Luna

Lighting is at the heart of how Pixar tells its stories

By shaping light, color, shadows, and atmosphere artists bring a 3D scene to life. At Pixar, lighting plays a critical role in storytelling, guiding emotion, focus, and the cinematic look of every shot.

Lighters at Pixar traditionally worked one shot at a time, navigating fragmented technical workflows.

Before Luna, Pixar’s lighting artists relied on third-party software that was slow and disconnected from the rest of their tools. Lighting a single film already takes months, but clunky software and slow renders made every small change a painful wait, stretching the process out even further. Something had to change.

Enter Luna - Real time interactive lighting that allows lighters to iterate across multiple shots

I was tasked with helping reimagine Pixar’s lighting workflow through Luna, a tool designed to replace traditional shot-by-shot lighting with faster, more intuitive, and procedural workflows.

Luna introduced a new paradigm for interactive lighting workflows.

Luna made the world’s first interactive multi shot lighting world possible.

The first goal was to enable artists to work across multiple shots simultaneously.

My first project was to design a a first ever multi rendering editor built for parallel shot workflows, enabling artists to iterate across multiple shots simultaneously.

Monitor enabled artists to work across multiple shots simultaneously, preview changes, and make lighting adjustments in near real time.

While reviewing renders, artists also needed access to critical render information and tools at a glance.

To support interaction across multiple shots, I designed a flexible sidebar that adapts to display tools, image information, and layer hierarchies.

The next challenge was enabling artists to manage thousands of lights simultaneously. We needed a scalable, procedural approach

To make large-scale asset management more efficient, we developed a regex-like query language for performing complex bulk operations. I designed the Collections Editor, an interactive interface that enabled artists to learn the language, compose queries, and confidently manage large collections of assets.

Certain workflows required more granular control, leading to the need for dedicated editors.

Another key workflow was enabling artists to shade lights. I designed a node-based Light Paint Editor that allowed them to create and manage shaders for dome and rect lights.

A new system called for a new visual language to support emerging workflows.

I also contributed to the design system by creating UI components, design tokens, and icons to improve consistency across Pixar’s tools.

Luna powered the lighting workflow for Toy Story 5.

Closing

Building my first set of VFX tools taught me that designing for expert artists requires deep empathy, humility, a vision and continuous iteration. These workflows are incredibly complex, and there is rarely a single perfect solution. Working closely with artists helped me understand their craft, embrace ambiguity, and design through constant feedback and refinement.