Part 2 - Shading Food: Making it Tasty for Ratatouiile
Lecture by Athena Xenakis of Pixar
Athena Xenakis is a Shading Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. She received her BFA from School of Art & Design at Purchase College in 1999. Some of her previous works before entering Pixar in 2004 included Ice Age and Robots. Her favorite food is Mac and Cheese.
One of the main challenges Pixar faced with recreating the food was giving it the style they sought as well as creating a convincing product. As part of our nature we inherently recognize the look of food and thus came the challenge of replicating it. For the shading section an overview was given hinting on the following areas:
- Technical Overview
- Explanation of Different Concepts Used
- Techniques and workflows to Achieve the Final Result
The overall approach of the film was to utilize skin and scatter computations, similar to that found in The Incredibles, but much more advanced. With the latitude of research in the industry it was clear to take advantage of this technology and, essentially, the shaders were just a small variation of Pixar’s house skin.
Similar to skin, food had a problem generating a realistic and convincing look with the lack of translucency being one of the factors to hinder the final result.
A focus and fact to remember was the food needed to be hastily brought through the process and Pixar did it using Slim. By adding shading elements and using scatter on the results they were able to add an additional level of visual achievement then those seen in traditional Slim shaders. While this did address most food items several required special attention to achieve the look such as wine and bread.
How to find the style was a challenge that had to be overcome. They wanted something that looked good but not completely “real”. In this event no real world photographs were incorporate into the food but, instead, were heavily adapted modified and painted over to be used. The key for the food finally came down to these three factors:
- Softness
- Reflection
- Saturation
In conclusion, the challenge to make food that we see on a daily basis is an extremely difficult task that required the positive associations of the emotional impact. Stylizing the food while sustaining the realism required help to achieve our goals using subtleties in the illumination and shading networks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Noodlehead Studios is a full service marketing solutions company providing Atlanta Video Production, Atlanta Web Design, Atlanta Graphic Design and Atlanta Marketing. If you would like a free marketing consultation please call us at 678-620-2279 or email us now.
|
About 
