DisneyBluLife wrote:I think they had cels up until shows like Recess. Earlier seasons of Recess was drawn on cels and then switched to digital during the later seasons.
Perhaps different shows switched to digital at various times. DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp was the last Disney feature (between The Little Mermaid and the featurette The Prince and the Pauper) which used cel animation. While it was a Disneytoon Studios production and not from Disney Animation Studios, it shows that other forms of digital tools than CAPS didn't take long to arrive at other studios.
Yes, it is hard to know for sure unless we see documentation or hear it straight from the horse's mouth.
Some more info about CAPS (I'm adding it here instead of bumping old threads), from Computer Graphics World, July 1994. There is not much new information, but still interesting:
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.an ... OkkuV0Yr7w
On screen, a film loop of a black and white pencil test is playing. "This is a simple multiplane scene," says Tucker, who realizes what she's said, and laughs. "There used to be no way you could put the words 'simple' and 'multiplane' together. There are seven pieces of art here. That was the limit conventionally." Now there are no limits. It's not unusual for a scene to have from 50 to 100 layers.
"In Little Mermaid there are three multiplane shots because that's all we could afford and all we could really manipulate. In The Lion King there are hundreds."
Various sections of one painted background might be scanned at different resolutions to accommodate camera moves yet efficiently manage data requirements. For example, as the camera zooms in on the stained glass window in the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast, the window is scanned at higher resolutions. "I scan exactly what's needed as it's needed and only that," says Robyn Roberts, supervisor of Scanning.
"We used to have a limited number of palettes for a film--about nine--although in Mermaid we had a lot."
The original goal for CAPS was to keep the Disney animation process, streamline it, and bring back the quality that had been lost after 1950. "Disney reached its low point in animation 10 years ago with the release of Black Cauldron," says Schneider. "By and large, no one thought there was any value in animation." To create the movies of the '30s and '40s by hand at Disney would have been tremendously expensive, and the little new technology introduced in the production process, the Xerox machine, had actually hurt the image quality.
"It was really Roy Disney who, in the takeover, ended up with the animation division," says Schneider. "He said to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, 'Wait a minute, go off and fix live action. But the animation division is very special. Don't touch it.' " Disney and Schneider pushed through a proposal for the CAPS system, a proposal meticulously developed (and cost-justified) by Lem Davis and other Disney engineers earlier, but not acted upon. Then, Disney contracted with Pixar and began working with Alvy Ray Smith on system specifications.
"The system wasn't tested," adds Hahn. "It wasn't really finished."
"If you look back on it, it was a stupid decision we made, because what if it hadn't really worked?" says Schneider. "It was very exciting. It was really pioneering. But it was on the edge the entire way. We were all here 24 hours a day for weeks."
The graphics system has been ported from the proprietary Pixar Image Computers onto general-purpose workstations. The port took nearly two years, but it's done. "I have it running on several platforms," says Yanover. "We don't want it to be tied to any platform. We want it to be open."
Then we get to know that CAPS has been used in "Nightmare Before Christmas, Dave, and other movies". Can't remember a Disney movie called Dave, and what other movies? The features in the canon, or someone else?
We can expect this new CAPS to include new features. Already, Hahn and his team have added live-action special effects in response to a request from Disney's Buena Vista division. The effects have been used in Nightmare Before Christmas, Dave, and other movies.
Here it sounds like they had huge plans for hand-drawn animation. They were working on Pocahontas when the article was written. After that, only 13 more were made (11 CAPS, 2 ToonBoom), and the rest is computer animated.
The switch to workstations is timed to take place with the move to a new, flashier building in December-- the fulfillment of a promise to Feature Animation from Michael Eisner after the success of Beauty and the Beast.
"There will be a lot of new functions and tools to provide artists new ways to do things," says Mark Kimball, who has been largely responsible for the system logistics. "I believe the new tools will have as much impact in the future as CAPS has had up until now."
Adds Schneider: "I look at CAPS as a first step, sort of the engine that allows us to do everything we do filmmaking-wise, whether it's the rack focus, the 360-degree camera shot, the wildebeests, the dust, the multiple images.