Discussion History Characters / Zootopia

I\'m not sure what you mean by \"nothing in CGI is \'just a prop\'\". I think this is \'\'exactly\'\' a prop.

And it just sits there and doesn\'t move, so the animators don\'t have to mess with it... I\'m really not sure what you mean by having to render the mug relative to the character. [[note]]If you\'re talking about indirect lighting and the influence the moving characters have on the lighting of other objects, that may have been complicated to handle properly with old-fashioned renderers, but if they\'re using a path tracer like we talked about earlier, then that would be handled automatically. The main attraction of path tracers, which has apparently in recent years overtaken the downsides in the eyes of major studios, is that it \'\'simulates the natural behavior of light\'\' with a degree of accuracy that makes a lot of the lighting/rendering tricks of traditional CGI completely unnecessary. It\'s to the point that you can just drop a pre-made object into a scene and expect it to behave; in that respect it\'s become almost more like stop-motion photography than traditional CGI.[[/note]]

And for such a common object, they probably didn\'t even have to model it (not that that would have taken long) since they probably had one they could re-use from an earlier production.

I don\'t see adding a coffee mug to the set dressing as something that would significantly complicate anything.

I\'m not sure what you mean by \"nothing in CGI is \'just a prop\'\". I think this is \'\'exactly\'\' a prop.

And it just sits there and doesn\'t move, so the animators don\'t have to mess with it... I\'m really not sure what you mean by having to render the mug relative to the character. [[note]]If you\'re talking about indirect lighting and the influence the moving characters have on the lighting of other objects, that may have been complicated to handle properly with old-fashioned renderers, but if they\'re using a path tracer like we talked about earlier, then that would be handled automatically. The main attraction of path tracers, which has apparently in recent years overtaken the downsides in the eyes of major studios, is that it \'\'simulates the natural behavior of light\'\' with a degree of accuracy that makes a lot of the lighting/rendering tricks of traditional CGI unnecessary. It\'s to the point that you can just drop a pre-made object into a scene and expect it to behave; in that respect it\'s become almost more like stop-motion photography than traditional CGI.[[/note]]

And for such a common object, they probably didn\'t even have to model it (not that that would have taken long) since they probably had one they could re-use from an earlier production.

I don\'t see adding a coffee mug to the set dressing as something that would significantly complicate anything.

I\'m not sure what you mean by \"nothing in CGI is \'just a prop\'\". I think this is \'\'exactly\'\' a prop.

And it just sits there and doesn\'t move, so the animators don\'t have to mess with it... I\'m really not sure what you mean by having to render the mug relative to the character. [[note]]If you\'re talking about indirect lighting and the influence the moving characters have on the lighting of other objects, that may have been complicated to handle properly with old-fashioned renderers, but if they\'re using a path tracer like we talked about earlier, then that would be handled automatically. The main attraction of path tracers, which has apparently in recent years overtaken the downsides in the eyes of major studios, is that it \'\'simulates the natural behavior of light\'\' with a degree of accuracy that makes a lot of the lighting/rendering tricks of traditional CGI unnecessary. It\'s to the point that you can just drop a pre-made object into a scene and expect it to behave; in that respect it\'s become almost more like stop-motion photography than traditional CGI.[[/note]]

And for such a common object, they probably didn\'t even have to model it (not that that would have taken long) since they probably had one they could re-use from an earlier production.

I don\'t see adding a coffee mug as something that would significantly complicate anything.