TOY STORY 4
Having grown up with the Toy Story films, getting the chance to contribute to the franchise that had such a profound effect on me as a child was a dream come true. When I was initially cast on Toy Story 4, I, like everyone else, questioned why Pixar was making a fourth film - I mean the third one was such a great ending! The crew was very much aware of this sentiment throughout production, and though there were times of self-doubt, and questioning our purpose (which un-coincidentally, was a major theme in Woody’s character arch in this film), we were determined to make a film that we could all be proud of in the end. And I can now say that I’m really proud of what TS4 ended up being - a worthy addition to the Toy Story saga, that functions as an epilogue and closure to the character of Woody. I’m also incredibly proud of the visuals of TS4, which I was fortunate enough to have had a significant contribution to.
On this film, I worked closely with Bob Pauley (Production Designer), Laura Phillips (Shading Art Director), and JC Kalache (Director of Photography Lighting). From the early outset of production, our director Josh Cooley and DP JC made it clear that they envisioned a high level of realism, richness, and tangibility for the characters and worlds. I remember Josh telling us that he really wanted to capture the feeling of seeing our world from a “Toy’s-Eye View”, with all the intricate details of dust, wear, and scratches revealing the miniature world that we don’t typically engage with as humans.
Global Material Project
I was brought on early in production to help with look development and technical testing for the Antiques Mall environment. It was my job to explore the look of the shading and texturing of the Antiques Mall to meet these big picture goals for the film. The team on TS4 knew from the beginning that the antiques mall was going to be incredibly complex with thousands of unique assets, and on top of that would require incredibly intricate detail to hold up to the close-up scrutiny from a “Toy’s-Eye View”. After spending a few months doing preliminary look development, it became clear that we needed to devise a strategy in order to tackle the complexity of the Antiques Mall environment. I was tasked by my Leads and Supervisors to take on a dedicated project to plan ahead for these challenges, which ended up becoming the Global Material Project.
The Global Material Project was a much larger and complex undertaking than anything I had done up to that point in my time at Pixar. A global material, is simply put, a material or shader that’s been designed with the intention of being used over-and-over across an entire film. These materials require meticulous planning, testing, vetting, and look development to hold up to the needs and complexity of an entire animated feature film. For TS4 I designed around 200 unique materials that were then populated across all the environments for the film. These GMs helped to define the overall look of the environments, and can be seen in nearly every frame of the final film.
I also designed and implemented scripts and pipelines to make the utilization of these global materials easier for other shading artists on the sets team. One of the major pipelines I implemented was a nightly render system that would render the global materials on a diagnostic set of geometry. This provided an easy way to visually browse the catalogs of materials available which was not possible previously.
These Global Materials and pipelines went out to be used in other Pixar productions after Toy Story 4, some of which include the Pixar Spark Shorts ‘Float’, and ‘Wind’, which are now available on Disney+.
TS4 TECH TALK
Here’s a really great presentation by my colleagues Yaa-Lirng Tu and Bob Moyer on how we went about creating the Antiques Mall and the Prologue sequence for TS4. Yaa-Lirng goes over the Global Materials I created @ 4:58 in this video.
Prologue (Andy’s House)
After wrapping up the global material project, I was tasked with creating my first environment for the film. I requested to work on Andy’s house, which has an iconography I was eager to bring into the visually rich world of TS4. Shading and texturing Andy’s house involved a lot of spelunking through old file archives, and resurrecting old textures, graphics, and patterns from a digital ‘backlot’ that spans nearly 20 years.
While resurrecting the assets of Andy’s house was it’s own challenge, prologue also had the added complexity and challenge of the exterior rain sequence. For this, I partnered closely with the FX & Lighting departments to create the wet look on all of the exterior shading, in order to have the environment seamlessly integrate with the FX rain geometry.
RV and Campsite
After wrapping up all the loose ends with prologue, I was tasked with shading the RV, and the campsite area in front of the carnival. The RV asset was started off by shading artist Jack Hattori, and after he was pulled onto another project, I picked it up and took the asset to final. The RV asset was deceptively complex to manage, as it had a number of different wear variants, and appears in a wide variety of sequences and times of day.
Antiques Mall
The antiques mall was the crown jewel of our environments work on TS4. It represents the efforts of many artists and technical minds across the entire production. Because of the nature of the set, it was difficult to have ownership for individual modeling and shading artists, but we tended to tackle the environments in chunks. I had ownership over the ‘lighting stall moment’ as well as several key sections in the dummy chase sequence when Forky and Woody first enter the mall. I feel a lot of ownership and pride over the visuals of TS4, but even more so of the antiques mall. The global materials I developed early on in production were utilized on nearly ever asset in the mall by different shading artists on the team, and it was really rewarding to see the environment come to life through the talents and efforts of many modeling and shading artists with the aid of the global materiel library I had developed in preparation for tackling this intricate environment.
