[Spliff]

Tool Time at Pixar

I'm not an artist, but for those of you that are, you might find this article interesting. It's about a digital sketch tool that was designed at Pixar (for OS X) to accomodate Brad Bird's work habits during the making of The Incredibles.

Excerpt:

A key feature of the tool is its eraser. “This is a vector-based tool with a raster erase,” says Johnson. “You can scale an image up or down, and when you want to erase, you turn the pen over and it erases. It feels very natural. Whenever I give a demo of this tool to artists and show them that feature, they immediately say ‘I want one.’ It is super simple to remove something easily, but really hard to remove the whole drawing by mistake. You'd have to erase the whole thing. It's a big, fat, 30-pixel eraser because we found that people want a fat eraser no matter how fine their lines are. They tend to erase whole big chunks. The underlying software knows when you put each stroke down. Erasures are actually saved as strokes, so we have the entire drawing history.

Using Pixar's Review Sketch tool, an animator can draw on an image, and then play the scene with the image moving underneath the drawing. Other features of the tool include a slider for choosing the width of the anti-aliased line, ghosting, and a raster eraser. The tool's drawings are stored on Pixar's intranet, which allows for immediate accessibility.

“What makes this tool really slick is how it's integrated into our screening rooms. We have this big expensive switcher in our screening rooms — you can route this or that computer into a screening room. We made the observation early on that we could turn a computer monitor into NTSC, because what the animators were doing at their desktops was essentially video rez, and then put that into a DV converter. On the Mac, I can get a DV stream in realtime, coming in over [Apple's] FireWire. Alex Stahl in our AV group made a huge contribution when he did some magic with the switcher and routed everything that goes to the projector through this DV conversion stream. We run this tool on the Mac OS X server, which we rackmount with all the video equipment. When Brad sat in front of the Cintiq in the screening room, what showed up onscreen was the video stream that he was drawing on top of. It made the whole thing seamless.”