[Peter] From the superhuman, to the supernatural.

From dystopian futures,

to Disney features.

[Announcer] Welcome to our show of shows.

It was a very big year for action-packed,

effects-heavy movies.

And, as the race for the Oscars heats up,

here's one thing we know.

27 of the last 30 movies to win best visual effects

have something in common.

What is it?

The surprising answer lies at Pixar.

To infinity, and beyond!

[Peter] Yes, that Pixar.

[All] Ooh.

[Peter] Meet RenderMan,

and incredibly powerful software engine

that goes well beyond animation.

Up until that point, the look, the lighting,

essentially had to be done by programmers.

[Peter] Ed Catmull is co-founder of Pixar,

but he started his career at Industrial Light and Magic,

George Lucas' famous effect studio.

ILM had been trying to find ways

to blend live action sequences with visual effects,

and Catmull led the computer graphics team,

which set in motion the innovations

that would become RenderMan.

Back then, you actually had to write code

to generate effects, so the animations in 1982's Tron,

just for one example, had to be produced a frame at a time,

an incredible amount of work.

[Racer] So long, sucker.

[racer screams]

[Peter] Instead of processing an image, pixel by pixel,

ILM's technology made it possible

to render a line at a time,

and turned a task that used to take days

into a matter of hours.

And, RenderMan dressed that code-level magic up

in a graphical interface, with things like menus,

and clickable buttons.

Not unlike the way Apple demystified personal computing,

by offering an alternate to the command line.

The resulting software allowed artists

to realize their creative visions

without an extra level of insane technical know-how.

[boy shouts]

The key to figuring this all out

was something called the Reyes Algorithm.

What Reyes stands for is Renders Everything You Ever Saw.

And, we took that pretty seriously.

It's a very powerful and very flexible,

extensible rendering platform, and boy, did we use it.

[Peter] ILM launched Reyes

in 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Computer, request security procedure.

[Ed] Well, our initial efforts

were to convince people of its value.

[Peter] And it worked.

ILM built the simulation

of a planet being terraformed.

All those effects.

Flying through digital landscapes,

watching the oceans overtake mountains,

would have been unthinkable with older methods.

[John] There were a lot of things

that were striking about that.

The particle effects from the impact,

it was fire that spreads around the planet.

And then, as the surface is growing up,

those are fractal terrains that are building up,

incrementally, as the shot continues.

[Peter] With the power of its Reyes architecture,

ILM also introduced digital motion blur,

an effect that's used all the time now,

to simulate how our eyes see fast motion.

In this aerial combat sequence from Return of the Jedi,

just a year later, you can see that the motion blur

not only conveys a sense of speed,

but also helps blend the miniatures into the frame.

[speaks in an alien language]

Here goes nothing.

[Peter] In 1985, they made another big leap forward,

with the introduction of the stained glass knight,

a character that jumped off a window

and into real life in the movie Young Sherlock Holmes.

[John] I still love the close up of the knight's hands,

holding the sword, because there's a rack focus in that.

[Peter] That's the focal effect you see there,

where the focus shifts to the knight's hands to his face.

[John] And, that was rendered into it,

so that's one of those amazing capabilities

that RenderMan had from the very beginning.

[Peter] And they used the same tools a few years later,

to make this, in James Cameron's movie, The Abyss.

It was just this one little scene.

[Peter] But, that one scene of the pseudopod

pushed the very notion of what digital artists could do,

by allowing them to give an artificial object

virtually any characteristic they could dream of.

It's trying to communicate.

[Peter] And, they took it even further

in James Cameron's next movie, Terminator 2.

[Ed] He decided he would let computer graphics

help make a main character in Terminator 2,

which was that liquid man.

The revolutionary thing that we did on T2

with being able to take live-action plates

and project them onto computer graphics

and then distort them.

Being able to do that kind of thing in this engine

was very enabling for us.

Get out.

[Ed] And then, 1993, Jurassic Park came out.

[exciting orchestral music]

Yeah, the original plan on Jurassic Park was,

that was gonna be particulated, stop-motion puppets.

All of that talk went away

as soon as we saw the first test

of a rendered, computer-generated dinosaur,

and because RenderMan supported motion blur,

right out of the box, you could get that very fluid

and realistic motion that just wowed everyone.

[T-Rex cries out]

[Peter] And, once effects artists

started getting comfortable with animals and creatures,

they started experimenting with humanoid creatures,

like Gollum, from Lord of the Rings.

My love, my precious.

It was so stunning.

Here was this strange creature,

and he absolutely looked real.

When I saw that, with sort of translucent skin,

it's like, oh, that's awesome.

[Peter] That translucent skin

that made Gollum look so alive

when he emerged from the shadows in 2002's The Two Towers,

utilized a brand new technique,

something known as subsurface scattering.

They're filthy, little thieves.

Subsurface scattering is a phenomenon

that you see in materials that are partially translucent.

It has a solid surface, but light enters that,

to that surface, travels someway down into the surface,

and bounces around,

and sort of scatters through the surface.

[Peter] Without subsurface scattering,

skin looks opaque and inanimate.

Simulating what light does below the skin

gives it depth and softens the texture,

making everything just a little bit more, well, human.

This effect soon became crucial

to making CG objects feel natural.

Knoll's team used it again to create Davy Jones,

in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

[Davy shouts]

[Jack screams]

Davy Jones was making extreme use

of subsurface scattering.

He looks a little bit like a jelly bean, because of that,

but I was really very pleased with the look.

And, it's the kind of thing

that you couldn't have done as a makeup appliance,

because the scattering is so deep.

You're a cruel mind, Jack Sparrow.

[Peter] Movie after movie

drew on the power of RenderMan to realize their ambitions.

The X-Men films, 300.

There's no reason we can't be civil.

[Peter] Iron Man, and the birth of the MCU.

[Iron Man] Oh, that's my exit.

[Peter] Pixar movies,

but we'll get back to them in a second.

What's taking them so long?

Hey, these guys are professionals.

They're the best.

[Peter] And, in the Star Wars saga,

Lucasfilms' crown jewel made a comeback in the 2010s,

you could probably guess what software artists used

to recapture the practical effect glory

of the original trilogy.

It doesn't sound so bad to me.

So, in Rogue One, like all the travel of spacecraft,

and the space battle, is computer graphics,

but we were very deliberately trying

to evoke the aesthetics of the original miniatures.

[Peter] One way they did that,

using something called path tracing,

which simulates how light bounces off objects.

It's what makes the space sequences more realistic

than you might have even registered.

Here's how a laser looked in Return of the Jedi,

painted onto the frame.

But, with path tracing,

calculating the way the light bounces,

the same laser in Rogue One

casts an ambient glow onto the X-Wing fighter.

And here, path tracing doesn't just account

for the shadows of the smaller ships

appearing on the larger on below,

but it captures the light bouncing off of the larger ship

and illuminating the underside of the ships above.

You might not notice these things in the moment,

but that's the whole point,

the light is part of the reality of the frame,

not an after effect.

May the force be with you.

[Peter] And, when they wrote

Grand Moff Tarkin into the movie,

rather than recasting the late Peter Cushing,

RenderMan made it happen

using the same subsurface scattering technique

they'd used with Gollum and Davy Jones.

When has become now, Director Krennic,

the emperor will tolerate no further delay.

[Peter] While ILM and VFX houses

have been using CG to enhance live action,

Pixar has been using RenderMan

to build its own wondrous, animated worlds.

It started with their very first film, Toy Story.

And it was magic.

It was like there was magic and alchemy happening

at night, over night, on the render farm,

creating these images.

[Peter] Lee Unkrich was an editor on Toy Story.

[Rex] Whoa.

[Peter] Toy Story came out in 1995.

By then, RenderMan had already been used

to make the pseudopod and the T-1000,

but all digital animation needs to be rendered,

whether it's for a five-second explosion,

Rocket's explode!

[Peter] Or a full length scene.

And, that's why RenderMan changed the rules

for animated films.

A full length movie is a massive amount of information,

all of which needs to get rendered out.

To infinity and beyond.

In the original Toy Story,

there was a reason that we made a movie about toys,

because back then, those were easier images to create.

Things that were made out of wood, plastic, glass,

reflective, simple textures we knew how to do really well.

What was harder were more organic forms,

like grass and trees.

Just an ordinary blade of grass and a bead of dew, right?

Everything was always in the service

of the stories that we were trying to create.

It was never about,

Oh, let's make it do this cool new thing.

It was never that.

It was, instead,

We've got a movie with monsters,

and we want some of the monsters to be covered with fur.

And, we've never done fur before.

So, how are we gonna figure out how to do that,

in a way that's directable, and art directable,

so that we have control over it,

and can create exactly what we want?

Oh, that's cute.

And then, that was the case, as well,

in Finding Nemo, with the water.

Like, everything under water, and the look of the water.

These were all things that we hadn't tackled before,

and not many people had.

And so, it was fun to be ground-breaking through the years,

but at the same time, it was always in the service

of trying to make great movies, tell great stories.

A history of Pixar is a history of watershed moments,

but of course, everyone has their favorite.

Is there one moment that stands out to you

as something that maybe surprised you or moved you?

The one that actually leaps out at me,

was, we took a very major jump

from our first film, Toy Story 1.

You're in rooms,

and you've got the characters made out of plastic.

Don't let it get to you, Woody.

[stammers] What, I don't, what do you mean?

[Ed] And then, the next one was to go to organic forms,

and still holds up, it's very beautiful.

Oh, they're beautiful.

Heimlich, wagon's taking off.

[Ed] And then, the next one was,

with Ratatouille, there was a sensitivity to that.

[Ego] Not everyone can become a great artist,

but a great artist can come from anywhere.

[Ed] And, a beauty that just astounded me, at the time.

[Ego] I will be returning to Gusteau's soon,

hungry for more.

[Peter] While just about every Pixar film

used RenderMan to pioneer new techniques

and new technologies, all of that culminated

in the studio's most complex movie to date, 2017's Coco.

The music, it's not just in me, it is me.

There were very few things that we hadn't done before.

It was more a matter of scale.

Like, we were doing things at a scale

that we had never done before.

Take the moment when Miguel crosses the Marigold Bridge

into the land of the dead.

Or, that tracking shot through the train station.

Whether the lighting or the towers,

or the hundreds of distinct characters,

each sequence is so visually packed

that there's no way to catch all the detail.

But, despite their complexity,

they both manage to feel absolutely natural,

and that, more than anything,

might just be RenderMan's most enduring legacy.

Are those renders still overnight processes?

How has that changed?

Yeah, well, the cool thing now is, a lot of times,

the kinds of images that we were creating

on the original Toy Story,

we can create, almost in real time, now.

That's huge, that's huge for artists.

'Cause when you're painting a painting,

you don't pretend to make brush strokes

and then wait, you know, a day for your image to come back,

you want to be able to create, right away, in real time,

and we're getting to the point where we can do that.

[Peter] 30 years ago, RenderMan took shape

as a tool to help artists bring their imaginations to life.

By now, it surpassed those aims,

and can accomplish those results nearly on demand.

But, the most mind-blowing visual effect means nothing,

if it's not in the service of a larger goal.

As long as they're impactful,

and they do some good in the world,

then, we're doing our real job.

Are you still moved by these movies, when you see them?

Yes, in fact, that's what I'm looking for, is,

when we're going through the early versions,

at some point, something wells up.

I already know, roughly,

what the plots and the characters are,

but when it starts to get into place,

then I get emotional, or I laugh,

Okay, we're getting there.

♪ Remember me. ♪