Aaaah so you mean there were no stepped keys at Pixar before this tool? Nowadays it's such a widespread workflow I didn't think everything was spline from the start back then! And no keys to drag along the timeline/graph editor (if they even existed) either?

Oh no, there were stepped keys, it’s just not what most people were using for blocking. Precise spline crafting was a huge part of the look of early Pixar animation (they obviously still are) but to show held keys for blocking wasn’t the method at the time. The method was blocking out animation with fairly polished splines for root with a bit more rough animation elsewhere and playing your animation on 1s. The tools we mostly used were split (spline tool) and mdt (spreadsheet style editor) and cuet (timeline cel style editor) for blocking.

Love your work! And so cool to get to read about some animation history! Thanks for sharing!

This is so cool to read while I take a break from the spline polishing I'm doing for class that's currently draining my life force

Inspirational. I love it, thank you for sharing your story, I always wondered how y'all managed to make it look so smooth!

I was just wondering... when you were working on the Incredibles, did you get to keep the playblasts that you made? Did you have to request Pixar to give you a copy of your playblasts or did you just hide the file on some disk drive or personal storage? Is Pixar strict?

woahhh thats such an interesting piece of animation history, thank you for sharing!! were people previously using spline for blocking?

I really want to see your animation in Monsters Inc

My favorite scene was Tony, the octopus armed monster handing out fruit and falling through the grates. I worked on that blocking until 4am and had my supervisor show it for me the next morning. Apparently it went over well in dailies and I didn't know until I remerged at work hours later. That scene almost broke me.

Where themodels for the other Omnidroid ever built?

Can you elaborate on what the tool does? You pose every frame and then draw the x sheet to make it move the poses where you draw? Is there any public making off where we can see it?

Because some of the models were so slow (Elastigirl would take 4 seconds to update with her heaviest anim model) so we needed a way quickly play with timing and posing. (The models were heavy because of features and lack of desktop power at the time, not because of the optimization of the chars dept.) So you would pose your character on frames 1,2,3,4,5,etc, then load an image of those poses into x-sheet. You could then drag your poses around while playing in real time, then execute your timing where x-sheet would retime your poses back into the scene. Once I had poses working, I would then start on breakdowns and at that point the shot was ready to show for blocking. I was unusual in that I used x-sheet for polish as well, animating with linear curves.

yeah well Im sure Brad Bird would be open to anything that would improve not just work flow but the expressiveness of the animation

Brad Bird and Pixar made it all possible. When Brad came to the studio he wanted all the troublemakers on his show - and he got us. He looked for hungry young filmmakers that had unconventional ideas and brought us all together. Pixar was amazing in the support they gave him. He inspired everyone and Pixar was permanently improved by his vision. Anyone that works with Brad wants nothing more than to work with him again. I can't say enough good things about Pixar or Brad.

This is brilliant. Now you guys were wild for elastic girls model and animation.

The shot where Helen flattens against the wall when breaking into Syndrome's base almost broke me. I had to ask the extremely talented Rob Russ to help me finish the shot when she goes flat against the wall to avoid the tram. It was too technical for me. He was such a champ and landed the shot beautifully.