DISNEY ANIMATION
DISNEY ANIMATION CAREERS
We're excited to be a part of SIGGRAPH’s 50th year in Los Angeles this August! Join our talent community & connect with us at the event. We look forward to meeting you!
Exploring new workflows, we leveraged Houdini to supplement Disney’s XGen in order to translate the aesthetic of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Strange World onto a fur groom for the family’s lovable dog, Legend.
Walt Disney Animation Studios presents techniques and lessons learned to optimize our Pixar Universal Scene Description (USD)-based pipeline’s asset structure and redesign our change management, as more of our workflows transition to USD, increasing our need for scalable interactive performance.
In Disney's Strange World, the handmade quality of the costumes was a creative need for representing the technological limits of the setting, Avalonia. We expanded and standardized our authoring workflows for curve-based fabrics to provide simplified artistic controls, handle complex woven patterning, and support finishing techniques like hems and stitches.
In Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Strange World, the character Splat presented unique artistic requirements posing computational challenges. We present solutions to two of these: a chromatic edge along the outer rim of the character, and an efficient, deforming, heterogeneous volume for the inner glow within Splat.
Disney's Strange World teems with a wide variety of fantastical creatures. The film contains over 65 million crowds elements, both in the background and as part of key foreground performances. New crowds tools and pipeline optimizations were introduced to meet the film's challenges and bring the world to life.
The craft of Disney storytelling, animation and technology has been handed down, generation to generation, for more than fifty years since the establishment of the Talent Development program in 1971. That legacy continues with students and recent graduates who join us from around the world for mentored, hands-on experiences and unforgettable opportunities. Join us as we share how Trainees and Apprentices apply their craft in the context of production, and as we provide industry insights to support educators in preparing the innovators and storytellers of tomorrow.
Looking to expand your understanding of career tracks and possibilities in the animation industry? Stop by and connect with Walt Disney Animation Studios’ production and technology artists and recruiters as they answer your questions and share about their experience. This session is designed for those early in their career or pivoting their professional experience in animation, technology, computer graphics, or related field. Stop by and say hello - we’re excited to meet you!
In Disney's Strange World, the Pando Thrower unleashes a dramatic stream of lightning and high-energy particles. In this talk, we explore the artistic and technical challenges of using neural style transfer to combine the distinctly different natural phenomena of smoke and lightning into one fantastical event.
Curious about what it’s like to get your foot in the door as a technology intern or associate technical director? Join Tabatha Hickman (Sr. Engineer), Shweta Viswanathan (General TD) and Nick Weidner (Engineer) as they share their journeys to Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Drop in during the hour to meet with members of our Disney Animation production and recruitment teams who will be on hand to answer questions and share insights. Stop by and say hello - we’re excited to meet you!
Come join the women in technology at Walt Disney Animation Studios as they discuss different career tracks within Animation Technology. Panelists will share their unique knowledge of the field along with how they navigated their careers and thrived in this dynamic industry. If you have ever wondered what working in Animation Technology at Disney Animation is like, this is the talk for you. Bring your questions and be part of the discussion!
Panelists:Munira Tayabji (Moderator), Director of Production TechnologyMaryann Simmons, Sr Staff EngineerKendall Litaker, Associate Technical SupervisorCharlotte Zhu, Sr. Software EngineerNatchar Ratanasirigulchai, Software Engineer
Join the discussion with the developers and users of Universal Scene Description (USD), Hydra and OpenSubdiv, along with many other vendors and practitioners who will showcase the work done in the past year and the plans ahead.
Join Walt Disney Animation Studios’ technology and recruitment teams as they stop by the suite to meet, mingle, and share insights. Stop by and say hello - we’re excited to meet you!
In production settings where procedurally generated participating media is common, many unbiased null-collision-based rendering algorithms result in either impractical amounts of noise or excessive cost due to having unknown bounding extinctions. We introduce a consistent progressive approach which makes null-collision-based techniques resilient to non-bounding extinctions while remaining performant.
For nearly 100 years, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been a place of creativity and innovation. From the first cartoon with synchronized sound to the multiplane camera, Fantasound, Xerography, the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), and implementing the evolving artistry and sensibility of both hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery, Disney Animation has been a combination of technology and art. Marlon West, a thirty-year veteran of the studio and VFX supervisor of the upcoming Disney+ series, Iwájú, will discuss his own journey, the studio’s journey through many technical advances, and look at how the past inspires and drives the future.
Swoop is a tool that allows artists to easily animate motion along a trajectory. It provides an intuitive interface for users to author and edit a Swoop curve, bind one or more objects to that Swoop curve, and easily animate the timing, spacing, twist, and offset of the bound objects.
Based on real production examples, this Universal Scene Description (USD) course will provide an overview of how to integrate USD in a pipeline by going through best practices for deciding asset structures, how to leverage APIs to build interactive workflows, and maximizing performance at render time.
We present a method to accelerate collision detection for high-order elements based on sum-of-squares programming (SOSP) by as much as 300x. Additionally, we formulate collision detection for new high-order geometries and trajectories. This enhances the applicability of SOSP in practice.