Nathan Devlin
ABSTRACT
The fantastical, frenzied environment of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 61st film "Strange World" necessitated an ecosystem teeming with unique creatures that form the literal lifeblood of the film. Multiple new tools and pipeline optimizations were required to handle the large scope of the project. We present a hybrid Crowds system combining Pixar’s UsdSkel [Pixar 2023] and a USD point-based caching system that uses our in-house instancer Aurora. Our method combines the flexibility of skeletal manipulation of character animation cycles for foreground elements with robust scalability to allow for millions of characters in the background. In addition, we describe tool sets for the creation of notable creature performances including procedural "Goblinswill" streams, a flocking system for "Terrordactyls," and a swarming system for "Reapers."
Supplemental Material
- Moe El-Ali, Le Tong, Josh Richards, Tuan Nguyen, Alberto Luceño Ros, and Norman Moses Joseph. 2016. Zootopia Crowd Pipeline. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Talks (Anaheim, California) (SIGGRAPH ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 59, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2897839.2927467Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Nicolas Nghiem. 2021. Mathematical Tricks for Scalable and Appealing Crowds in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ "Raya and the Last Dragon". In ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Talks (Virtual Event, USA) (SIGGRAPH ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450623.3464650Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pixar. 2023. Universal Scene Description, version 23.05.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Creating Creature Chaos: The Methods that Brought Crowds to the Forefront on Disney’s
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