A new exhibit up at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City showcases the in-depth research that goes into Pixar's films. Here's an early (early) Woody from Toy Story by Jeff Pidgeon.

Another early Woody, by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher.

These watercolor and paper renditions of Riley and the emotions of Inside Out, by Ricky Nierva, are an early-stage look at the characters.

But, they are certainly not the earliest. Creating Pixar characters can sometimes start with simplified, abstract shapes.

In The Incredibles, the Parr's home is top-to-bottom California Modern. The renderings, by Ted Blackman, could easily be from a real architecture firm.

To make California Modern real, the Parr's furniture had to be just right. Drawings by Teddy Newton.

A colorscript by Lou Romano for The Incredibles shows how color palettes were developed for different locales.

To get audiences to buy into an imaginary world, Pixar's designers have to root character design in the real world. These motion studies, by Bolehm Bouchiba, look at how a rat might really move.

Same goes for these animation thumbnails, by Bolehm Bouchiba, study

Designers working on Ratatouille even studied real-life cherries to make sure the fruit looked believable. Digital painting by Robert Kondo.

The ink-and-paper making of Wall-E, by Jay Shuster.

Installation view of "Pixar: The Design of Story." Photo by Matt Flynn

For Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up, the designers even created accurate plumbing infrastructure, seen only from underneath.

The house is based on a Victorian-style home in Berkeley, California, and an annotated diagram on display at Cooper Hewitt shows where the designers specified nearly microscopic details like patinated copper at the base of the chimney and the scale and frequency at which cracks in the paint would appear.