Exactly a week after the release of Up it has jumped to 15th 16th place in the IMDB top films of all time, an incredible feat for an animated film, and has a rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. It looks as though Pixar have continued their success into the 10th feature film to come from the animation gurus.
With many of their films they produce groundbreaking technologies to create the realism they strive for each time- Monsters Inc. had them experimenting with fur rendering, Finding Nemo involved underwater light and particle movement, and in Up a new physics engine was developed to animate the 10,000 balloons needed to lift a house. CNET news talked to Pixar about the procedural animation.
There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen. [...] May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn’t be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio’s computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem.
Wired magazine have calculated if lifting a house with balloons is even possible.
