On April 4th, Tony DeRose Ph.D. came to the Marin Science Seminar to discuss the many applications of mathematics at Pixar studios. As a high school student, it can seem like hours of abstract math each week is a strange use of time, but calculus, geometry and other advanced mathematics are used on a daily basis at Pixar to make the incredible animations we know and love.
The process of making an animated film involves many steps with fine tuning at each to create the incredible worlds we see on the screen. First, the story is drawn by hand into a “storyreel”. For each character, sketches of the character’s main facial expressions are made to understand the character’s personality. The characters and sets are then modeled from the sketches on computers. There are controls for the movement of different body parts of each character. To simulate face movement, there are over 300 controls for the face movements of each character, each for a specific part of the face. Algorithms are then applied to the scenes to simulate gravity and other movements not directly related to character movement.
