Hacker News Reader

Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

One thing about 3-D animated movies is that can be rerendered later on with improved rendering tech without being reshot.

Disney should go ahead and rerelease Toy Story with its latest rendering tech (at maybe 8k), to show these kinds of rendering improvements.

View on HN

My guess is that it's significantly more difficult than that—those movies are pure legacy code by now, and we all know how difficult it is to modernize legacy applications :).

You are correct. Toy Story 1 and 2 were resurrected around 2010 for 3D re-rendering. It took a team of 4 or 5 working for the better part of a year, IIRC.

A 3D movie like Toy Story isn't like a Maya file; it's hundreds of thousands of files in a gigantic filesystem, and many pieces of complicated software working together just to compose them and generate a mere description of the scene, let alone make an image out of it. Getting the software to a place where it could reproduce an image at all was a feat.

And the end result, if everything goes well, is just the same image rendered again from two angles instead of one. The images would not magically look like modern graphics, because for that, an artist would have to re-model the characters to be higher resolution (and then re-animate them to be up to snuff), re-surface them, re-light them... basically re-make the whole movie. Not a button push. :)

you would probably only improve the resolution and minor details, but the assets (models, textures, shaders etc.) created for a CG movie from the 90ies certainly won't offer many of the details that CG movies nowadays have.

Re-rendering Toy Story with a global illumination lighting model would make a huge difference though, even if the geometry and textures remain the same.

It would look horrible, because the lighting was done assuming no global illumination.

Besides destroying artistic intent, the no-longer-missing indirect lighting effects would double up with all the "cheats" and clever techniques the artists had placed to make up for them.

Obviously all shader code and lighting would have to be redesigned. I wasn't trying to suggest that they could just multiply a GI render pass on top of the old shader output, or something like that.

It's not a matter of code (though that, too, would be an enormous job). It would clash with what the artists have done.

Here's a random image from TS1: [1]

Look at Buzz's butt-- he has some yellowish up-lighting. That's because an artist placed a yellow light underneath him to fake the indirect light from the bedspread. If you turned on GI, the bedspread would cast its own yellow light, and it would look wrong because now his butt is glowing.

Not to mention that ambient occlusion would likely darken lots of things that weren't supposed to be dark in the original composition. Really, it would look totally broken and destroy the artistry.

[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kLXYT7zSJTVAiI_jflkF_mW7bPk=...

As I said, lighting would have to be redesigned. We're not disagreeing.

I don't think it's something that Disney should ever do. I was just replying to the person who suggested that limitations in geometry and bitmap assets mean there's nothing that could be done to upgrade the look.

Ops point was that old movies could just be rerendered and quality would improve dramatically, and i disagreed. Of course, if you put in a lot of work and rework the entire lighting model and other things, you can improve quality a lot, but that wasn't the point.

Better to put the effort into a new show, say TS4, that's intended from the beginning to take advantage of the new tech. ;-)

A tremendous amount of effort would still be needed to provide detail to the models

There are two major, obvious problems with that.

1) Toy Story was made a long time ago, 22 years ago in fact. As stated by tikhonj, Toy Story would be pure legacy code by now, as so much has changed technically in 22 years. Getting it to work in modern software that could render it in 8K would be very difficult, as it was already difficult enough to re-render it in 2010 as tbabb's comment explains.

2) There's no point in upscaling in 8K. Yes, it would be in a very high resolution, but a lot of the textures were made in the 90s and are obviously not made for 8K. I would imagine that you would have to remake essentially all of the textures, otherwise they would probably look terrible in 8K.

Besides, there's no point of re-releasing it in 8K, because it wouldn't all the detail that rendering in 8K normally come with.

I think the assumption in the parent - which would also have been my guess - was that assets begin in higher resolution than required and get sampled down. Certainly used to be the case with games.

That was the plan with Babylon 5, except the digital assets were lost...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com