Harish Palaniappan's

Animating 2D or 3D characters is a painful process.. very much so that Sir Walt Disney is said to have taken many years to create the Mickey Mouse films, and also those were the days of traditional animation, where every frame of a scene is painted or drawn on paper.

If you even have worked on softwares like photoshop or corel draw like a hobby to drawing or designing something, you know how much time and pain it is to even design a proper webpage.

So, after all that when you go and see a movie like "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc", or "Cars", you open your mouth and gape.

Because every single frame of the movie which plays only for 1/24th of a second (in digital filming there are 24 frames per second) , has the characters, the environment or background graphics, with color, texture.. and to add to the complexity, they have lighting and related object surface color and shadow variations.

To put it lighter, one frame of a scene in animation movies is equivalent to drawing what you see below on a computer or a sheet of paper with whatever tools you want on earth (except a copier and printer).

So, that explains how much work should be done to make a movie like what Pixar does .. and how much effort to be Pixar, because they are the best today.

Obviously for any animator their work is inspirations, and people look forward to learn from their experience. Knowing this Pixar has interestingly put-up a brief of their process of making animation films on their website. The page mentions only the core steps or milestones of the animation film making process, but that itself would overwhelm you.

Pixar - How We Do It

What I learnt New from their processes..
> The animators make the frames of a scene and have the animation as digitized sequences, but this is not the movie that gets released... what we see as a film is a video recording of the sequences played up on their computers.

> If in a scene, a character raises its hand, the animators probably create one or two steps of the action or only one or two frames of the scene and the computer generates the in-between frames that show the motion of the hand as a smooth one.. the animators of course fine tune these in-between frames manually as necessary.

This is one other major advantage digital animations have over traditional animations. The first advantage obviously being able to correct or modify the art work easily, instead of redrawing the whole thing on another paper again.

> They use server farms just like all big software enterprises do.. they use a bulk of machines (farms) to render each frame. Probably this means redrawing the background, the characters, the lighting, etc., all into a frame, or integrating every other teams work into the final output.

Pixar says, on an average each frame with such bulk of servers, takes about 6 hours to render, and some complex frames take up to 90 hours too.

Interesting bit of information they had on their website.

Related link:
Blend it... its easy to make 3D graphics yourself