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Constructing the underwater world of Finding Dory

Published: 24 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

One of the primary challenges in making a sequel to a beloved film, such as Finding Nemo, is finding a way to make the world familiar while also awe-inspiringly new. In Finding Dory, we not only revisited familiar coral reefs, but also ventured through the wreckage of a container ship, and swam through a swaying kelp forest. Starting with sets that were extracted from rib files from the first film, we painstakingly reconstructed some of the iconic reef environments in our modern pipeline. The level of desired complexity in these sets required us to build and adopt a point-and-click method of prop placement, in order to speed construction. Parts of the reef that were cheats in the first film were rebuilt in Maya and Houdini as true geometry with far greater levels of detail. Props that needed movement were simulated and cached in a generic way that could be adjusted in each shot. The set dressing artists employed a wide variety of coral, rock and vegetation models in the initial construction of the sets, followed by extensive dressing on a per-shot basis, to better lead the eye of the viewer. Combining technical and artistic effort, the modeling, dressing and tech teams came together to breathe new life into some old sets.

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  • (2023)Elemental Characters: The Living Vegetation of Element CityACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Talks10.1145/3587421.3595430(1-2)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGGRAPH '16: ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Talks
July 2016
158 pages
ISBN:9781450342827
DOI:10.1145/2897839
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 July 2016

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  1. Finding Dory
  2. Houdini
  3. Maya
  4. environments
  5. modeling
  6. set dressing
  7. vegetation

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SIGGRAPH '16
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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,822 of 8,601 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Elemental Characters: The Living Vegetation of Element CityACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Talks10.1145/3587421.3595430(1-2)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023

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