SIGGRAPH 2025

A new variation on an old classic, Steerable Perlin Noise offers anisotropic noise at little extra cost, offering a new dimension of control to the average artist.

Disney Animation makes heavy use of Ptex, which required a texture streaming pipeline. The goal was to create a scalable system to provide a real-time experience even as the number of Ptex expand into thousands. We cap the maximum size of the GPU cache, and employ a LRU eviction scheme.

In Disney's Moana 2, crafting the intricate hair and cloth motion to support and enhance the complex character performances required a new strategic approach. This involved performance categorization, continuity through visual planning, and iterative refinement, enabling Technical Animation to achieve the highly art-directed shots with consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Based on real production examples, this Universal Scene Description (USD) course will expand upon previously presented best practices for pipeline infrastructure and integration. Presenters will walk through how they are more powerfully leveraging USD, building flexible, context-driven workflows, while balancing optimizations for consumer and author performance.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fly? To soar among the clouds on an adventure with Peter Pan?

That was the question Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios set out to answer with Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure, the new attraction which opened in June of 2024 in Tokyo DisneySea’s Fantasy Springs. The development of this major new ride-through adventure took over seven years, with hundreds of artists, technicians, and software developers partnering to get it off the ground.

In this session, our panelists will discuss the collaborative efforts between Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios as they crafted the visually immersive, stereoscopic experience. We’ll go into detail about the visual and story development process, the creation of 3D assets based on the original hand-drawn theatrical film, and the technical innovations created throughout the project. This undertaking was a unique opportunity where Disney Animation artists got to take part in the magic that Walt Disney Imagineering creates every day.

Join us as we discuss the “faith, trust and pixie dust” that ensured a trip to Never Land became a reality.

We will share some nitty-gritty details and challenges when integrating path guiding into production rendering systems.

Lighting plays is key in Disney Animation films. For Moana 2, we developed a new lighting workflow in Houdini, empowering artists with more control while reducing creative barriers. This talk explores how we enabled new workflows, mirrored successful experiences, and eased the transition with new tools in a legacy system.

Scenes in which multiple characters come to life to achieve a cohesive performance present a unique set of animation challenges. While the techniques and workflows evolve, there are constant underlying principles. With examples, we present a distillation of the essence of the art of crowds animation through Disney Animation films.

Collisions are a key problem in generating complex crowds animation. The mudskippers in Walt Disney Animation Studios' Moana 2 presented a particularly challenging scenario as they pack tightly together to form a towering pile. Our solution introduces an additional simulation step to deform the skinned character meshes to resolve contact.

The directors of cinematography of Moana 2 talk through the lighting design and the camera language used across three of the songs and how it supports the progression of Moana's physical and emotional journey, touching on themes of "Heightened Reality", "Chaotic Theatrics" and "Playful abstraction".