Dylan Sisson, known for marrying art with technology, has mastered digital art with an experience of over 25 years in VFX and animation. His creation RenderMan Walking Teapot, a quirky mascot made for the software’s promotion, spotlights the rich tapestry of computer graphics (CG) and Pixar’s contribution to core rendering technology.
In 1999, Sisson joined Pixar Animation Studios where he has been engaged in the part of Pixar’s RenderMan Group. With a deep knowledge of CG with a traditional background of painting, illustration and toy design, he believes that there’s a lot of opportunity in emerging technologies as they bring things together that weren’t related before. For instance, adding stylisation to the renderer helped in including various illustrations into visual effects.
In an in-depth discussion on exploring evolving technologies and how it is influencing the future of animation and digital art, Pixar Animation Studios marketing manager Sisson told Animation Xpress, “I’m a big proponent of VR sculpting. We’re not using it in production that much, but I think it’s very good for prototyping and for visualisation.” Further, he feels artificial intelligence (A.I.) is a big word. “There are narrow use cases like machine learning and the denoiser, and then there are other cases like generative AI. I think we’re going to see narrow use cases of these different technologies in the pipeline.I don’t think necessarily we are going to see pipelines getting simpler in many ways. So hopefully we see applications that enhance creativity and not replace artists.”
The latest version of Renderman (version 26) came out in April 2024. This new version comes with a machine learning denoiser, which they implemented across the Disney Studios several years ago, like for Toy Story 4. “It’s really kind of transformative in the impact of allowing us to render an image with fewer samples so we can render really fast and render much bigger images than we could before,” he said. They have also released interactive denoising so one can fire up the scene as a lighting artist or a shading artist, and work with it interactively, get the first bucket of pixels in, and then it’ll denoise it. So one can have an immediate sort of response that Pixar lighters use it all the time and they just turn it on.
They have their new stylisation tools. Sisson further explained, “In the tool set what we call Renderman stylised looks, we’re making NPR (Non Photorealistic) looks with lines, tune shading and cross hatching. We’ve enhanced the tune and enhanced the lines so you can be more creative with them and get more types of styles, including anime styles and others.”
Also, the team has been working on Renderman XPU, so that it allows them to use the GPU to accelerate the rendering process and use the GPU and CPU concurrently on the same image. So that is the future architecture that’s going to replace the current Renderman architecture and that is actually the future Renderman version.
And in this last version, they have added support for all the analytic lights and a bunch of features that one really needs for lighting. This is remarkable because they initially released it just for loop development, and now they are at a place where it’s almost a final frame render, or a final frame render for a certain category of shots. He mentioned, “Next year, we’ll have about 10 more features that we’re going to be delivering, so we can use it as a final frame renderer at Pixar and at all the other studios, like ILM and DNEG and MPC. Because they also use Renderman.”
Sisson expresses satisfaction with the fact that due to the advancement in rendering technology and other innovations, artists can actually start looking at the scene, not much from a technical aspect, but from a point of cinematography. They can think about how the lighting is supporting the narrative, as opposed to, making sure that the shadows aren’t floating around. With the new tools, the goal should be to empower the artists to make creative decisions and help support the narrative of the story.
The veteran shared that films like Street of Crocodiles, Coraline, Fantasia and others made a huge impression on him. Out of many Pixar films, he likes the story of Ratatouille and finds the relationship between a chef and a rat really cool. Just making food look delicious, and using CG with such technical wizardry remained stuck in his mind.
Sisson loves to spend his free time hanging out with his friends, cooking and watching movies. Even after two decades of becoming an icon, his favourite pastime includes doodling. He is driven by his passion and he advises the younger generation to join the industry only if they love the work and not grab it as just another opportunity.
