Evolving Animation: It's All in the Pixels

EMERYVILLE, Calif., Nov. 4, 2004 -- -- Bob Parr is supposed to be a superhero with a big heart and a slightly oversized gut as well. But to the computers at Pixar Animation in California, Bob is really 84,581 "points."

Points?

Bob is the main character in "The Incredibles," the newest computer-animated film to be released by Pixar and the Walt Disney Co., the parent company of ABC News. The film marks something of a turning point for computer graphics. It is the first in which the main characters are human -- something they've avoided until now.

The computers that make all this possible could care less. Rick Sayre, the supervising technical director for "The Incredibles," calls them "idiot savants that would create the strangest results if we let them."

So back to the issue of points.

In a semi-darkened room at Pixar, just past a sign that says "Closed Set" (there is no physical "set" here, just a lot of computers), Bill Sheffler sits at a terminal, playing with a transparent wire-frame rendition of Bob. The points are individual dots in the computer's memory, programmed to move together whenever Bob picks up a car or does battle with a bad guy.

"You can see that the end of the pectoral muscle is actually sticking to this massive deltoid," Sheffler said. He uses medical terms to describe the computer-generated figure on his screen; beneath his desk he keeps a copy of "Gray's Anatomy," a book one would be more likely to find at a medical school than a movie studio.

Sheffler and his fellow engineers at Pixar designed Bob with virtual bones and muscles inside. Moviegoers will never see them, but they help to make Bob's on-screen movements believable.

"The characters are like puppets in a puppet show," said Sheffler. "The animators are like puppeteers, and I'm the guy who builds the puppets for them, so that they can use them however they want to."

Once the characters have been created, the animators' job ought to be easy. They pull and drag on the characters' muscles and facial features with a standard computer mouse. But it's exacting work.

Animator Steve Hunter showed a shot in which Bob lifts a giant robot.

"This is half a second," he said. "[It] took me probably a week."