I watched several youtube tutorials about shaders in blender. In the youtube videos they mostly show that you can recreaate the pixar shader style by painting a simple texture. For instance, usually they demonstrate the method on a female character adding strong blush red on the cheeks and making the skin very very pink, the eyes will be huge and the head large.
most of the style is achieved with modeling, and the textures end up being very simple to recreate. Some people also use SSS settings, even if not really necessary.
Is that it? Is there someone who made sort of a shader or something, a node group magic trickery that achieves stylized results in cycles?
Most of the Pixar look is lighting, and also Pixar uses their own rendering engine that is very different from Cycles. If you want a 1:1 Pixar look, start by using Renderman
you may be spoton. its all abuot light… infact I took a look at the pixar shading and looks ugly in many instances, especially if not on motion… but I do think there has to be a trickery somewhere, like some secret sauce… or is it reall just skilled application of lights?
lighting, RenderMan, and thousands of people working on each shot. The man-hours component is the one thing people really don’t take into account when trying to replicate a Pixar look- each frame of a Pixar movie is thousands of man-hours
The Principled BSDF that combines multiple layers into a single easy to use node. It is based on the Disney principled model also known as the “PBR” shader, making it compatible with other software such as Pixar’s Renderman® and Unreal Engine®. Image textures painted or baked from software like Substance Painter® may be directly linked to the corresponding parameters in this shader.
Note:
The emphasis on compatibility with other software means that it interprets certain input parameters differently from older Blender nodes.
At least… it’s them same idea behind the curtain… things do change while we are reading this…
(And i don’t think those videos show the pixar shader style… more likely the disney style in general…)
My assumption is that it would take less time or equivalent time.
Less time I think because realism can follow realism rules. And then the pixar effort would be directed towards achieving cinema level or more, grabbing even more from normal movies than they do now, which would be easier not harder due to an established language of cinema and a huge amount of info they can already be inspired by.
Equal time would be if I am wrong and instead they would simply put as much effort as they currently do.
I hear lots of people nowadays do lighting relying only exclusively on global illumination and an HDRI, and this suffices for most usecases that cover “realism”… believability, how else you want to call it. Im not an expert in realism beliebability.
In any case it does look complicated, being “realistic” or “believable” however you want to call it. If I had to do realism, in that case I would focus all my energies to understand rules of realism and pay some premium to rendering engines that appear to do better in this regard.
But I think disney understands realism as “believable”, for instance I have read the disney book called “the illusion of life” where they focus alot on realism. What they mean by “realism” is something like “a physically accurate movement”… but pay attention, doesnt means a dog will walk like a real dog. No, it will mean that maybe a dog will have a belly fat that behaves like jello, but it is “realistic” and “believable”, the jelly surely moves like that… its realistic when they do art studies nd they draw the sugar bag floating and dancing to study the movement that will be the torso of goofy character…
All based on realism, but understood not as “lets do just rando standard boring humans and rando standard stuff that exists in real life”, they use it to make it an illusion of somethign that can be real.
I think that when they were done someone said “OK. For now on… All humans will look like cartoons” . (Maybe remove them from the 3D content and hand draw them? )
I don’t think it is neccessary to use Renderman in order to get the same look. As Joseph said its all about the lighting (and general art direction.)
A little bit offtopic, but:
Uncanny valley was very short lived. IMO it was combination of immature rendering tech and not very competent character artists/animators (Just because someone works for big animation studio doesn’t mean they are competent).
I remember someone made one cartoony animated movie with human characters of more realistic proportions, and people disliked it, so everyone started to use it as an example of uncanny valley problem. But that didn’t mean we haven’t crossed the valley yet. Already at that time, it was possible to make renders far more realistic, so it was possible to get to the other end of the valley.
It was really frustrating to see people constantly repeat that animated characters have to be stylized, otherwise they end up in uncanny valley. I mean look at what Blur studio was doing almost 9 years ago:
I could easily watch entire feature length movie like that without feeling like it’s bad experience because something looks uncanny.
So why are the face expressions are then mostly captured from real actors… ?? Because it’s easier to make this catoonish grimaces we all know… even with popping out eyes or tongues to the floor…
Even if not captured directly the visual of the voice actors are the reference for the animators…
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