At the heart of our Blue Sky system is the proprietary software package called CGI Studio™, often simply called Studio by those who work with it on a daily basis. Studio is primarily a powerful programming language and renderer, designed specifically to describe, manipulate, and visualize 3D elements.

Every scene we create is described in Studio's scripting language and will be read in to be rendered by a powerful ray-tracer. Ray-tracing is a rendering technique that projects virtual rays into a digital scene. When these rays intersect with an object, the software calculates the object's material properties and whether it has reflection, transparency, shadows and so on. The resultant lighting calculation is returned to the image plane as pixel intensities and colors. This technique is generally considered the most physically faithful way of creating 3D digital scenes.

One of the most exciting aspects of our software is its accuracy when it comes to simulating light, and the ways light interacts with surfaces. This is one area where using a ray- tracer really comes in handy, because the technique so closely mimics the way light works in the real world. It makes the entire image-making process extend another level where nearly all phenomena are reproduced with a single approach. Studio is designed to let artists construct and light a digital set just the way you'd want in real life, and to provide high quality images in all situations.

Another reason our images look so good is that we don't subdivide our curved surfaces into polygonal facets as many other software programs do. All of our surfaces are parametric patches including our sub-division surfaces which we render directly by solving the ray intersection with the patch. This keeps memory demands down, and avoids approximations that typically create shadow artifacts and difficulties with edge quality.

Our techniques for reproducing motion blur, reflection, refraction, global illumination, diffuse reflection, super-bright diffraction flaring, and even depth-of-field are physically-based, meaning that they faithfully follow the scientific principles that describe such phenomena. From there, we can bend the rules if we need to, but we have a solid foundation from which to begin.

Recent advances that build on this foundation include new developments in texturing and fur. The traditional way to apply texture is through the use of "maps". A map is a 2-D image, usually painted, which is "wrapped" or mapped onto a surface to provide material complexity. Our technique uses procedural textures. The drawback of this approach has been the lack of local control. We have developed interactive techniques for not only eliminating this problem, but at the same time enhancing the richness and breadth of the surfaces which artists can create. Our fur grooming techniques extend this notion of local control down to individual hairs. The fur and grass sensitivity can be animated, and is totally integrated into the renderer, supports all lighting features, including global illumination, and is self shadowing as well.

Studio also incorporates an advanced volumetric rendering capability that renders ray-traced steam, dust, clouds and other scattering media that interact with light sources, whose form is defined either by explicit geometric surfaces or procedurally generated implicit surfaces.

To facilitate the design process, we have a number of very powerful interactive tools. Our Interactive Renderer allows users to make changes in their scenes, re-render, and display the results in a matter of seconds. Information about the scene such as points in space, normals objects and their attributes can be retrieved by click on pixel locations. To improve performance further, any number of processors can be used as a distributed resource. The Material Design Editor, with its set of supporting texture / utility nodes, allows artists to design complex material networks and export them as compiled procedural textural elements for CGIStudio. Our Image Flipbook, with rudimentary editing capabilities, allows users to view their shots with sound in the context of surrounding shots. It also affords the user the ability to "scrub" the animation and retrieve basic image data.

When the time comes to render our animation, our Render Queue Manager manages the task of allocating computing resources, recognizing dependencies, handling priorities, rendering and compositing. The series of files that describe everything in every frame of a scene: lights, objects, camera location, etc. are read into Studio and the frame is computed, pixel by pixel, line by line, until it's done. Then the finished frame is sent to a file server storage system: a sort of holding pen for lots of images, and is eventually recorded as part of a sequence and viewed. This process is efficiently managed over the 500+ processors in the render farm as well as any available workstations (150+) around the clock.

With such a large amount of data and information traveling with each shot, our in-house Production Tracking software allows artists, TDs, and managers to know everything they need to about their sequences and shots in order for them to work efficiently. It enables them to communicate issues both forward and backwards through the pipeline and provides a historical record of every significant change made to shots and other assets. It provides custom reports, and ties in relevant imagery and other media for reference. The entire system is easily plugged into by our other in-house software. And since our needs change with every film, it is extremely flexible in order to suit even the unexpected future tracking needs.