Pixar's Andrew Dayton

I think the things we look at generally is what we can use real-time graphics for to help us approximate what the renders will be. Can we use stuff from the GPU to give us a real-time sense of these assets, so we can utilise and quickly modify them?

So that when we poke "Render" - and when we do that, we're talking per frame, that can go anywhere between 3-10 hours, with 24 frames per second we have to visualise... So for us we're looking at what gaming is doing, what they use.

Well, they use the GPU - so what can we get from that sort of technology, from offloading some of our work onto the GPU that we've not been able to do traditionally? It's one of those things where we're not using the technology for the final output, but we are looking at game technology to increase production up to that final output.

It depends on what you're looking for. If you're talking about Pixar, we're a different medium - we're not trying to make it completely realistic. If we did, well s**t - shoot it live! But if you look at what James Cameron did with Avatar, whether you like the story or not, I thought what he did in that film was completely revolutionary.

He took snippets of what WETA did for Lord of the Rings, and even then they had The Uncanny Valley on those films. But once they went into the Avatar world, you saw what he did with motion capture, performance capture and the rigs that he created, he proved without a shadow of a doubt that you can get near photo-realism.

Is that something we would do? No, because we're not doing action adventure live-action films. What we do is more like saying: "Well, wouldn't Cinderella have been more awesome if it was photo-real?" No, probably not, it's a different medium.

Because of that difference from reality to that style, you can do certain things in that medium that you couldn't get away with in live action... Avatar's renderer is Pixar's renderer, it's our software it's rendered on. It just shows you what you can do when you're tasked with the impossible.

This technology is something that's available for us now, but it might be available for gaming further down the road. It might not be something that you can render in real-time yet, but it's possible that there are ways of getting the processors there - it's all a matter of number-crunching at this point. We've proven we can do it, it's just who's going to be the one that comes up and has the Avatar-like game, that completely changes the rules.