Hello, I’ve worked in 3D animation productions. Short answer: You can get close.

Unreal Engine has the capacity to deliver something of similar quality in real time providing you have a powerful enough rig. You would need not only the hardware but also the technical know how to optimize several aspects of your scenes. Basically the knowledge of a mid to senior unreal TD and a mid to senior generalist combined to say the least.

Digital Foundry compared the first movie with Kingdom Hearts 3 back in 2017. Worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/tkDadVrBr1Y

Things that can affect it, with some wild estimates on how it reduces the 800kh:

• Processors are 10-100 times faster. Divide by 100ish.
• A common laptop CPU has 16 cores. Divide by 16.
• GPUs and CPUs have more and faster math operations for numbers. Divide by 10.
• RAM speeds and processor cache lines are larger and faster. Divide by 10.
• Modern processors have more and stronger SIMD instructions. Divide by 10.
• Ray tracing algorithms may be replaced with more efficient ones. Divide by 2.

That brings it down to 3-4 hours I think, which can be brought to realtime by tweaking resolution.

So it looks plausible!

With a modern game engine and PBR shaders you can definitely get the same look as the movie. If you try to render it exactly the way they did it with a software renderer on the CPU then maybe. Their rendering software, Reyes, didn’t use raytracing or path tracing at all. You can read about it here

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Reyes/paper.pdf

I only skimmed it but it seems what they call micro polygons is just subdivision. Which can also be done realtime with tessellation.

Yes and no.

You could get away with it with lots of tricks to down sample and compress at times where even an rtx 5090 with 32GB VRAM is like 1/64th of what you’d need to do in high fidelity.

So you could “do it” but it wouldn’t be “it”.

Modern GPUs are easily 1000x faster than the ones back then, so 800k hours would be reduced to 800h which is a month worth of time. Thats just raw compute tho, there is lots of optimization work that has happened in the last 30 years, so its probably waaay less than that. I would expect it to be possible in a few days on a single high end GPU depending on how closely you want to replicate the graphics. Some rendering things might be impossible to reproduce in identical manner due to a loss of the exact system and software used back then.

I’d say you could render something close in real time. I’m not entirely aware of all techniques used in this film, but seeing what we can render at 60fps in terms of games, I think you could find a way of achieving a Toy Story look at 24fps. You may need a lot of tweaking though, depending on what you use (i was thinking about EEVEE, the Blender ‘real-time’ engine, and I know there are a bunch of settings and workarounds to use to get good results, and i think they may tend to make the render not real-time (like 0.5s, 1s, 2s per frame, so quite fast but not real time)

Basically to sum it up:

• Render the actual movie from original files, hard because of the inherent technical challenges

• Recreate the movie, easy from a technical perspective for your machine to render, hard (potentially very hard) from an artistic and design perspective.

Doubtful

I’m not talking out my ass, a good buddy of mine worked for frantic films for decades and I myself learned 3D alongside him… We would squabble over the rendering farm too…

Anyways most of the renderers made for those early movies were custom built. And anytime you custom build, you can’t generalize to output to a different system. So it’s a long way of saying no but maybe, if you wrote a custom renderer that was specifically designed to handle the architecture of the scenes and the art and the lighting and blah blah blah

Edit oh and you would probably need the Lord of all graphics cards, possibly multiple in a small array with custom therading software

Kingdom Hearts 3 Toy Story world looked damn close to the original, so I’d assume maybe if work was put into it?

Fun fact: in the first Toy Story, all the kids at Andy’s birthday have the same face as him.

Every time. And I don’t even drink. 🤡