Making bugs
The task of making a new animated film starts with an idea -- a story line. The Pixar folks focused on a straightforward rivalry among insects -- rigid animals with the simple joints that keyframe animation does best (recall the stiff-limbed toys in Toy Story). After studying real insects, they sketched full-color drawings of the "cast" members.
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Photo by Lorey Sebastian. ©Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. All rights reserved.
Wanna fly by this river bed? [524K mpg].
With keyframe animation the user specifies the viewing position at a few "key" times in the animation; then the animation program interpolates positions in-
The real plunge into the digital world began when the sketches and maquettes were converted into "wire-frame" 3-D models, using a computer-assisted drawing program or a digitizing tablet. These wire-frames can be rotated and flipped to automate the later production. Then each scene was assembled by placing the wire-frames on a digitized landscape and adding lighting. Drawing a frame's worth of pixels can take 1 to 20 hours of computer time.
After the rendered frames were checked, they were printed to film and shipped to eager theaters. Up on the big screen, the animation will ideally disappear, leaving the viewer to empathize with the ants and their buggish comrades and loathe the despicable grasshoppers.
If you can stomach some self-congratulatory hype, here's a more elaborate description of the Bug's production process, complete with Quick-Time Virtual Reality character models. Notice the wonderful commands for moving Heimlich: Slither, Crawl and Jiggle...
So how might motion capture work?
