And lastly on the animation front, there was no real pipeline for bringing traditional animators into a CG environment.
If we want to fix the look of a kettle in the background, we don’t need to re-render the whole scene, we can just re-render the kettle. Today, we use compositing tricks to find more efficient ways to get to the final look. When you rendered an entire scene, if you needed to fix one aspect, you had to re-render again. Back then, they were rendering right out of the 3D environment what you saw was what you got.
Simulations would have taken forever to create, light and render - today, out of the box simulations look fantastic. Today you have reflection maps, while back then you had to fake it. Going through the pipeline differences between 1995 and today, we now have photorealistic lighting and environment maps - which you wouldn’t have back then. So the timeline could be much more condensed or at least give you so much more instant feedback, that you could rapidly improve the quality and have a lot of flexibility over the story as you work. The speed of GPU (which unlocks better quality and more iterations) would be exponentially faster. In terms of hardware, a key difference is that we have great looking GPU rendering now, which Pixar didn’t have.
