Pixar 2023
Reimagining Lighting at Pixar
When you’re designing tools for the world’s best artists, the challenge isn’t just technical—it’s about fueling creativity. Here’s how I helped Pixar’s lighting team achieve that with Luna.
I led the design of a new set of lighting tools for Pixar's upcoming feature film "Hoppers". By innovating on the new lighting pipeline, we cut iteration time by half, allowing over 80 lighting artists to explore and refine their creative visions without technical delays.
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
3 x Product Designers
2 x Engineering Leads
14 x Engineers
AREA
Strategy
Research
Design
USERS
80 x Lighting Artists
The Context and Ask
At Pixar, lighting isn’t just a technical task — it’s the heart of storytelling. Lighters, the talented artists behind the lighting, use color and light to set the tone and mood, shaping the visual experience and driving the narrative. As Pixar continues to push the boundaries of visual storytelling, our lighting artists were facing mounting challenges. Relying on third-party tools, they struggled with complexity and efficiency, limiting their creative flow.
That’s when I was brought on board to design a new set of lighting tools within Presto, Pixar’s animation software. My mission was to rethink the future of lighting by introducing multi-rendering, in-image workflows, and advanced asset manipulation. The goal — To create an intuitive, powerful set of tools that would not only simplify workflows but also empower lighting artists to tell even more compelling stories through their craft.
Solution
To address these challenges, I designed a set of lighting editors within Presto, tailored to the unique needs and creative approach of Pixar’s lighting artists. By seamlessly integrating these new tools into their workflow, we empowered the team with intuitive interfaces for advanced asset manipulation and real-time multi-rendering. This transformation not only simplified complex tasks but also gave artists more control and flexibility in their process. As a result, the lighting pipeline became significantly more efficient, allowing artists to focus on what they do best: telling powerful stories through light and color.
Lighting in Presto
Current Experience & Problems
At Pixar, lighting artists rely on Katana, a powerful tool that’s central to the breathtaking visuals in our films. Over the years, we’ve extended Katana’s capabilities to meet the unique needs of our ever-evolving movie pipeline, allowing for innovative and customized lighting approaches on each project.
However, as we’ve built upon Katana’s features, the toolset has grown increasingly complex. This expansion has introduced new challenges for both artists and engineers as we continue to push the boundaries of what lighting can do in our films.
Three key issues have emerged:
Speed and Performance: Rendering heavy shots has become slower, creating bottlenecks that disrupt the creative flow. On top of that, a tedious user experience further slows things down, limiting the ability to quickly experiment and refine ideas.
Efficiency in Workflow: Many repetitive, manual tasks have become a burden for our artists, taking valuable time away from their creative problem-solving. These time-consuming processes slow down the overall workflow, reducing the time available for exploration and innovation.
Scalability and Flexibility: Currently, artists can only iterate on one shot at a time. If a change is needed, they must go through each shot containing that light and make the adjustments manually. There are few options for batch editing, and those that exist are overly complex and difficult to use.
Katana's UI
Core Product Goals
Rethinking a new experience over the traditional way of lighting meant grounding myself in core goals from the very start. I wanted to make sure I was designing for the future, not just giving old tools a facelift. I facilitated a design sprint with lighting artists and key stakeholders to delve into current artist workflows and define clear product goals. Here are the key goals we uncovered for the new product.
Center creativity on the Image, not the tools: Over the years, adding new tools to Katana for lighting created a scattered feature set, pulling lighters away from their core focus: the image. One of our goals with the new lighting experience was to allow artists to work directly within the image itself.
Integrate seamlessly with existing standards: Presto has been an animation software for years — but would be a new tool for lighting artists. We set out to add features for lighters while preserving the best of Presto’s existing functionality.
Change management: Ultimately, any new interface is never about us. A new fancy tool can be fun to design and might look great on first glance, but can be genuinely scary for users. We had to ensure that the users could onboard on this new experience seamlessly with minimal training or handholding.
Improve lighting speed: One of the biggest pain points that stood out during my research was speed. One user shared how often they had to plan their breaks and structure their day around long render times and a sluggish interface. The team was determined to significantly focus and improve the speed of lighting workflows by leveraging advancements in multi-rendering technology and streamlining the overall user experience.
Complexity Management: As we bring more editors and image-based workflows to Presto, we also introduce a significant amount of complexity. The tools need to be robust, often needing advanced technical capabilities to support the growing demands of the workflows. While some level of complexity is unavoidable, we wanted to ensure that editors can manage it effectively by designing tools that are intuitive, scalable, and tailored to their needs. This means providing clear visual hierarchies, smart defaults, and customizable options to empower editors to focus on their creativity without feeling overwhelmed by the system’s intricacies.
Design Sprint Board
Inside Luna
With those goals in mind, here’s a look at some of the editors I worked on, the questions I wrestled with and the design decisions I made, and what Presto with Lighting could look like moving forward. I'll be sharing two major editors that I worked on, the design decisions and a bit about my process.
Envisioning a new Future with Multi-Shot Workflows
I began my design process by identifying the core workflows of the artists. Along with my team, we led a 7-day sprint to gain a deep understanding of the user pipeline and key concepts. These early insights allowed us to visualize what this new approach would look like and gave us a solid foundation to build upon.
We explored a suite of ideas for working in the image and key workflows
A day in the life of a Lighter…
We were designing a tool for expert users with years of experience, so before fully diving into development, we needed to validate our approach. Rather than overhauling everything, we focused on a few key features to present an early version of the experience. I created sketches and a script that illustrated a day in the life of a lighter, helping users visualize the tool’s value and providing early feedback.
Taking inspiration from Pixar’s creative process, I crafted a story pitch to bring the tool’s potential to life and guide our next steps.
Story reel capturing moments from Jolene, a lighter, as she begins her workday.
After sharing our vision, we not only secured stakeholder buy-in but also received invaluable feedback from artists. This feedback helped us refine the interactions, ensuring they were intuitive and aligned with real-world workflows. Once we identified the right direction, we focused on developing the core editors, setting the foundation for the next phase of our project.
Monitor Editor
Center your creativity on Image
Monitor, our first editor for lighters in Presto, was an opportunity to rethink how lighting artists interact with their work. The goal was simple yet ambitious: bring focus to the image itself. Monitor introduced a multi-tiled view, enabling artists to render multiple shots side-by-side effortlessly.
I designed the experience to make sure that the image manipulation tools were integrated directly into the editor such as — selection, selective rendering (or Region of Interest), a render catalog for managing iterations, and seamless switching between renders. These features empower artists to experiment, iterate quickly, and stay immersed in the creative process without breaking focus.
New Monitor Editor
Edit multiple shots simultaneosuly
To help users focus on the primary image while managing multiple renders, my team and I conducted extensive user studies to understand their workflow challenges and ideate solutions. A key goal was to enable users to view variations of primary and secondary render images simultaneously, allowing them to efficiently assess lighting changes across shots without losing focus on the primary image.
Key Design Decisions:
Primary Image View: A distraction-free view that emphasizes the primary image, allowing users to focus on detailed lighting adjustments.
Grid View: A comprehensive layout to display all open shots, enabling users to monitor changes across multiple renders in real time.
Primary + Slate View: Combines the primary image with a bottom slate of secondary images, making it easy to switch between shots or view critical frames (e.g., first, middle, last) while editing lighting seamlessly.
This design ensured a balance between focus and efficiency, giving artists the flexibility to make changes across shots with ease.
User stories to understand artists needs
Multiple render
Optimizing Workflow and Focus
Currently, Presto’s editors work independently, offering flexibility but resulting in a fragmented workflow. With Monitor, we aimed to empower artists by bringing essential tools alongside their images, minimizing distractions and allowing them to focus on their creative work.
Key Design Decisions:
Sidebar Panel: Positioned tools to the side rather than the top bar, maintaining a consistent image size and reducing distractions.
Collapsible Tools: Contextually revealed tools that adapted to the artist’s current workflow, keeping the interface clean and focused.
Dismissible Sidebar: Allowed artists to hide the sidebar completely, giving them more control over their workspace and maximizing image space.
Monitor Sidebar design
Collections Editor
Elevating Light Manipulation: Expression-Based Workflow in Presto
In Katana, light edits depend on a node-based system where users define collections of assets for batch actions. With Presto, we took this concept further by enabling lighters to perform powerful manipulations across multiple assets using an advanced expression language.
Key Design Decisions:
Interactive Expression Editor: A user-friendly tool with a Quick Reference guide to support experimentation and syntax learning.
Live Evaluation and Asset Selection: Real-time feedback and direct selection of assets or lights within the shot.
Seamless Collection Integration: Simplified access to collections on any light property for smoother workflows.
Save as a Collection Asset: Expressions can be saved as assets, allowing users to manipulate multiple assets simultaneously.
Collections Editor
Light Linking Using Collections
Light Linking allows lighters to associate lights with specific objects in a scene, providing the flexibility to highlight or exclude objects for more dynamic lighting control. Unlike live-action lighting, which is fixed, digital lighting gives us the power to selectively direct light to certain objects or avoid others to emphasize the main focus of the scene.
In Katana, this process is handled via an “On/Off” UI, where objects are manually selected and added to either the “on” or “off” collections. So if you want to turn the light ONLY on a character say - Buzz. You'd put the /world in the off collection and Buzz in the On. While functional, this approach can be tedious, requiring explicit selection to turn lights on or off for each object, making it a cumbersome task for lighters.
We aimed to simplify this process by using collections - reducing a lot of manual effort of selecting dragging and dropping to do light linking and making the workflow more intuitive for the artists.
Key Design Decisions:
One list to control what is turned ON* like an expression
Allow users to be able to add Pre-saved collections
Select objects and drag and drop to the editor
Light Linking In Presto
Light Linking in Katana previously
Presto Expression In comparison to Katana
Reflections
Navigating product strategy can feel overwhelming, especially when users are experts, the team is new, and collaboration processes are still taking shape. This project was a journey through uncertainty, where I learned how to make the most of limited resources. It wasn’t about following a traditional design process, but transforming a huge undertaking of a technological advancedments to something useful for artists.
Working with Pixar’s talented engineers, lighting artists, and other stakeholders was key to the success of this project. I collaborated closely with engineers to ensure that our design integrated seamlessly with the existing pipeline. Regular feedback and collaboration with the lighting team helped refine the toolset, ensuring it addressed their needs and provided real-time improvements to their workflow. Iterating based on this collaboration was essential to developing a tool that genuinely empowered the artists.
I lead a new XFN Design Process tailored to Pixar's unique needs
This project pushed me to think creatively under constraints and work closely with a multidisciplinary team. The experience taught me how to translate complex technical challenges into intuitive design solutions. Going forward, I’m excited to apply the skills I gained in collaboration, iteration, and problem-solving to future projects, continuing to design tools that amplify creativity while improving efficiency.
