How Vast Data created the data platform for dazzling Pixar’s Elemental film
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Pixar Animation Studios partnered with Vast Data, the data platform company for the AI era, to power the data-intensive feature animation production of its film, Elemental.
The movie hit U.S. theaters on June 16 and it was called out for taking 3D visuals to new heights. The movie has taken in about $395 million in box office revenues worldwide. It was Pixar’s 27th film since 1995, and once again it involved adopting a new kind of technology.
Pixar, a division of Disney, began working with Vast in 2018, using the volumetric rendering technique in their acclaimed 2020 film Soul. For the next film, Pixar asked if Vast could handle three times more data than it used in Soul.
However, unlike the geometric surfaces and materials used in earlier Pixar projects, the broadly-applied volumetric animation methods used in Elemental — Pixar’s 27th film — turned out to produce six times the data footprint and computational demands than that of Soul.
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In Soul, when the animated character dies and goes up to the soul world, you notice that the apparition has a kind of glow to him. All the light particles are actually simulated in 3D, at that level of granularity, by Pixar, as opposed to just painting a bunch of dots. They weren’t traditional models; rather they were simulations, said Eric Bermender, head of data center & IT infrastructure at Pixar Animation Studios.
“One of the important things to realize is that it’s the story and the animation that dictates our pace of
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