BUILDING A CG WORLD  A Pixel-by-Pixel Approach
"Toy Story" marked art director Ralph Eggleston's introduction to the world of computer animation. The "heightened reality" look he envisioned for "Toy Story" resulted in a stylized world with realistic textures. After discussions with the director, Eggleston, who has since served as art director for "The Incredibles" as well as production designer for "Finding Nemo" and "WALL·E," designed a color script of the film's 28 major sequences.
Eggleston and his art department designed the contrasting worlds (i.e., bedrooms) of Andy and his twisted neighbor, Sid; the space-age motif of "Pizza Planet"; and the moonlit Dinoco gas station where Buzz and Woody join forces to find Andy.
Andy's bedroom was conceived as a refuge--a safe and comfortable environment flooded with warm pastels in which the toys can spring to life. "It gives one the feeling of being underwater," says Eggleston. In contrast, Sid's bedroom is a horrific torture chamber for toys, complete with black-light posters, a rusty barbed-wire bed and a single, bare light bulb.
The greatest challenge for the art and technical departments was creating believable human characters. The organic qualities of hair, skin and clothing render human characters among the most difficult objects to make convincing using computer-generated images. "I didn't want to attempt super-realism," says Lasseter. "But I also didn't want to make them overly simplified, because they'd wind up looking too much like the toys."
Clothing, with its precise wrinkles and creases, also presented challenges for the modeling, shading and art departments. "We could make those stiff, shiny objects look utterly real," Lasseter says. "But as soon as we attempted natural fiber, it was a quantum leap in visual complexity."
For "Toy Story," the Pixar team pioneered the technology that helped them navigate human characters, clothing and hair. It has continued to grow, as showcased in the studio's subsequent films.
Every creature, toy, prop and setting in "Toy Story" had to be created in virtual space, from a single blade of grass to the 1.2 million leaves on the trees in Andy's neighborhood. Each textured image started as a hand-drawn storyboard that went through a ten-step process before it was ready to be recorded on film.
"'Toy Story' was a landmark in the world of computer animation, but it was just the beginning of a revolution in animation," says producer Ralph Guggenheim. "'Toy Story' expanded the canvas for animated films. There are a variety of animation techniques, and they will continue to exist, but we broadened the horizon. The most amazing thing was that we were starting to scratch the surface."

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