Pixar movie Elemental uses AI in one of the smartest ways possible

The latest family-friendly flick from Pixar, Elemental is confirmed to have used AI to help create one of its most striking visual effects, the company confirmed in an interview with Wired.

Pixar’s Elemental might be yet another animated summer blockbuster, but the effort taken into lovingly crafting its digital words requires a lot of brute force and a lot of power. The result? We called Elemental “visually stunning” in our review. To help the company get over the line and deliver a breathtaking-looking film, Pixar has spilled the beans on how its stunning flame effects were created over in an interview at Wired.

Director Peter Sohn states in the interview that animating one of its principal characters, Ember required effects pass on every single frame of the character that Pixar generates. This would have been extremely time-consuming, even with the powerful GPUs which the company has access to.

However, an experimental paper detailing something named “Neural Style Transfer”, a type of artificial intelligence-powered method that allows images to move like voxels in animation. This would allow the team to simply run the tool over a simpler-looking fire effect, without as much of the GPU overhead. According to the interview, there was only a 50% chance that the method would prove to be worthwhile.

Pixar enlists AI and machine learning labs

Wired / Pixar / Disney

To help develop an internal solution, Pixar teamed up with Disney Research Studios, which specializes in machine learning and AI. “Many of us didn’t do machine learning until it started becoming prevalent recently, so we’ve kind of learned on the job,” notes Paul Kanyuk, a technical supervisor who worked on Elemental.

Following regular meetings to tackle the issue, the team eventually devised a method, which was used in tandem with the Neural Style Transfer to achieve an AI-assisted effect for Ember’s flames.

“Once you apply a style transfer to naturalistic fire, you can actually start to direct its style and start to bring the artist’s hand into something that is otherwise not touchable,” states co-character supervisor Jeremie Talbot.

Using AI as a tool for artists

Here, Pixar has displayed a near-effortless way to generate AI effects, with their own unique style and personality, making it one of the best applications of an AI-assisted tool that we’ve seen yet. Though GPU overheads were extreme, the company also found a way to virtualize the GPUs in order to take the rendering times down from five minutes per frame to just one second per frame.

Director Peter Sohn continues: “It’s this coming together of left brain and right brain, and using technology as a tool to help express emotions,”

With AI gaining so much traction in 2023 so far, it’s refreshing to see its application being so ingenious, while the tech industry is embroiled in an arms race between Microsoft, Google, Meta, and more, companies are only going to turn to AI for solutions more in the future.