Im sure all of the information I’m looking for will be out when the DVD comes out but I can’t seem to find any information online currently. What I’m looking for are little behind the scenes facts such as how long the movie took to render, how much computing power it took, how many frames, the size of the completed movie (in GB, if not TB I imagine), etc. Has anyone seen sites with this info?? I also wonder how long it would take my P4 2.66Ghz, 256MB ram desktop to render, lol. Thanks in advance for all the info!
Well, since Pixar’s partially owned by Apple, I’d be willing to bet that the work was done on Macs.
Here’s a little info on it. Good question.
I’d be willing to bet that almost all animation work is done on Macs. I don’t think the Apple ownership would have anything to do with it.
And here I thought this was going to be a request for me to start a “Ask Little Nemo” thread.
I’d be willing to bet you guys are wrong. Pixar used to use SGI workstations but have recently changed over to intel-based renderfarms running Linux.
See Pixar’s “How we do it” montage
See page 13 of the montage “the computer data is rendered” explanation,
Lucasfilm has recently done the same thing. Something like half the FX in Attack of the Clones was done in Linux. All of Lucas’s future films will be done completely in Linux. Take that M$! 
Heh. Have you checked the BBQ Pit lately? Apparently, you cause lesbianism. 
#1- Shouldn’t your location read “In Slumberland”?
#2-I haven’t read all that many strips but there seems to be an excessive amount of racism in them. Flash Gordon had Fu Manchu style Ming, and certain of Mongo’s princes seem to have been stock pulp characters such as ‘Noble Zulu Prince #3’. Popeye featured numerous characters who would be highly objectionable stereotypes if they were clearly members of certain groups. EG Make Wimpy a Jew and his quirks of being obsessed with eating and not paying for it make him the new Amos and/or Amdy. However, I’ve never been able to positively identify the ethnicity of any Popeye character. Nemo had Pickaniny Africans and Irish cops. Have I somehow managed to read just the bigotted Nemo’s? Was Nemo more bigotted than usual for it’s time?
#3- In strip number 537-G, the first panel shows Nemo riding on a long-legged, self-propelled single bed. But, the next frame clearly shows a twin bed? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that one.
#4-In the Nemo game for the NES is there a way to escape the red dungeon on level 3 without using the wizard’s key?
Re-The OP
While attempting to animate Toy Story, Pixar discovered that it was prohibitively expensive. Hower, one of their animators held PhD’s in both philosophy and quantum mechanics. He was able to generate a portal to a dimension in which the characters were living entities. Pixar merely took a crew through the gateway and filmed the action as it happened. Shrek and the rest have been filmed the same way.
Pixar’s expenses and logistical problems are not animation related at all. Rather, they must engage in a cover up, find celebrities who sound like the entities they’ve already filmed, and convince these stars to lie and take credit for work they have not done.
Thus, Pixar never CHOSE Ellen to be the voice of that fish. It was simply a happy coincidence that Ellen and the fish sound exactly alike.
Heck, No. Assuming they used a combination of
1)Maya
2)SoftImage XSI
3)Houdini
4)In-house tools
then the hardware would be Intel and the OS either Windows/Linux with Linux getting a bigger share by the month.
Well, if they used Maya, there is a Mac version available, and since OSX is unix based…
I am willing to bet that none of the animation work is done on Macs, and the only thing that would possibly be done on Macs is Photoshop/painting work.
Can’t do it. James Bennet filed an injunction.
Gimme a break; it was 1905. Have you checked out strips like Hogan’s Alley, the Katzenjammer Kids, or Krazy Kat and seen the kind of stereotypes they had?
It was a wizard. Anytime something like that happens it was a wizard.
Use the blue thing you can find in that other place.
Sad but true. I’m only one man; women realize they can never have me and no other man can compare.
Another yes to Houdini. This link’s to a job posting at Pixar, no less, and they also mention something called Slim, which turns out to be another tool for creating shaders.
Don’t forget RenderMan in its various flavors.
Look, I don’t mean to downgrade Macs. But most 3D work is done either on Win/Intel or Linux/Intel (ports of SGI-Irix legacy apps). There’s this public image built up of Macs as THE platform of choice for graphics, but really that’s more oriented towards still media or audio work as such and even in those streams I’m not sure anymore.
In any case, Maya Unlimited is not available for Maya. I would assume Pixar wants Cloth/Fur…etc although they might have in-house tools for that as well.
Anyway, a link
Hey, I own a PC myself, I just happen to know a guy with a Mac and he’s got a copy of Maya, so it certainly seemed possible to me that they might use it. I know that Lucas does all his CG work on SGI machines. Lucky bastard’s got a sweet deal worked out them. He (or rather his employees) get to play with the new machines long before they ever hit the street.
Lucas (ILM) is moving away from irix/sgi to linux/intel based machines. As an example, the webpage for ILM’s open source image file format, OpenEXR (http://www.openexr.org) offers downloads for OS X, Linux, and Win32, but not irix. An article about this transition is available at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6011.
Just as a “word of warning,” the version of Maya (and presumably XSI or Houdini) that big studios like Pixar or ILM use is very, very different from the stock versions of the software. They have numerous scripts and plugins etc.
If you mean that the software is used with a lot of customised MEL scripts(Maya) or in-house plugins, of course. But, if you’re suggesting that the core software out-of-the-box is itself somehow different, I doubt it. In other words, these plugins/scripts are added/supplemented and not replaced in the stock software.