[quote=AN]How do you think they made Casper if Pixar is the only company that was developing characters 100% in CGI? I guess I’m just not in awe about a movie 100% in CGI as you are.[/quote]
Big difference — in Toy Story, the entire world is rendered. Everything else up until that point involved overlaying CGI on top of film. The difficulty in a 100% rendered film is that all of the physics have to be simulated, every object interacting with every other object, every surface, every shadow, everything. Motion, collision, deformation, etc… This is unbelievably complex and can probably only be appreciated by people who have studied or worked with the technology. And to do a full length movie in 1995 when a $20K workstation ran at 100MHz and had only 64MB of RAM! You needed banks and banks of these expensive machines to render the frames, you needed tons of special software to manage the huge job of rendering everything, this was huge but they pulled it off.
I’m actually not a big fan of animated films but some of them are great. I am a big fan of software though and I appreciate the difficulty of doing things like this…