This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
How do you follow an Oscar-winning, $1 billion (£620m) smash likeFrozen? For Disney Animation Studios, the answer was simple: aim bigger. Big Hero 6, out January 30, marks its most visually ambitious film yet. Adapted from an obscure Marvel Comics franchise, the film follows a boy called Hiro and his inflatable nurse-robot, Baymax, who unite with friends to assemble their own ragtag team of superheroes. "Each film has its own unique needs, whether it's
Frozen with snow and ice, or having to build an entire city," says Disney chief technology officer Andy Hendrickson, 49.
Big Hero 6's setting, San Fransokyo --a vibrant Tokyo/San Francisco mashup -- is vast, containing 83,000 buildings, 215,000 trees and 100,000 vehicles. "It's so visually rich," he says. "This film has three times more objects in it than our last three films
[Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen] combined. We had to design new methods to deal with all that complexity."
Chief among the new animation tools created for the film is Hyperion, Disney's new custom-built digital tool for lighting.
The renderer allowed the animators to create global illumination, whereby light bounces off and scatters through surfaces. Where light once might have been laboriously animated for a single bounce, Hyperion automatically simulated up to 20 bounces per scene, resulting in spectacularly nuanced images. "We were able to let light filter through the city, through windows, off buildings," says Hendrickson. "It gives a softness to the light you can't match in any other way. The results are pretty dramatic."
Rendering so much detail requires a huge amount of power, so Hendrickson and his team built a 55,000-core supercomputer across four locations to manage the heavy workload. Using another new piece of Disney-built software called Coda, the computer processed more than a million computation hours every night for several months to render the film. "This film is a big milestone for us," says Hendrickson. "You can watch it multiple times and still see new things."
Big Hero 6 is out on January 30
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
