Main content
Course: Pixar in a Box > Unit 11
Lesson 1: Modeling grass with parabolas- Start here!
- Introduction to parabolic arcs
- 1. String art
- String art construction
- 2. Midpoint formula
- Midpoint formula
- 3. Parabolic arcs
- Parabolic curve matching
- 4. Modeling grass
- Design challenge: Modeling grass
- 5. Animating grass
- Design challenge: Animating grass
- Getting to know Tony DeRose
- Hands-on activity
© 2024 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Getting to know Tony DeRose
Want to join the conversation?
- how long does it take to make such short movie by one person? (talking about a starter and comparing them to a pro)(15 votes)
- It really depends what quality you are aiming for. Pixar-quality? Even a short movie, if it had to be done by a single person at that quality, would presumably take years if not decades. And if you count things like the various characters' voices, unless you go for only a single voice (yours) or none at all, a single person can't do it at all.
But if you build a movie around your personal capabilities and don't necessarily expect infinite polish, you can probably do something pretty nice in something like a month. (It also depends on other things besides personal skills. For instance, what kind of rendering quality are you going for? And what, compared to that, is your machine capable of? - Pixar's rendering farm is huge and still takes a ton of time to render individual frames of a movie, of which you need 24 per second of movie. (Or perhaps more if you're gunning for fancy formats like 48fps movies, and twice that once more for a 3D movie)
BUT they are doing a lot of really fancy things that are incredibly complex and slow to process by a computer. If you live without those things (or do simpler versions of them), you'll find a lot saner rendering times.(29 votes)
- Khan should teach Blender!(13 votes)
- i downloaded Blender, but have no idea how to use it. I mean getting started. What shall i do ?(4 votes)
- does anyone use blender? I am planning to download one.
Thanks for the video!(4 votes)- I do. Blender is awesome when you want to get started in computer graphics and animation, and the great thing about it is that it's open source-meaning that you don't have to pay for it.(2 votes)
- Does Pixar offer internship? 0:48(4 votes)
- What software can i use to create grass and other objects using this method?(1 vote)
- Like he said blender is a good start for animators and 3D artists. I have had blender for a year (but never really used it) but I know that realistic grass can be made just look up tutorials on YouTube(5 votes)
- Yeh I really want to go to pixar? wow(2 votes)
- I really hate math, but animation, and movies in general, really fascinate me. Is there a way to create characters and work on story lines without having work with all that math?(2 votes)
- You could work as a storyboard artist or a script writer.(1 vote)
- the blender software that I just downloaded is not working, any help please?(1 vote)
- You'll have much better luck asking at a forum devoted to Blender.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?44-Technical-Support(3 votes)
- Shouldn't this video be in the beginning instead of some random place like this?(2 votes)
- It's not really teaching anything, and it would probably distract from the main point of the course were it at the beginning. Seems like it was pretty much a way for Dr DeRose to get in the rest of the things he wanted to tell students without cluttering up the main point of the lessons.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- Well as a child I grew up in the age of Apollo, the moon mission. So I always knew I wanted to go into science. First I thought I wanted to be an astronaut like everybody my age. I didn't really discover mathematics until I was in 7th grade. I was building model rockets at the time and my 7th grade science teacher showed me how to use trigonometry to calculate how high the rockets were going. And I thought that was just so cool that I could, with math, figure out how high something went without having to get a big ladder or a ruler. And then in graduate school I discovered that you could put math, science, and computers together. That was computer graphics. And I was lucky enough to be there really at the beginning of computer graphics in the early 80s. So I was hooked immediately. After graduate school I went to the University of Washington and started as a professor there, where I started a computer graphics laboratory. Stayed there for about 10 years but the computer graphics community was really small at that time and everybody knew everybody. So I really stayed in touch with a lot of people at Pixar. About 10 years after I got to Washington, that was about when "Toy Story" was being finished. And I thought, "Gee, if I'm ever gonna "try something different, this is a good time." So I did the unthinkable I left an academic position and joined this little startup called Pixar. When I got to Pixar one of the first projects I got to work on was the short film "Gerri's Game". Which was really exciting because it was a chance to take some of the technology I'd been working on at the University of Washington and really apply it in the film industry. It was really successful both creatively and technically. It won an Academy Award for Best Short Film that year. And later I won an Academy Award for the work that I did on "Gerri's Game", the technical work. The technical work I did on "Gerri's Game" is talked about in the character modelling lesson with Alonzo. It's the mathematics of sub-division. So I've done various things at different times in my almost 20 years at Pixar. For the last 10 years I've been leading the computer graphics research group here. So it's our job to get out in front of technology needs of future films. We built a new hair simulator for Merida in the film "Brave". More recently in "Inside Out" one of the researchers Kurt Fleischer developed some new technology for helping animators get even stronger performances out of their characters. Looking ahead over the next five to 10 years one thing we're working on hard in the research group is how to make all these complex calculations go in real time. That is at least 24 updates per second. Right now in some areas, including simulation, the updates can take minutes or hours per frame. Getting into computer graphics these days is so much easier then when I was a kid. In fact, when I was a kid, computer graphics didn't really exist. These days if you're interested in computer graphics there are lots of opportunities online. You can go to Blender dot org for instance, download a free software package that does animation very much like the tools that we use in-house. It's free, there are lots of great tutorials. Using Blender you can get an idea of how the artists here at Pixar work. And then using Pixar in a Box you can understand some of the mathematics that Blender requires. Well for fun for the last 10 years or so my two sons and I, in fact our whole family, have been building kind of wacky projects to take to this big event every year in the Bay area called Maker Faire. In 2010 for instance we built and eight and a half foot tall animatronic fire breathing dragon. Why not, right? In 2012 we built a flight-simulator based on the TV show "Battlestar Galactica". And just this past year we took a powered exoskeleton, kind of inspired by movies like "Elysium" and "Edge of Tomorrow." In those films the exoskeletons are props and we wondered, "Hmm, could we build one "of these things that actually really works?" So my youngest son brought together seven of his friends and we took something to the faire that really put a lot of smiles on people's faces.