1356 The always useful Macworld UK has clued us in to an interesting article from Millimeter Magazine about a new OS X program developed in-house at Pixar.

Pixar is, of course, Steve Jobs's other company, and is responsible for such hit CGI movies as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and now, The Incredibles. But while in production for that last film, Pixar ran into a problem. The director of the film, Brad Bird, was used to 2D animation, and expressing his ideas by sketching them out; difficult to do when your newest creation exists only on a computer screen.

So Pixar developed Review Sketch, a program that, along with a Wacom tablet, allowed Bird to do line drawings "on top of" the computer animation.

Pixar's technical gurus tackled the challenge using the Cintiq as a hardware gateway. Weber and fellow designers Brendan Donohoe and Max Drukman developed the user interface, and Johnson provided sketching code that he'd been writing for use on the Macintosh OS X platform. Weber also volunteered the services of her summer intern Antoine McNamara, who was aided by Johnson's intern Josh Anon. After a summer of brainstorming, McNamara put together the completed application.

The Review Sketch tool, which resides on all the Macs at Pixar, contains features that addressed Bird's style of working. The director could draw on an image, and then play it back with the image moving underneath his drawing. A slider let him choose the width of the anti-aliased line.

“Most people dial it way down and have a very fine line,� notes Johnson. “Brad would use a two- or three-pixel line as his hard line.�

Read on for more information about this creative solution. No word yet if the Review Sketch program will be made available to the general public, but be sure to watch for the e-mail petition on Slashdot demading it be Open Sourced.

Bill's been using Macs since the late 80s. When he's not making smartass remarks to amuse Kirk Hiner, he enjoys fighting for the user.

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