Pixar History and Technology
This cluster discusses Pixar's origins as a hardware company, its pivot to animation under Steve Jobs, technological innovations like RenderMan and USD, and its influence on the animation and VFX industry alongside studios like Disney and ILM.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
Pixar - ‘How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio’
It's more likely because of Pixar's longstanding practice of keeping its core technologies openly available (Blender is rife with technologies originally developed by Pixar gurus, not the least of which is RenderMan). Disney may be a huge company but Pixar is the only part of it that has ever won an Academy Awards (it has about ten as I remember) except for a single award for Beauty and the Beast. A Pixar guru also runs both Pixar and the entire Disney Animation Studio. Jobs never had
Pixar is computer generated motion, no?
Pixar and the like can theoretically do this already, but don't, maybe due to cost reasons.
Pixar, Disney and many VFX studios like ILM are as much tech companies as they are studios. Most of their bleeding edge tech they used to make visuals quickly trickled down to mainstream PC, VR and digital camera user space.
Watch Lights & Magic on Disney+ and you will understand why the reference is in there. ILM, Pixar, WETA had huge influx on graphical swe... hell even photoshop was a sideproject of ILM at the time.
This really makes me want to work for Pixar.
The Pixar company originally sold hardware and then software, before it became all about animation. Even on the animation side it was doing adverts to bring in money. So it wasn't a charity project with the aim of creating great art, it was just an unsuccessful technology business until the Disney deal.
About: https://stevejobsarchive.com/stories/pixar-early-days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967720)
Parent comment was edited after this post, so now this reply seems out-of-context. The parent comment originally made a comparison to Pixar and Disney Animation coming up with hair and water tech first and then coming up with stories for Brave and Moana respectively to wrap around the tech.