Pixar's Drawing Tool

May Kasahara writes "Millimeter has an interesting look at Pixar's Review Sketch tool, one of this company's latest pieces of proprietary software. It's cool in that it allows directors to draw on top of CG images with a Wacom Cintiq, essentially bringing elements of traditional hand-drawn animation into the 3D realm. The article discusses how the tool came about, how it was used during the production of The Incredibles, and even includes a discussion of the tool's naming."

Comments

Isn't all that new...

[tonsofpcs]

This idea isn't all that new, the only new part is their application. TVPaint on the Amiga let me do this with renders (from NewTek's Lightwave).

Re:Isn't all that new...

[pipingguy]

Did it have thoughtful design features, like turning the pen over to erase (obvious) and not allowing someone to delete the whole screen accidentally (not as obvious)?

We (now obsolete) draftsmen used to actually have electric erasers and I doubt that real illustrators ever bothered to use the other end of a pencil for erasing. The choice of grades for graphite and eraser compounds (not to mention personal style) were too great to just rely on one type of erasure. I could blather on about this, but it would bore everyone.

"Deleting a whole screen" was when a badly-maintained print machine (sometimes mis-called a blueprinter - blueprints, AKA white lines on blue background - died many years ago) ate the original. We always did have recovery techniques, though, and when the large format photocopy machines came along we were able to re-use a lot of previously-drawn details without using CAD. There were erasable vellums with printing on either side of the sheet, copy-and-paste techniques, photo-drafting and other innovative tricks.

Now, of course, such creative thinking at the document creation level is no longer required because computers have made these things so much easier to do. So much easier in fact that many managers now think that designing a refinery can be done by sophisticated software and all that is needed is a bunch of CAD jockeys.

Could this have other applications?

[jim_v2000]

Say a doctor is performing a surgery, and suddenly needs help from a a more experienced surgeon. Get him on the net, get a live video feed of hte operation going, and the more experienced doctor can draw live diagrams (or whatever he needs to)to show the other what to do/where to go.

Re:Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one community-driven program that exists now that can do what this professional program does. And I'm not talking about something that you could to hack up in a matter of days or weeks, tell me one that exists NOW.
Professional programs inspire the community to create free programs that have similar functionality - MS office->OpenOffice, Unix->Linux & BSD, Adobe Photoshop->GIMP, IE->Mozilla & Opera. That said, I expect that somewhere between a month from now and 2 years, there will be a community-driven version that has similar functionality.
Or maybe not: The market for this software is very small in comparison to the number of people who use GIMP or Linux, which means that there will be a smaller group of developers for the community-driven version that does what this does. Maybe it'll never be done, but I doubt that.

Alias Sketchbook Pro is very similar

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I read this article in mm, and i beleive CGW had an article on it as well.. from what i understand its very similar to Alias's Sketchbook pro. It is a little different in that in Alias Sketchbook Pro you first hit the capture screen button on your windows task bar and then it opens up in alias sketch pro... where you can easy draw on the screen cap and save etc.

Alias Sketchbook pro is an EXCELLENT tool. I would like to see it have the Pixar workflow added to it though, which is to simply allow you to draw anywhere on the screen and then save it as a capture, rather than hitting the capture screen and then drawing in alias sketch.

Both workflows are good actually... let the user decide how it fits with their brain.

Either way... Alias Sketchbook Pro is very similar to Pixars tool and i definatly recommend it.

http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/sketc hb ook_pro/index.shtml

Why its not the same

[acomj]

There is some tendancy to say "photoshot already does this with layers..." and to some extent its true, but why this is different.

Its not a pixel drawing tool. Its a hybrid vecto tool with erase any part of the stroke you put down capability. You erase any part you like, which is a neat solution.

quoth..
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.
end quote.

I like software solutions to specific problems, especially those that can be developed by small teams. Unix like.

It seems to be just erasing by adding "transparent strokes" which I've never seen before. It would make it harder for an application like painter to use this technique because how many layers would you remove. But for sketching it seems ideal.

out of the bag

[Doc Ruby]

Now that we're seeing a demo of "Review Sketch", we'll see reimplementations of it under open source - and won't see others, kept proprietary and secret at actual Pixar competitors. Regardless of copyright or patent, though trademark will probably keep the name "Review Sketch" safe. Often, the most valuable contribution to innovation is the proof of concept. And Hollywood tools make their techniques part of the culture in that shifting population of mercenary contractors which prizes specialization as much as complexion. We'll see whether Pixar's innovation can actually contribute to society's innovation, or whether they'll keep developers from adding their own "clean room" versions to our favorite multimedia packages.

Gromit does this in Linux

[scav]

Gromit does this and Totem can use Gromit when playing a video.