Big Hero 6 | November 7, 2014 | Now available on home video

[Melvin Frohike]

Guess I couldn't tell. As you said, it's part of the backgrounds, so perhaps for me, it didn't stand out as much.

Lighting affects everything, including how objects interact with one another through light. Before global illumination, which simulates light bouncing off of multiple objects, everything (including shadows) had to be painstakingly lit manually just to look anywhere close to natural. Getting the rendering software to do this for real instead of trying to approximate it by hand can theoretically result in even more natural-looking, believable lighting, but it is very computationally expensive, so compromises traditionally have to be made anyway (e.g. limiting the number of bounces, using simplified and therefore less realistic simulation algorithms).

 

Thanks for the insight though. In your opinion then, which films have looked good? Or is Big Hero Six now on the top?

"Looked good" is a matter of design and subjective opinion, but as far as rendering and lighting go, Big Hero 6 is at the top.

 

I know not every movie coming out advances tech. Pixar supposedly used to with each film. Do you know a list? I know Tangled they did something for hair.

There is virtually always some kinds of custom software (often a simulation) that have to be developed, so innovations are always being made, although they are not always major ones. Tangled needed special software to make Rapunzel's 70-foot hair manageable, and Frozen used custom software on top of that to make the characters' hair easier to style. And of course there is the innovative software that WDAS developed to simulate snow (the most realistic simulation thus far) in Frozen. Hyperion, however, is a major development that advances the state of the art in global illumination and rendering.

 

I forgot that Monsters University had a new lighting system too, so I'd say that's the only other one on par with BH6.

Yes, global illumination has been added to RenderMan (a major development in itself), and the difference it makes is significant. Sony Imageworks had this feature first (since their proprietary rendering software is based on ray tracing, I guess it was more readily implemented), and they've been using it for several years now, but its effectiveness is limited by it being so computationally expensive (their rendering software has some fundamental advantages and disadvantages based on how it operates).

Hyperion, however, uses new methods that are more computationally efficient, and when used on what is almost certainly the world's most powerful render farm (WDAS' distributed supercomputer system), it can do a far more complete job of global illumination than anything else out there currently. In some scenes the only light sources that are defined are completely outside of the room as well as indirect, but the scenes are still naturally and believably lit. If you tried to do this with any other system, you probably couldn't see much of the inside of the room; you'd have to add multiple virtual light sources inside of the room to light it, and you'd have to be real careful about it, too (of course, you could still do this for a certain desired "theatrical" effect if you wanted to, as is sometimes done with live-action movies).

Edited November 21, 2014 by Melvin Frohike

[phantom]

With all these awesome technologies being invented for every animated movies and for innovation, still adults keep on saying that these are for kids only and sometimes girls. But big boys and grannies shouldn't dare watch those unless they have kids with them. 

 

How about if they try to produce Attack on Titans on CGI medium and release it worldwide, is it still for kids only?

Edited November 21, 2014 by phantom

[BK007]

Lighting affects everything, including how objects interact with one another through light. Before global illumination, which simulates light bouncing off of multiple objects, everything (including shadows) had to be painstakingly lit manually just to look anywhere close to natural. Getting the rendering software to do this for real instead of trying to approximate it by hand can theoretically result in even more natural-looking, believable lighting, but it is very computationally expensive, so compromises traditionally have to be made anyway (e.g. limiting the number of bounces, using simplified and therefore less realistic simulation algorithms).

 

"Looked good" is a matter of design and subjective opinion, but as far as rendering and lighting go, Big Hero 6 is at the top.

 

There is virtually always some kinds of custom software (often a simulation) that have to be developed, so innovations are always being made, although they are not always major ones. Tangled needed special software to make Rapunzel's 70-foot hair manageable, and Frozen used custom software on top of that to make the characters' hair easier to style. And of course there is the innovative software that WDAS developed to simulate snow (the most realistic simulation thus far) in Frozen. Hyperion, however, is a major development that advances the state of the art in global illumination and rendering.

 

Yes, global illumination has been added to RenderMan (a major development in itself), and the difference it makes is significant. Sony Imageworks had this feature first (since their proprietary rendering software is based on ray tracing, I guess it was more readily implemented), and they've been using it for several years now, but its effectiveness is limited by it being so computationally expensive (their rendering software has some fundamental advantages and disadvantages based on how it operates).

Hyperion, however, uses new methods that are more computationally efficient, and when used on what is almost certainly the world's most powerful render farm (WDAS' distributed supercomputer system), it can do a far more complete job of global illumination than anything else out there currently. In some scenes the only light sources that are defined are completely outside of the room as well as indirect, but the scenes are still naturally and believably lit. If you tried to do this with any other system, you probably couldn't see much of the inside of the room; you'd have to add multiple virtual light sources inside of the room to light it, and you'd have to be real careful about it, too (of course, you could still do this for a certain desired "theatrical" effect if you wanted to, as is sometimes done with live-action movies).

 

Two questions, given that Big Hero Six's advancements are not really exclusive for it, as opposed to Tangled's hair and Frozen's snow, why haven't Disney or any other studio done this sooner?

 

Second, it's expensive and everything, but what about live action movies like Transformers and all the other CGI fests out there? Do they look better than animation? After all there aren't Ninja Turtles and aliens and all running around being shot, so the light? What about Avatar? 

[Sal]

Two questions, given that Big Hero Six's advancements are not really exclusive for it, as opposed to Tangled's hair and Frozen's snow, why haven't Disney or any other studio done this sooner?

 

Second, it's expensive and everything, but what about live action movies like Transformers and all the other CGI fests out there? Do they look better than animation? After all there aren't Ninja Turtles and aliens and all running around being shot, so the light? What about Avatar? 

 

They've probably had this in the works for a while.  Don't forget how long it takes to make an animated movie.  One of my friends works in software development and I can tell you that 1) It takes a while just to get something going and 2) production can take a long - VERY LONG - time and be very expensive.  Given that WDA was still just coming out of a slump when most of these projects likely got greenlighted, it's not a surprise they didn't do this before.

 

As to why other studios didn't do it... simple.  Software production takes money.  Most studios aren't going to shell that out for their animated feature section.  Can you seriously imagine Dreamworks or Blue Sky having the money to work on such an extensive piece of software... much less two?  I think we may tend to forget that animation is still largely considered a niche thing and while you get the occasional breakout that makes a ton of money, on average animated features cost more and make less than live action blockbusters. Most companies probably won't want to invest that much time and money if it's not a sure thing.

 

Live action movies are a completely different beast, really.  A lot of them don't rely on the CGI as much... and, frankly, a lot of them don't do a very good job when they do have CG.  Also I point out that stuff like Transformers is actually easier to CG because the way lighting falls on metal is easier to fake than the way it reacts to 'soft' surfaces.  Using CGI for hair or fur or even subtle skin tones is a hell of a lot harder than even a really detailed robot.

 

Not to say that CGI in live action movies isn't good or that it's not getting better.  Look at the CGI on Gollum which was pretty groundbreaking at the time LotR came out... but looking at it now, you can still tell it's CG.  Even Avatar which is visually lush and pretty can still be a bit obvious at some points when you have both real actors and CG in the same shot.  And yes, part of that is the light.  They can approximate, but a lot of the time the lighting on CG characters can't quite match the surroundings or non-CG characters on the screen.  The problem is that light on CG characters tends to have to be simplified.  On metal characters, like in Transformers, it's not as noticeable because our eyes are used to the hard fall of light on a metallic surface.  Skin and hair conduct and diffuse light in different ways that are harder to mimic.

 

For a good example of the subtle differences in lighting in BH6... just look at Baymax.  The lighting on his body is very diffuse compared to the harder objects around him.  You can even see points where certain lights hit him and then the light is actually reflected inside him to give his body more of a translucent look to it.  It's not always there (in dimmer or less direct light his body is seen as more opaque) but when it is, it's a clear example of the advances they've made in lighting with this software.  Not only do things reflect light as they do in real life, they also reflect colour, which is one thing that most CGI objects don't do very well.

[Melvin Frohike]

Two questions, given that Big Hero Six's advancements are not really exclusive for it, as opposed to Tangled's hair and Frozen's snow, why haven't Disney or any other studio done this sooner?

If you're still talking about global illumination (automatic, realistic simulation of reflected light), not only is it non-trivial to implement in software, before recently there had never been enough computing power to do it justice anyway in animated features (pragmatically speaking). CGI has always relied on a variety of shortcuts, cheats, and workarounds due to this limitation, and one of them has traditionally been manually (and very skillfully) lighting scenes (there are whole teams devoted to this for major productions).

As for exclusivity, the idea is general but each of these studios has their own implementation, which are all very likely quite different, even though their goals are the same. Many of the production studios have their own proprietary rendering software, and PDI and Sony Imageworks, for example, have been using global illumination since about 2010. Pixar added it to their RenderMan renderer a bit later (although they've been experimenting with it for many years), and one reason they didn't exactly rush into it is that in all of these cases, even today, there are significant limitations regarding scene complexity. If limited global illumination can only give you so much and then potentially places limits on determining how a scene will look, then you might as well do it the old-fashioned way.

Now, WDAS had always relied on a variety of commercial renderers, including Pixar's RenderMan, to do their CGI work (obviously they started out with hand-drawn animation, so they initially weren't as pioneering in CGI as some of these other studios), but being who they are, they wanted to come up with their own advanced renderer to overcome certain limitations they've always had. Hyperion can, with its newly developed, far more efficient lighting algorithms, handle all of the incredibly complex scenes in Big Hero 6 with a very full global illumination effect. It was designed from the ground up to do this, and other renderers, as far as I'm aware, can't handle such scenes (not without big compromises or going back to traditional lighting techniques). That's my understanding, anyway, and indeed the lighting in this movie is exceptional. If the former were not the case, then WDAS would have used RenderMan and other renderers that have global illumination implemented, but obviously they couldn't get the job done.

 

Second, it's expensive and everything, but what about live action movies like Transformers and all the other CGI fests out there? Do they look better than animation?

I don't know what you mean by "better." If you mean more realistic in general, the CGI in those movies strives to look as realistic as it can, while the goals are often different for animated features. The goal of Hyperion is to realize natural CGI lighting as fully as possible. Maybe this will answer your question: whatever can be done with CGI in live-action movies could be done even more realistically using Hyperion (if that is the goal). This is not necessarily true with other global illumination implementations because some scenes may be too complex for them.

 

After all there aren't Ninja Turtles and aliens and all running around being shot, so the light? What about Avatar?

They could all be lit the traditional way--manually placing virtual light sources to simulate natural lighting. Global illumination would actually be of more limited use in that it only takes into account the CGI elements, so any reflections off live-action objects (particularly for the shaded CGI areas) will still need to be lit manually. In an all-CGI environment, however, you can light the scene pretty much like you would a live-action shot, and get more natural lighting automatically.

Edited December 7, 2014 by Melvin Frohike

[Melvin Frohike]

Can you seriously imagine Dreamworks or Blue Sky having the money to work on such an extensive piece of software... much less two?

I'd use different examples because PDI (Pacific Data Images, which is now part of DWA) and Blue Sky are both early pioneers of CGI--they actually came before Pixar, albeit probably not before Ed Catmull's groundbreaking work in the field. They both have their own proprietary rendering software packages that were originally developed when they were producing more software than animation (Pixar did this, too, and even produced specialized computers for CGI for a time). Accordingly, they are strong in terms of developing software, although as you said there are budgetary limitations, especially for Blue Sky. DWA has budgets that approach the level of WDAS, though, so they could do quite a bit when they feel they have a need for it (although their budgets will likely be slashed in the near future).

Although WDAS wasn't a pioneer in CGI back when that field got started (might have been if Walt had hung around a few more years), they have always been by culture and nature rather forward-thinking and ambitious (except when management has gotten in the way). Along with the live-action Disney studio, they pioneered the use of CGI in movies (Blue Sky worked with Disney on the CGI in Tron and Pixar supported WDAS on the CGI elements in their hand-drawn animated features, with WDAS doing nearly all of the actual work), and since they've gotten their mojo back, they decided to do 70-foot long hair in Tangled and realistic snow in Frozen, for example. The reason Blue Sky didn't do the latter in their Ice Age movies might have been the budget or maybe they didn't think it was necessary. The simple particle system they used works OK if you're not paying much attention, but WDAS decided to be more ambitious, enlisting the help of researchers at UCLA to create "Matterhorn" (get it?), their custom snow simulation. WDAS now has teams of researchers and developers around the world working with them on advancing the state of the art, including a team in Switzerland that helped with parts of Hyperion (not global illumination, which came out of WDAS proper, but Hyperion is a full renderer so a lot of other work needed to be done), and what is currently the most powerful render farm in the business (more than twice as many cores as Pixar's, although the latter might have upgraded by now).

Here are a few relevant links that may be of interest:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/disneys-new-production-renderer-hyperion-yes-disney/

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/

http://electronicdesign.com/blog/disney-supercomputer-renders-big-hero-6

 

I think we may tend to forget that animation is still largely considered a niche thing and while you get the occasional breakout that makes a ton of money, on average animated features cost more and make less than live action blockbusters. Most companies probably won't want to invest that much time and money if it's not a sure thing.

I think that major animated features have been known to be more reliable hits, even though they've had a smaller upside--less likely to become mega-blockbusters, but also less likely to flop. This is probably why this industry is still growing--movie studios are definitely risk-averse businesses. Frozen and DWA's recent track record have probably eroded both ends of that idea somewhat, but studios still consider these movies relatively low-risk for their cost (and they sell merchandise, but Disney is really the only one that makes such a HUGE amount from this). On the other hand, to the extent that they are still viewed as movies primarily intended for children, there may be a general reluctance to invest in technological advancements. Fortunately Disney doesn't see things this way, which is one reason WDAS and Pixar keep on innovating (not that the other studios are standing still in this regard--they still do their best to impress whenever they can).

EDIT: Note that it wasn't technically "Blue Sky Studios" that worked on Tron, but the guys that started this studio did and it inherited a lot from its predecessor--that's basically what I recalled above. In analogy, a bunch of years ago I technically worked for several different software development companies over the span of two years, but I worked with the same people on the same software that whole time, so what's the difference, right?

Edited November 22, 2014 by Melvin Frohike

[DAJK]

So where is this headed Box Office wise? Its legs are fine, but I don't see them carrying the film much past 215M. Right now it's only (14?) million ahead of Ralph, so that will at least put it on course for 200M+

Did this release close enough to Christmas to get those holiday legs? I will curious to see how it holds against MJ, and Thanksgiving against Penguins.

[Captain Craig]

So, it's likely to pass TASM2, making only TMNT the only true contender to not beat it domestically.

(SinCity2 was uber niche, not a contender)

[AJG]

So, it's likely to pass TASM2, making only TMNT the only true contender to not beat it domestically.

(SinCity2 was uber niche, not a contender)

Yep folks. The Guardians of the galaxy and Big Hero 6 are making more money than SPIDERMAN.

Disney could put out Howard the Duck and make more money.

[AJG]

So I come downstairs and my brother and daughter are watching this on the TV, not giving a fuck. She likes it but not as much as Frozen. Goddamn that UK date is far off.

[portgas]

Big Hero 6 continued to hold strong on its third weekend, earning $20.09 million, or down just 41% from last weekend’s $34.6m gross, and crossing $120m domestic. The animated superhero adventure now has a 17-day total of $135,7m. That’s still the biggest “end of weekend three of wide release” total for a non-Pixar Disney cartoon outside of Frozen ($164m) and The Lion King ($143m) and it’s still outpacing Wreck It Ralph ($18.5m third weekend) and Tangled ($14.3m third weekend).

 

Forbes

[Melvin Frohike]

So where is this headed Box Office wise? Its legs are fine, but I don't see them carrying the film much past 215M.

Yes, they're good legs, and the movie is doing fine, but honestly I was expecting (or at least hoping for) better. There is actually still some time for its legs to show improvement, as Frozen's, for example, took a week longer than this to look like anything out of the ordinary, but it has to come pretty soon at this point if it will come at all (not that late legs aren't possible, but a really good run would still be less likely).

 

Did this release close enough to Christmas to get those holiday legs? I will curious to see how it holds against MJ, and Thanksgiving against Penguins.

Right now it's a waiting game, which is probably why there hasn't been much discussion in this thread lately. I hope you enjoyed the technical stuff, though--it's certainly in the spirit of the movie itself.

The movie should get a big boost from Thanksgiving weekend. Wreck-It Ralph only dropped 10.8% from the previous weekend in 2012, albeit it only had Rise of the Guardians as direct competition, while Big Hero 6 will be going up against Penguins of Madagascar. Regardless of holidays or competition, however, I want see whether WOM will give its legs a significant boost. I don't know about everybody else, but from what I've seen personally and heard about from others, the WOM on this should be very strong. For some reason this doesn't necessarily always translate to strong legs, though--it's hard to predict this, so all we can do is wait and see. If its legs don't improve or worse, they falter, then we could always blame the audience for being reluctant to support an Asian protagonist.

[TServo2049]

Every time I see this movie, it has excellent audience reaction. Always huge laughter at the same points (Baymax deflating, fist bump, etc.), always applause at the end.

Is it having better WOM/legs in places like the San Francisco Bay Area? Yes, San Fransokyo connection, but I believe certain films have played better here than in the domestic market as a whole? (Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim, Godzilla, Interstellar?)

Edited November 23, 2014 by TServo2049

[zackzack]

BH6 is a pretty good animation but I don't like the anime styling and the design of the characters

What's with the crazy hair all over the place..

[AJG]

BH6 is a pretty good animation but I don't like the anime styling and the design of the characters

What's with the crazy hair all over the place..

Anime styling?

The whole thing just looked like a colourful American cartoon. Nothing really stood out, just looked kinda generic.

Edited November 24, 2014 by AJG

[Spidey Freak]

Yep folks. The Guardians of the galaxy and Big Hero 6 are making more money than SPIDERMAN.

 

Guardians of the Galaxy also beat X-Men, Captain America and is likely to finish at #1 for the year! The point is kind of moot.

 

As for BH6, it was WDAS's next following Frozen. Disney Animation could have made a Squirrel Girl film following Frozen and it would've easily crossed 200M! Heck, I actually think a post-Frozen Disney Squirrel Girl would have outgrossed Winter Soldier and Lego Movie since it is more appealing to Disney's core demographic than BH6!

[Spidey Freak]

So, it's likely to pass TASM2, making only TMNT the only true contender to not beat it domestically.

(SinCity2 was uber niche, not a contender)

 

Flopzilla and Flopstellar.

[Melvin Frohike]

Anime styling?

The whole thing just looked like a colourful American cartoon.

Actually, a couple of people I know are put off by how animesque the movie seems to them. It may not actually look animesque, but in some ways it reminds people of anime nonetheless, and some people think that this is weird for Disney. This is by no means a majority view, but I wonder how many people feel this way.

[Jonwo]

WDAS CG films have had a consistent style since Tangled but I think that's deliberate since the characters models are very similar to the 2D films.

You compare CG humans now compared to even 10 years ago and the difference is incredible. The ones in Shrek don't hold up well compared to say The Incredibles which was the first film to really ultilise human characters.

[Klingo]

Actually, a couple of people I know are put off by how animesque the movie seems to them. It may not actually look animesque, but in some ways it reminds people of anime nonetheless, and some people think that this is weird for Disney. This is by no means a majority view, but I wonder how many people feel this way.

Funny you should say about anime when the Japanese created that big eyes on their characters which is based on Disney ones.