Creating an animated feature film takes an army of artists. But Pixar’s Monsters University movie, coming out June 21, also took a bunch of technologists who had to solve difficult problems like properly illuminating scenes without melting down a data center.

Behind the tech magic: Monsters University

• The making of Monsters University
• How Pixar made the ultrarealistic The Blue Umbrella
• Bringing digital monsters to life

Pixar’s Monster’s University took more than four years to create, and much of that work was technological in nature. More than 100 technology engineers worked on it, and it took more than 100 million CPU hours to render the film into its final form.

Pixar had to double the size of its render farm, a room full of servers, to create Monsters University. And each frame was so sophisticated in terms of artistic detail that it took 29 hours to render, said  supervising technical director Sanjay Bakshi in a talk at Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville, Calif.

Part of the problem was that there were, on average, more than 25 detailed animated characters in every shot. And there were 6.2 limbs and 3.7 eyes per character. All of that had to be computer-animated because it was far too complex to be animated by hand, said Christine Waggoner, (pictured at top) simulation supervisor on the film. Roughly 89 percent of the film is built from computer simulations, she said.

Everything, from the movement of cloth and vegetation, is designed to look natural. Characters such as Sully, the big blue monster, have 5.4 million hairs in their fur, or five times as much as the original film. A dozen years ago, with the first Monsters Inc. film, the scenes were far less complex. This time, all of the programs for creating hair, fur, and other details had to be totally rewritten. A typical scene has anywhere from 300 to 500 lights, said Jean-Claude Kalache, a lighting expert at Pixar.

In a visit to Pixar, we heard Waggoner, Bakshi and Kalache talk about the technology behind Monsters University in a presentation. We also interviewed them separately. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Source: Disney/Pixar

Sanjay Bakshi, a techie

VentureBeat: What was the hardest thing to do from a technological view?

Christine Waggoner: The cloth and hair were pretty tough. I think it’s deceptively simple, the idea of Sullivan wearing a T-shirt. There have been other instances of clothing on hairy characters in the past, but it’s not the same problem. Sullivan’s hair is long. You can’t just make all the hairs along the boundary invisible. The cloth is a dynamic thing. It moves and slides across the boundaries of the hairs. There isn’t a simple solution – “Just paint away the hairs underneath!” The shirt can slide up at any time. Allowing for that freedom was difficult. The other thing is that you can’t just pretend that Sullivan’s T-shirt is big and baggy and say, “Just keep it away from the hair!” He’s a very big character, and the shirt was supposed to be tight. The hair is very fluffy and there’s just a whole lot of it.

Sanjay Bakshi (pictured): And it’s a story point that he wears that shirt. It’s in a lot of shots. He has to act and perform in those shots. It was definitely a big simulation challenge.

VentureBeat: Does it seem like interaction is the hard part? Characters bumping into each other in a very crowded scene and things like that. Does that become a hard thing to accomplish?

Waggoner: It can be. When it’s a crowded scene and there’s a lot of interesting, it’s easier to get away with some cheats. It tends to be when characters are really close up on camera, those hero moments, that’s what makes it more difficult. The other thing is that animators need to pay attention to what is important for the performance and for animation. There can be specific limitations that make a great performance hard to simulate, where we have to find ways of making it look natural while preserving the performance.

Source: Disney/Pixar

The Pixar physics experts

VentureBeat: Doubling the computing power seems fairly tough, but I guess in the same time period, computing power has gotten much cheaper. Are you already stuffing in a lot of new computers every year anyway, because they’re just cheaper to upgrade than the five-year-old machines?

Bakshi: Computers are cheaper, but the high-performance storage and backup requirements and networking requirements are still very costly. It still costs a lot to add a thousand computers to the render farm. At that scale, people say, “Why don’t you just throw in more memory?” The memory we use has to be the best memory. It has to have fast access and so forth. So it’s still prohibitively expensive to add tons and tons of processors.

VentureBeat: Is it about 2,000 servers? Is that around what you guys have?

Bakshi: We have 24,000 cores.

VentureBeat: Does that count as a top 500 supercomputer, then?

Bakshi: Of the published ones that we know about, it would be in the top 25.

Jean-Claude Kalache: It’s tempting to just say, “Let’s throw in more power.” But if you say, “No,” we all go through the exercise and find solutions – software solutions – that otherwise we wouldn’t have picked up on because we had unlimited hardware resources. It’s a fine balance between how many you really need and how many you can bypass by thinking smartly – building a world that’s more optimized or lighting differently.

One of the biggest concerns I had with our technology is that while we’ve proven, with the prototypes, that we can minimize or reduce complexity, I was worried throughout the show that we would abuse the technology and go back to a really complex world. We spent a lot of time training our team, and learning from them as well, so we don’t get tempted into that kind of huge explosion of complexity.

Source: Disney/Pixar

Christine Waggoner, simulations expert

Bakshi: We spend the same effort on optimizing the scenes so they render efficiently as we ever have, even though computers and memory get more powerful. We still have to spend a lot of time on that. We always make the scene more rich or more complex. We always keep adding things to make it more visually interesting.

VentureBeat: Saschka Unseld, The Blue Umbrella director, made a comment that they created some things and sent them to be rendered and it didn’t work. They had to reduce the complexity and send it back again. Is that a process that happens a lot for you guys, where you have something that’s just way too complex?

Kalache: We have what we call gates. Every department has to deliver inventory to the next department, but it has to go through a gate. In that gate, we look at complexity, if it’s manageable. It might be okay for you, but it may be unusable for someone else. If you model a building, it might be fine for you, but the next department needs to make 20 copies of that building, and that adds up. So there are gates – speed gates, memory gates, different gates that we try to police very carefully. It will add up quickly if we’re not careful.

Bakshi: The feature films are a little different than the shorts. The shorts will be pooling assets, and their production schedules are so tight that they don’t have as much time to build everything from scratch and be careful. Whereas with the feature films, we have a very rigorous process of measuring and making sure things aren’t too expensive as they go downstream.

VentureBeat: The color guys had this interesting comment where they were talking about keeping a character’s face in the light, versus Hardscrabble’s face, where it’s backlit and the face is dark. They said they had to cheat sometimes to do that. It seems like what would be wonderful is if you could someday simply build the world and position these characters in it, and then light would fall on them the way it’s supposed to.

Kalache: That would definitely help, kind of like live action. But if you look closely at live action, every shot is cheated, just because things don’t work naturally out of the box. We do draw a lot of inspiration from live action. I feel like our cheating today has gotten much better, in the sense that it’s simpler to cheat. But I do agree that if somehow we can see it all at the same time in the future — with the lighting, with the spotlight – then maybe we’ll cheat less. It is an interesting path that we’re taking as we implement in the future.

Source: Disney/Pixar

Sully’s jacket was hard to make.

VentureBeat: When I’m playing a game, the time when it really slows down sometimes is when there are 20 things happening in the same frame or the same scene. Is that the same problem that you would run into, where you have too many monsters running around?

Bakshi: The number of characters being animated in the shot – the amount of animation or how complex that animation is – probably doesn’t hurt the render performance like it would with a game engine. But the fact that there are 30 furry characters on the screen behind one pixel, that would have more effect than the amount of animation.

Kalache: From a lighting perspective, it’s sometimes the opposite. If you have a scene with a thousand monsters and a scene with one, the likelihood of you noticing what all the thousand monsters are doing is almost zero. So the lighting is very simple. But if you have one character in the scene for a full 30 seconds or so – a model like Mike with the big eye and highlights and gleam – all of a sudden you start noticing a lot more details, because it’s just the one character. That scene might be more complex lighting-wise, to bring out the details and interesting things, than a scene with a thousand monsters. It depends.

Source: Disney/Pixar

Mike, the lead character of Monster’s University

Waggoner: From a simulation perspective, generally we don’t simulate all thousand characters at one time. It’s definitely complex to manage all those characters, but it wouldn’t bog down in the same way that a game would bog down, because we’re not trying to do everything in real-time.

VentureBeat: If I look at Mike as a character, he seems very simple to me. When you guys look at it, is there some complexity to something that’s as simple as Mike?

Kalache: The eyes are the window to the soul. Mike’s eye is the biggest piece of real estate on the screen, and that’s always challenging for us. You can always see a reflection of who he’s talking to or what he’s looking at. It’s always the eye, in Mike’s case.

He’s very interesting, if you look at details. He’s very complex, but in a nice, subtle way. He has lots of freckles. He has the retainer. Depending on your lighting situation, you might reveal a lot of freckles and stop looking at the eye, so we have ways to control the freckles. Or if the retainer catches a lot of highlights, that’s distracting, because you’re trying to focus on his eye. I always tell my lighters to be very afraid of the simple shot, because that’s the one that has a lot of people’s attention, mine included.

Bakshi: If you think of Mike from an animation standpoint, this is a movie about Mike. He has to be so expressive. You have to believe that he feels the emotions he feels. You can imagine, under the covers, there are tons of animation controls to make him that expressive.

Quantum Wave Fund (QWave) has pooled $30 million to create the first fund dedicated to companies developing quantum technologies. Quantum mechanics is futuristic stuff. It is a branch  of physics that studies matter and energy at the microscopic scale (to put it simply). Aside from stretching the limits of reasoning and consciousness and raising questions about the nature of the universe, quantum physics potentially has commercial applications.

QWave will invest in companies that are applying quantum materials and technologies  to solve real-world problems. Serge Haroche and David Wineland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum computing, which could dramatically up the processing capabilities of computers.

So far, QWave has invested in startups tackling quantum encryption security, new materials, and quantum devices. According to a release, the potential results of research in this area are “safe data transmission networks, new materials with superior properties, optical sub-micron transistors, high-frequency optical electronics, new systems for ultrasensitive imaging of the brain, and compact and accurate clocks for navigation systems.”

Serguei Beloussov is one of the partners of the Quantum Wave Fund, as well as at the venture firm Runa Capital. He said in a statement that the venture community stopped investing in “sophisticated capital intensive projects” and shifted to focus on software. While there was intensive research going on at universities and scientific centers, many of the scientists had no idea how to turn their work into a business. However, anticipation runs high for the impact quantum computing could potentially have on the technology industry, and QWave strobes to be one of the “pioneers to drive this opportunity.”

QWave is headquartered in Boston with outposts in New York and Moscow and is seeking to ultimately close the fund at $100 million. Read the press release. 

Why is the night sky dark? “Because the sun isn’t up!” But wait — if the universe is chock full of stars just like our sun, why isn’t it bright day and night?

NASA recently released the deepest-ever view of the universe, an amazing photo that combines 10 years’ worth of Hubble Space Telescope images. The photo contains about 5,500 galaxies, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. With so many stars and galaxies, shouldn’t it be a little brighter at night?

Popular YouTube channel Minute Physics explores this question in a new fact-filled video that will illuminate the science geek in all of us.

Check out the great video above.

Earlier this month, scientists at CERN observed what was most likely the elusive Higgs boson particle. But unless you’re a physics geek, it can be hard to understand just what made the discovery so significant.

Thankfully, the good folks of the Minute Physics YouTube channel have created a three-part video series that does a great job explaining the Higgs boson, mass, and particle discovery. While Minute Physics doesn’t dumb down the science, it does make the discovery a bit easier to understand with clever diagrams and metaphors. Heck, even if you’re a science fan, you’ll probably get a laugh or two.

Check out the three-part series below:

Part 1: The Higgs Boson explained

Part 2: What is Mass?

Part 3: How to Discover a Particle

Although CERN scientists are hesitant to deem that they have absolutely found the Higgs boson, the new particle is more massive than anything yet seen, a key property expected of the Higgs.

To get some insight into the significance of this discovery, Singularity University asked none other than A. Garrett Lisi, the noted theoretical physicist and independent researcher, to offer his enlightened perspective on what he calls “perhaps the most momentous day in particle physics of the century” and what it means for the future of science. You can see his full response in the video below:

The Higgs boson is the “Holy Grail” for particle physicists because it “is the missing link that provides a description of how all particles get their masses and how they interact with the gravitational field,” said Lisi. “We’ve been trying to get evidence for this Higgs boson for decades now.” Because of its importance to understanding the forces present in the cosmos, the particle has earned the moniker “the God particle.”

During the 1970s, physicists were able to theoretically unify the fundamental forces of electromagnetism and the weak force in what is known as the Standard Model, but to do so meant that force-carrying particles had to have no mass, something that goes against observations. So Peter Higgs and others proposed that an invisible force field permeates the universe and that particles acquire mass when they interact with the field through special particles, called Higgs bosons. No one could know for sure if the Higgs boson was real or not, but without proof of the particle’s existence, an understanding of mass would remain a mystery.

The 17-mile long LHC was built to propel particles to near the speed of light so that, somewhere in the aftermath of their collisions, the Higgs particle might be seen. Today’s news from CERN that a particle with a large mass within the range predicted of the Higgs has been detected is welcome news for the thousands who gambled on a project requiring the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.

As Lisi said, “Now that we know the existence of the Higgs boson, this is just as significant as finding out that, in fact, atoms do have these hard little nuclei,” a key discovery made by Rutherford almost exactly a century ago in 1911.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is the last piece of the puzzle for the Standard Model, which will now likely be refined with further experimentation and potentially pave the way toward even more unification theories. But for now, science has another toolset — like Newton’s Laws of Motion, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and quantum mechanics — with which to study the strangeness and mystery of everything that surrounds us. Understanding of other cosmic phenomena, such as dark matter and dark energy, extra dimensions, antimatter, and string theory, will only benefit from this deeper understanding of subatomic particles and the forces that bind them.

In the video, Lisi points out that, although the ways in which this finding will aid society may not be immediately clear, they will inevitably come, just as they have for other fundamental discoveries in physics. “We don’t know what the implications will be decades down the line from this discovery, but they will surely be huge.”

David J. Hill writes for Singularity University. The university, founded in 2008 and based at the NASA Research Center in Mountain View, California, aims to assemble, educate, and inspire a new generation of thinkers, scientists, and business executives looking to better the world through disruptive technologies.

What happens when an astronaut plays a game of Angry Birds in real life on a space station? An awesome new video posted by Rovio showing just that.

The video was released to hype up the much-anticipated launch of Angry Birds in Space. NASA astronaut Don Pettit explains on camera at the International Space Station just how physics affect launching both Angry Birds and spaceships.

Pettit launches a red Angry Birds toy from a catapult while in zero gravity to explain trajectory. To add to the effect, he also blows up green balloon to make an evil pig and lets some “stolen” eggs float in the air in front of him. Of course, he makes the admirable pitch for people to learn math and physics so they can “get a neat job, a job sort of like mine.”

“We’ve got to see all of this in a weightless environment, which is what the Angry Birds Space game is going to be like with gravity fields from planetary bodies,” Pettit says in the video.

Angry Birds Space will be available for download on iOS, Android, PC and Mac on March 22. Personally, I cannot wait to play this installment.

Watch the full video below:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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He rushes out onto the court. It doesn’t even feel like a video game. It feels like I’m sitting with my friends watching this game while it’s on live television. Somewhere out there, Jordan is laying a beat down on Magic Johnson, the Lakers’ point guard and top player. I don’t, at any point, feel like I’m physically playing basketball.

“The point of our games is not re-enacting throwing a football, but the spirit of the sport and letting gamers fulfill their sports dreams,” said Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts’ sports game guru. “These are real players, they are real events and there is real angst — we want to re-enact reality.”

What’s more, sports games have an unrecognized role in driving forward innovation for the entire video game industry. That’s why you should take them seriously, even if you’re a sports-hating nerd who would rather pick up a BFG than a basketball.

I pissed off a few people for making a snarky comment about people complaining about the release of yet another Madden and NCAA Football game from Electronic Arts at the company’s summer games showcase last week. It’s perfectly understandable that someone would complain about the release of yet another sequel that — at face value — doesn’t seem to include new content or innovate at all. To most people’s eyes, the games seem like a roster update and a slightly better graphics and physics engine. But those people are missing the point of sports games.

Take NBA 2K11, for example. The game re-enacts some of basketball’s finest moments, such as Jordan’s famous shrug after he drilled his sixth three-point shot in the first half of game one against the Portland Trailblazers in the 1992 NBA finals. The same is true for other sports games. As a University of North Carolina graduate, I’m a Bulls fan by default. But I was way too young to appreciate that series back in ’92, when Jordan was at his peak. I was 5 years old at the time. This video game helps me relive an experience I missed the first time around.

The games feature hundreds of hours of commentary. And it isn’t from a generic commentator for a sport — sports games makers pull in the same commentators that show up on ESPN and CBS for live sports games. Clark Kellogg and Doris Burke, two well-known reporters in the sports field, show up in games like NBA 2k11. The games feature commentary that really feels equivalent to a live sports game.

“When I look at the various people out there criticizing the franchise, they’re not sports fans, and that’s okay because there are a lot of people who are,” Wilson said. “If you ever ask a sports fan, there’s a reason the sports category is one of the top categories in games — it makes up around 20 percent of the game industry.”

Most of the heckling I took from that comment came from gamers saying that they should simply go out and actually play football. But these sports video games aren’t designed to replace that experience. The act of playing a sport is something that binds us together as human beings. Games like soccer and tennis transcend nations, ideologies and religion — they are games we all feel a deep connection to, and physically playing that sport will never be replaced.

And, after all, you wouldn’t want to feel like you are defending Johnson when he drives the lane for a lay-up a hundred times in a game.

“Having an Andy Roddick serve coming at you probably isn’t that fun — you wouldn’t even be able to see it most of the time,” Wilson said. “The idea is not to ever face something as dynamic or ominous as an Andy Roddick serve, but give you something that feels like an Andy Roddick serve.”

Sports games are a main source of revenue for Electronic Arts, so a lot of the innovation in terms of graphics and realistic physics happens in that department and trickles down to other games, said David Tinson, director of relations for EA Sports. Electronic Arts, for example, uses the collision engines originally built for Madden in games like Battlefield 3, Wilson said. Each year, those teams build and re-build physics and animation engines for their in-game characters, and then other games reap the rewards of those engines.

“Physics and animation in our very core games has been driven by sports games since the inception of the technology,” Wilson said. “That physics and animation had to be in a sports game, for many years shooters didn’t need it.”

The same goes for artificial intelligence. Shooters are becoming more realistic so it becomes more important that non-playable characters start making decisions like normal human beings. That started with games like Fifa, where the company had to design artificial intelligence that would make 22 players on a pitch behave like real human beings and make realistic decisions, Tinson said.

Those teams also pioneered the “once-a-year” cycle that many companies like Activision-Blizzard now employ in their largest franchises, Tinson said. The teams spend longer than a year working on the game, and they rotate as to which year to release games. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are both Call of Duty games released one year apart, but they both had development cycles longer than one year. Activision-Blizzard is able to do this because they have multiple Call of Duty teams.

Again, these video games aren’t supposed to exactly replicate the act of watching a real sports game or going out and playing a real sport. I’ve added videos below of one of the greatest moments in basketball history, including both the real thing and a representation of it in a video game. It’s not the same thing, but the video game does a great job of capturing the emotion and feeling of that game. For video gamers, that makes it a window into an important piece of sports history.

So, to the folks I pissed off a little while ago: I’m not saying you have to start liking sports games. But realize what they contribute to the industry. It isn’t simply Football Roster Update 2012 or Next Sports Game 2012 — they are new games, just like every other genre. And they bring something new to the table, too.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Unlike computers based on transistors, quantum computers rely on principles of quantum mechanics to conduct operations. The computers take advantage of properties like entanglement — when two particles have the same properties and behave identically while being separate — and storing data with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Typical bits store memory by registering an “on” or “off,” or a one or zero, while qubits can represent information as both memory and the state of entanglement with other particles.

The quantum computer uses a system of 128 qubits, which means the computer will be able to solve more complex problems than traditional computers at a much higher speed. The computer is able to tackle computing-intensive problems related to number theory and optimization. One example is Shor’s Algorithm, a quantum algorithm that determines the prime factors of a large number quickly and efficiently. Given enough qubits, a quantum computer can use Shor’s Algorithm to break modern encryption algorithms like RSA encryption, a type of public-key cryptography.

The computers can theoretically be significantly faster than regular computers and can solve much more complex problems. They could also lead to new kinds of encryption methods and security algorithms to secure data and model more complex systems — such as emulating how enzymes in the human body work and modeling more complex biological systems.

D-Wave was founded in 1999 and calls itself “the quantum computing company.” It is selling the computer, called the “D-Wave One,” for $10 million per computer. The company will also perform maintenance on the computer and other professional services.