People are still amazed that Toy Story 4’s cobwebs were made by AI spiders [Video]

We’ve written before in our roundup of Disney animation secrets about how Pixar used AI spiders to create the cobwebs for Toy Story 4. It’s a fact that never ceases to amaze people, but today’s it’s creating a whole new debate: was it really AI?

To recap, the cobwebs you saw in Toy Story 4 weren’t created by human artists or pulled from a reference library. They were generated by digital spiders that don’t actually exist. Pixar dubbed these critters ‘AI spiders’ since they were created mathematically as a form of machine learning.

Pixar’s Dylan Sisson told us at our own Vertex event back in 2021 about how technical director Hosuk Chang’s team created the swarm of AI spiders in Houdini so that they would weave webs like real spiders would.

“They would go into these nooks and crannies and start weaving webs,” Sisson told us. “We’d render these webs out and that was pretty helpful.” In the video above …