Hi there.

I find programming graphics extremely interesting, especially within game engines and animated movies from studios such as Pixar and Disney.

Creating a game engine is no easy task, although, you find plenty of tutorials and open source projects to help you on your way to creating your own. However, I have yet to see any tutorials based on non-realtime graphic solutions for things like animated movies, which is what I'm interested in. Does anyone know of any tutorials/papers/open source projects that would help me on my way to creating something in which I could create (simple) non-realtime animated movies like ones you see from Pixar/Disney.

I think the easiest and cheapest way to get into animated movies, is to use Blender. You can create models and animations but also render them for a full movie. Actually they made a movie completely in blender with a big bunny ( don't know the name right now)

If you want to do it on your own, you have to write an engine (Rasterizer like UE4, Unity etc. or Raytracer like 3D Studio Max, Blender etc.) and store keyframes on a timeline with matrices (position, rotation, scale) for every object/objectpart in your scene. Now you can interpolate between those frames, render and store them as a video.

I think the easiest and cheapest way to get into animated movies, is to use Blender. You can create models and animations but also render them for a full movie. Actually they made a movie completely in blender with a big bunny ( don't know the name right now)

If you want to do it on your own, you have to write an engine (Rasterizer like UE4, Unity etc. or Raytracer like 3D Studio Max, Blender etc.) and store keyframes on a timeline with matrices (position, rotation, scale) for every object/objectpart in your scene. Now you can interpolate between those frames, render and store them as a video.

I think I've seen that big bunny movie thing, I didn't know it was done in Blender.

I'm more into the programming and technical aspect and practically useless when it comes to art so making a movie would be incredibly hard for me. Thanks for the tips on what I'd need to do in order to make this engine, I'll do some more research and compile a big list of everything that a common animated movie engine requires.

I've also found an open source renderer, http://www.renderpixie.com/ which is an alternative to renderman. Although it doesn't include things like physics.

The Blender Projects space is a pretty good place to start. They have a variety of movies and shorts made with Blender, and there are detailed development blogs for each one.

Thanks, I'll have a look.

The SIGGRAPH shading courses:

• 2012
• 2013
• 2014
• 2015

Contain information about both online and offline rendering, including heavy descriptions from Disney & Pixar.

I find programming graphics extremely interesting, especially within game engines and animated movies from studios such as Pixar and Disney.

Creating a game engine is no easy task, although, you find plenty of tutorials and open source projects to help you on your way to creating your own. However, I have yet to see any tutorials based on non-realtime graphic solutions for things like animated movies, which is what I'm interested in.

Probably because you should be looking for rendering engines and not game engines. A Rendering Engine is only a subset of Game Engines (which also deal with Physics, AI, Networking, Audio).
Furthermore you'll probably get info about realtime rendering methods, while you should be looking for offline raytracers, pathtracers and the like, which is what's used in (most) animated movies. Mitsuba can be very educational.

Thanks! This helps a lot.

I have also been looking at papers pixar provide on rendering techniques etc (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/).