Presto

      Presto is a proprietary animation system Pixar built for Brave and was used for Monsters University. This is an interactive environment with a rigged character that is detailed right up to small facial movements such as ‘bottom lip’. Essentially, this builds an environment and character that could be translated straight into a game, but is used to create a full length animation picture. One of the troubles the animators had with the character Sully in Monsters university, was that he has 900,000 hairs on his body, and all these hairs have 4 cv points, which are worked on the GPU (graphics processing unit), rather than the CPU (central processing unit) so he frame rate isn’t compromised with all that information to render. They then use ‘multipass open GL drawing’ to place these back into the scene so the animators aren’t slowed down. The problem with Sully is that all Sully’s hairs give him his silhouette, and without it he looks far skinnier, and not like the familiar character.  Presto allows the animators to at the click of a button see the character with his fur in real time so that they know the position is right and don’t have to render the scene to realise they’ve done it wrong, and have to do it all over again. 

      Presto seems like a revolutionary piece of software, that allows the studio to animate multiple furry characters, all with render passes, without any impact to the animators. This technology is very new but I  am sure will become more and more popular and will be used heavily in future Pixar releases. If a game studio were to use this software, weather they bought it or struck a deal with Pixar the use for it in game could massively improve graphics regarding hair and fur, something the video game industry seem to struggle to perfect in graphics.