"Red's Dream" is the latest computer-animated film produced by Pixar's Animation Production group. The film is directed by John Lasseter.

"Red's Dream" is the latest computer-animated film produced by Pixar's Animation Production group. The film reveals what philosophers and poets have long wondered: What do unicycles dream about on rainy nights? Red, relegated to the discount section of a big-city bicycle shop, dreams of running off to the circus where, while assisting Lumpy the clown, the unicycle saves the show.

The film is directed by John Lasseter, with technical direction by Eben Ostby, William Reeves, and H.B. Siegel. Pixar's last production, "Luxo jr.," received an Academy Award nomination in 1987 for Best Animated Short Film, as well as awards at several U. S. and international film festivals. "Red's Dream", like its predecessor demonstrates computer animation's. The film premiered at the July, 1987 SIGGRAPH (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) convention in Anaheim, California.

"Red's Dream" includes several technical achievements in computer animation. Almost half of the film was rendered using the Pixar Image Computer, manufactured and marketed by Pixar. Using the ChapReyes image synthesis software, the Image Computer rendered frames of the film's dream sequence in 8 - 10 minutes. By comparison, rendering these frames on a typical minicomputer would consume roughly three hours of computation per frame, or almost nine months of computer time for the entire sequence.

Several scenes were rendered with procedural texturing techniques, self-shadowing, and motion blur and, in some cases, particle systems. They were computed on two Computer Consoles Power 6/32 processors. Animation for "Red's Dream" was created using a Power 6/32 computer and an Evans & Sutherland PS350 running Pixar's own key frame animation system supplemented by procedural animation software.

Examples from the film "Red's Dream", which represent some of Pixar's technology in generating realistic imagery.

The bicycle shop image involves over 10.000 modeling primitives, such as spokes and hubs, which are diced into 30 million surface elements. In addition, the scene includes shadows, self-shadowing, and a variety of special light sources. Modeling was done using constructive solid geometry and boundary representations, with certain objects, such as the wheels, procedurally defined. Surface characteristics, which are also procedurally defined, involved 15MB of texture data. The tire treads, for example, are modeled with procedural displacement maps.

The street scene at the beginning of the film involves perhaps half as much geometry, but twice as much texture information; and it includes rain and reflections off rippling puddles. The variety, complexity, and sheer volume of the elements contributing to these entirely computer generated images points up the requirements of photo realism, requirements that are not considered in the current graphics standards. Pixar's Animation Production group creates animation for feature-length films employing the same techniques used in "Red's Dream". Previous animation was included in "Young Sherlock Holmes" "Return of the Jedi" and "Star Trek 11".