Elio's Art Direction: Designing a Galaxy of Wonder
Pixar's procedural lighting team built an entire suite of new tools to render the interstellar Communiverse. The results are the studio's most ambitious visuals to date.
Inside Pixar's Emeryville campus, the lighting bay for Elio is unlike any room the studio has built before.
Where previous productions relied on hand-tuned light rigs for each shot, Elio's interstellar Communiverse demanded something more procedural — a system that could be art-directed at the level of mood, then resolved automatically across thousands of frames.
Lena writes about the craft and business of feature animation from Emeryville to Burbank.
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