Rethinking Lighting tools at Pixar
Pixar's new image based lighting tool that transforms the way artists light animated movies.
Role
Product Designer
Team
3 Product Designers,
2 x Engineering Leads,
14 x Engineers
Users
80 Lighting Artists
Area
Strategy, Research, Design
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.
Context
At Pixar, lighting is more than technical it’s storytelling. Lighters use color and light to shape mood, guide the eye, and deepen emotion. But as storytelling grew more ambitious, our current third-party lighting tools couldn’t keep up.
I was brought onto Pixar to redesign lighting tools within Presto, Pixar’s animation software - introducing multi-rendering, in-image workflows, and smarter asset manipulation. The goal was to streamline complexity and give artists more creative control to light with intention.
Lit Shot from Coco 2017
Solution
I designed a set of lighting editors in Presto, built around the unique needs of Pixar’s artists. With real time multi rendering and intuitive asset controls, the tools streamlined complexity and boosted creative freedom, making the lighting pipeline faster, smoother, and more artist-driven.
A set of editors in Presto for lighting
I'll be sharing a few core editors that I worked on and some features
A multi rendering image Monitor
An expression based collection platform to create collections and manage primitives in the scene procedurally
