What new animation technology was developed for Daffodil?

Toy Story 5 developed invertible rigging for Daffodil, the horse character. It was created to make her complex body movements easier to animate and control.

Pixar studied a real horse brought to its campus, then spent more than a year building, rigging and simulating Daffodil. The new system lets animators manipulate a character in several directions: they can bend a finger, pull a hand, move an elbow or adjust a shoulder, with the rest of the pose updating naturally.

The technology combines direct manipulation with inverse and forward kinematics. It also helps solve practical contact problems, such as how Daffodil's feet meet the ground and how her ankles roll. This reduced the need for riggers to create separate controls for every special movement.

Invertible rigging is easy to confuse with Pixar's other Toy Story 5 innovations. RenderMan XPU improved rendering speed, while Luna expanded lighting workflows; neither is the horse-animation system. The term refers specifically to Daffodil's character rig and the flexible way animators can pose her.