"We can do 50 times more on screen than we did with Toy Story," says Tom Porter, the supervising technical director on Pixar's Monsters, Inc., being unleashed by Disney November 2. To enhance the realism of its animation and hit its target of one film a year, Pixar needed more than the raw power of 240 multiprocessor Sun workstations. The studio's secret weapon: the physics and deep-shadowing algorithms of FizT, a proprietary modeling tool making its feature debut. FizT, which took three years to develop, ensures that Sullivan's 3 million blue hairs move along with his muscles and that little Boo's red shirt drapes just so - and the program simulates them in record time. Add to that a custom-rigged laser film recorder known as PixarVision, which takes hi-res digital images and transfers them to film at rates four times faster than was previously possible. Now that's a monster production schedule.
ELECTRIC WORD
Spring Bake
In The Out Door
Wind Instruments
Photosynthesis
Mockroach
Inside Track
