- I don't get this video and I am in the 4th grade who is on the 5th grade level because I passed the 4th grade level, So I don't even get it.(3 votes)
- One reason why you aren’t getting it is the math and some of the concepts in there. But for a kid in 4th grade wanting to challenge herself levels above, you keep being curious. Maybe this may be your new motto: “Curiosity leads to learning”.(1 vote)
- White dot again in2:40(3 votes)
- how we start learning animation ?(3 votes)
- Firstly as Michell Perez said, “By watching animated movies, bro!”, and secondly, you might ask some questions in your mind, sparking curiosity, and then you research by doing the lessons on Khan Academy and finding other programming courses.(0 votes)
- Can mandelbrot sets and other fractals be used in movies?(2 votes)
Video transcript
(lazy western music) (clock beeps) - What is the holdup? - Ugh, shading artists at the salad bar they just get a little too involved. - Is it a fractal? - I think so, that puffy
shape repeats itself. Oh, maybe we should talk
about this somewhere else. - I'm Beth, I'm a shading artist. - And I'm Ana, I'm also a shading artist. This lesson is about patterns, which we use in shading all the time. - Shading is creating
the surface appearance of all the stuff you see in our films. Cars, bugs, trees, aliens, they all start out modeled
three-dimensional objects, but they don't have surface
characteristics yet. - [Ana] We create and apply the textures that make our characters and sets seem like they're made
out of something real. - [Beth] The word seem
is really important here, because we're not trying to
recreate reality exactly. - We're trying to capture
the essential qualities of a surface that make it feel believable. - [Beth] And a lot of times, that quality is actually a pattern. (playful bongo music) - When we begin creating a surface, we usually start by looking
at reference images, or things from the real world. - [Beth] We look at a
few different qualities, color, illumination, which is how the surface reacts to light, and displacement: how
bumpy or smooth it is. - Let's talk about how
we did that with Arlo. In The Good Dinosaur, Arlo was supposed to feel young and fresh. We actually used the succulent plant called Titanoplis, as a
reference for his skin. Looking closely at the plant,
we were able to deconstruct what made it feel right for Arlo. First of all, there was a series of cells that formed the main
feature of the pattern. In terms of color, these cells had one color in the cell itself, and the ring around the
cell was a darker color. The surface of the plant was shiny, but it wasn't a sharp
shine, it was a soft shine. Finally, the cells that
made up the main pattern were displaced from the surface,
so it was kind of bumpy. Once we figure out these main features, we started creating a pattern. However, to make the pattern feel organic, we needed to do something
else to it: add randomness. - Believable randomness can
be surprisingly difficult to achieve in computer graphics. Computers are great at
modeling regular patterns, but in nature, most of
the patterns you see have some variation or irregularity
within their structure, giving them a quality of
controlled randomness. - Getting that randomness
into Arlo's shading was a big challenge, but we
used some interesting techniques that we'll share with you throughout the rest of this lesson. - And you'll get to use
randomness to create and manipulate patterns of your own. - I bet after this they'll
all start looking at the world like a shading artist. - Hey, check out the bubble
pattern in this baguette. (playful accordion music)