Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy” Short Listed

Pixar’s most recent short “Partly Cloudy”, revealing the details of where storks really get their delivered babies from, is in the running for the AMPAS Best Animated Short, to be announced February 2nd.  Peter Sohn sits down with StudioDaily to talk about how he got the idea, and some of the hurdles they ran into creating semi-transparent clouds as characters.

“A real cloud is mist and vapor,” he adds. “If you got close to it, it would dissipate. Trying to get something that had a form and was appealing but still retained cloud properties…that was on the technical aspect.” The biggest hurdle, he says, was the rendering. “Gus is made up of over 200,000 particles,” he says. “It took about 60 to 70 hours to render one frame of him, because he was a translucent character. And we didn’t have a lot of time to finish the movie.”

via Studio Daily Blog » Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy” Short Listed.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

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