Anyone Can Cook: more on the food in Pixar’s Ratatouille
Turns out that the new section on Pixar’s website about the food in Ratatouille is an excerpt from Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen, a 58-page paper from Siggraph 2007 whose four chapters cover the sets, shading, lighting and effects used to make the food in Ratatouille look so appealing.
Chapter One describes how, in order to make the food look delicious, the set designers had to figure out to how make it sag naturally:
…computer models built by hand or by code tend to have a rigid posed look. They lacked a “found in nature” feel to them, which one might describe as weight or contact or sag or rest. Our hand sculpted models tended to not adequately show that the soft objects had a weight to them, causing them to sag and droop and deform according to their surroundings. Piles of food tended to not look natural. They looked as if someone had carefully stacked them together (which was true!) More importantly they didn’t actually look like soft objects were pushing against each other. In the end we had hard plastic toys carefully stacked together and not a crate of soft vegetables randomly thrown in. — Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen , pixar.com
They refined their solution by simulating how sacks of potatoes lie against each other and by how fruits and vegetables pile naturally in a container, then applied what they’d learned to, among other things, a poached scallop dish with a dollop of cavier on top:
The caviar dollop was a new problem. There is an overall shape that feels like it has weight and is resting on top of the scallop. In turn the dollop is made up of a multitude of individual eggs, that each needed to feel as if they were truly squeezed in together.
Consider the level of detail here: in a feature-length film running 111 minutes, in one of many scenes with food on plates, one plate containing scallops has cavier on top. Making the individual eggs in that cavier lie naturally posed a new technical problem interesting enough to include in a technical paper.
Pixar is an amazing group of artists. If good cooking starts with good ingredients, good animation about cooking surely starts with passionate attention to detail like this.