cinema history - What technology did each Pixar movie introduce? - Movies & TV

I recall reading years ago that each Pixar film included some new technology or capability to their internal rendering software that they they'd developed as part of making that film. Monsters Inc. for example introduced fur. This article makes mention of this tradition as well:

Pixar’s subsequent films act like a timeline of technological developments in computer graphics. Building on the work of other researchers, 2001’s Monsters, Inc. introduced the on-screen representation of fur. Two years later, Finding Nemo pioneered new techniques in digital lighting, which were used to create realistic-looking water. The Incredibles and Ratatouille brought with them believable human characters, and advances in the simulation of crowds and fluids.

My question is, what technological development did each Pixar film introduce?

Answer

Here you can find all technical memo's and publications of Pixar. Most of them can be directly related to the movie they are developed for, or used in by the images provided.
Note that many of their publications are published in SIGGRAPH, which is one of the worlds biggest conferences/journals on Computer Graphics/animations. So they do new and innovative stuff all the time, though some of their novelties are not made for a specific movie directly. It seems they have people working on their rendering and simulation tools in general, while others try to achieve certain effects required for a specific movie.

I think that for their first movies they didn't publish as much since they still needed a solid ground in the movie business. Furthermore, it takes time to be able to develop new stuff. Also they improve on their techniques every movie (see for example the rendering of hair). So this list is unfortunately incomplete, but gives a nice overview of the published novelties per movie.

General:

Movie techniques:

• Chess game (short movie) - Subdivision Surfaces in Character
  Animation



• Monster Inc - Untangling Cloth


• The incredibles - Simulation and Rendering of Hair


• Cars - Lighting engine, Acceleration for Animated Global Illumination, Interactive depth of field and Ray tracing


• Ratatouille - Crowd animation, articulating appeal, Acting with contact in animation, Food animation, Surface from particles rendering, Simplification of Aggregate Detail, Soft reflections, simulating white water rapids, Hair/fur rendering, cloth simulation and Harmonic coordinates


• Monsters University - Better global lighting and Physics based lighting


• Brave - Curly hair and Large scale geometric visibility


• Multiple movies (Toy Story 3, UP!, Pirates of the Caribean) Point based global illumination

List without papers, but notable used techniques:

• Toy story: First big feature animation movie, new re-rendering techniques


• Toy story 2: Acting and behavior of animations


• A bugs life: Fluid animation


• Monster's Inc: Fur


• Finding Nemo: Underwater rendering, sea surface


• Ratatouille: Cutting food and wet fur