How Pixar uses AI and GANs to create high-resolution content

As digital animators continue to push the boundaries of technology and creativity, the technical teams that support them are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver the tools they need. That's the case at Pixar, where the company has made new machine learning breakthroughs it hopes will both improve quality and reduce costs. Vaibhav Vavilala, technical director at Pixar Animation Studios, has been leading some of those efforts after carefully studying recent scientific literature and monitoring the work at the R&D labs of parent company Disney. Vavilala said those advances have the potential to reduce Pixar's datacenter footprint by half for some stages of production. Vavilala made his remarks during a presentation at VentureBeat's Transform 2020 conference. In recent years, Vavilala has worked on the lighting and rendering optimization team on such Pixar movies as Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. But a couple of years ago, he began focusing on a concept called Deep Learned Super Resolution.