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Shading Tool Videos

Starting back in 2012 I created some videos to present to my fellow shading TD's at Pixar about how we might want to shade in the future. At the time we were shading all of our films using a Pixar/Renderman tool called Slim which was a very powerful but slow and cumbersome tool, and I wanted to present some new ideas for how we might want to create our complex procedural shaders. I originally focussed on 3 areas: creating networks, tools for managing those networks, and finally, realtime-rendering. These and other, more fleshed-out interface and workflow designs, along with the help of many other shading TD's, Designers and Engineers eventually helped create the shading tool we currently use on all our feature films at Pixar today, Flow. In 2017 I was given a Pixar Hero award for my contributions in helping design and build our new shading tool. Some of those videos are shown below. All of these were created in After Effects