[TommyBoy]

So this is just a thread for discussion (most likely). I'm sure many of us know that Walt Disney Feature Animation used to use Silicon Graphics machines to ink and paint their traditionally animated films. For those of you who don't know about this, Disney embarked on their switch to digital artwork in 1988 when they teamed up with the newly formed Pixar Animation Studios to produce a software package that could replace the long and cumbersome process of manually transferring pencil sketches to cels for coloring. The software that came from that was known as CAPS. CAPS could do ink/paint work, mix 2D and 3D animation (as seen in the dance scene of Beauty and the Beast), and organize the incredible amount of image files that were required to make a feature film. It was a very revolutionary piece of software for the late 1980s and early 1990s. CAPS was used for every Disney film from 1989's The Little Mermaid to 2004's Home on the Range. Pretty amazing.

Enough chatter... The reason why I posted this thread is because I've wondered if we have anybody on here who worked at Disney during those years and used the CAPS system. If so, please share some of your memories. Also... I know it was proprietary software that was never distributed, but does anybody know if CAPS was ever leaked? Did any of you happen to receive a copy of it that is still laying around somewhere? I'm sure that everyone in this small SGI hobbyist community would love to get their hands on that. Please post any info about CAPS on this thread!

[robespierre]

I don't know whether it applies to Disney, but for several years, animations were done using a combination of computer and traditional cel techniques.
In a 1989 SIGGRAPH panel, Bill Kroyer described his process using an HP 7550 plotter to output line art from computer wireframe animation, to acetate cels which were shipped overseas (to Korea or the Philippines) to be painted.

[jwhat]

Hi TommyBoy,

just to add to this the early Pixar work on using computers to support "traditional" animation, stemmed from the work done by Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull, two of the original Pixar Founders.

They published lots of SIGGRAPH and other papers on this work.

Cheers from Oz,


jwhat/John.

[commodorejohn]

I don't know whether it applies to Disney, but for several years, animations were done using a combination of computer and traditional cel techniques.
In a 1989 SIGGRAPH panel, Bill Kroyer described his process using an HP 7550 plotter to output line art from computer wireframe animation, to acetate cels which were shipped overseas (to Korea or the Philippines) to be painted.

Well, I'll be damned - I had a recollection when I read the OP about a fairly crappy failed cartoon pilot that was one of the random dollar-store videocassettes my grandpa used to pick up and bring with him when he came to visit. Wasn't much good on the being-an-entertaining-cartoon front, but there was a little making-of micro-featurette at the end of the tape explaining how the definitely-not-TRON sequences were created by modeling 3D shapes to then be traditionally animated. (There was also a godawful rap, because of course there was, it was 1990.) Looked it up, and lo and behold the director was none other than Bill Kroyer. Kinda wish I still had the tape now...

(Not nearly as much as I wish I still had the tape with the Angry Beavers pilot, though.)

[robespierre]

(Not nearly as much as I wish I still had the tape with the Angry Beavers pilot, though.)

Nice. Do you remember a cartoon pilot with a bunch of raccoons in a missile silo? I wish I could remember what it was called.

[commodorejohn]

Gosh, no. Definitely makes me curious, though.

[TommyBoy]

Lolz! So we're getting into cartoon nostalgia here. Fun topic for sure, but the thread's about software. I know that this may be a dumb question (considering that Disney likes to keep some things locked away) but... Does anybody know if there's a way to get a .tar file containing the CAPS software package? Somebody out there must have the discs laying around in storage, and if they could upload that to mediafire it would be an incredible hobbyist tool for SGI owners.

[Raion]

I'm going to ask that you all share this privately because I'm not going to fight Disney. Otherwise I hope it comes up

[vishnu]

just to add to this the early Pixar work on using computers to support "traditional" animation, stemmed from the work done by Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull, two of the original Pixar Founders.

Ed Catmull and Jim Clark (yes, that Jim Clark) share a patent for Catmull Clark subdivision surfaces, look for their paper titled “Recursively Generated B-Spline Surfaces on Arbitrary Topological Meshes,” first published in Computer Aided Design 10, 1978). Catmull went on to found Pixar while Clark founded SGI. So far Catmull has won five Academy Awards for revolutionary technical achievements in filmmaking.

[GameBreaker64]

This thread hasn't seen any activity for a while so I'll shed some light on the subject. This info comes from a conversation I had with someone in the SGI User Group Discord who works at Pixar. I asked him if they have any old builds of the CAPS software and he had this to say:

"CAPS: hah! this is another thing I've been poking at. The answer is 'kinda'. I don't have a single complete source tree, but I have pulled together what I think is all of the pixar built stuff from backup tapes and stuff stashed away in the devs homedirs. (My office was next door to one of the people who built it years ago). I've found tapes that look like they have the disney built stuff and a test database, but pandemic has delayed getting that restored. there are multiple versions, the first one runs on a sun-3 connected to an image computer, later it's just an X app on an sgi. Disney ported some portion of it to linux and keeps a couple of computers around to run it to pull old data."

Hope this helps.