DISNEY ANIMATION
DISNEY ANIMATION CAREERS
Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology developed a new automated data management system that migrates production resources between storage tiers and cleans up unneeded data throughout a film’s lifetime. The system ensures no disruption to end users and maintains data integrity while also aiming to be user-friendly, scalable, and observable.
In Disney’s Zootopia 2, thousands of mammals gather at a Desert Festival. The expansive layout of the set, alongside the need for art-directed performances, required an efficient, multi-scale crowds approach. Environment-driven systems for large-scale movement, automated placement of authored group performances, and procedural character animation, all proved effective at scale.
UsdSkelPointInstancer is a new USD schema for crowds that combines packed arrays for agent data with prototypes built from shareable UsdSkel components. The increased speed and reduced memory of the new representation was used successfully to represent large crowds on Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia 2.
Based on real production examples, Hydra in Production will present best practices and case studies of how to integrate OpenUSD's Hydra library into a content creation tool or pipeline, and leverage it to solve complex pipeline challenges and enable powerful workflows. This is a companion course to USD in Production.
When building upon a beloved franchise like Zootopia, the artists of Walt Disney Animation Studios had to consider every detail that makes the world unique and its characters memorable. By combining the famous bunny and fox duo with a herd of new animated animals and environments, artists developed new rules and techniques to expand the world in genuine and exciting ways.In this session, the Zootopia 2 leadership team will take you on a wild journey through the film’s worldbuilding. They will explore what it took to visualize marshes, mountains, deserts, and tundra, and discuss the development of new characters like Gary De’Snake and the Lynxley family. They will also share new workflows and tools throughout the discussion that allowed for collaboration across multiple departments, and enabled the crew to tackle an adventurous and expansive body of work.
This hands-on course focuses on debugging USD composition in production. Participants gain practical experience authoring data across composition arcs and diagnosing issues in complex scenes. Building on USD in Production, the course emphasizes interactive use of modern debugging and visualization tools to understand how opinions, overrides, and data resolve.
Capturing the look and performance of Gary De’Snake’s scales in an appealing way was a key challenge in Disney’s Zootopia 2. New procedural workflows for creating and deforming scales made it possible for artists to efficiently achieve the desired look/motion while allowing for specific art-direction and exaggerated animation performance.
Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia 2 was the first film to adopt Disney's Hyperion Renderer's second-generation path guiding system. Building on lessons we previously shared in “Path Guiding in Production and Recent Advancements”, this talk presents new advancements of our system that enabled large-scale adoption, improving workflows and rendering efficiency.
Choosing a BVH structure for accelerating ray tracing applications typically involves trading off between BVH build/update speed and BVH traversal speed. We introduce a hybrid BVH structure that combines the strengths of both the standard two-level structure and a monolithic single-level BVH, while minimizing the downsides of either approach.
Walt Disney Animation Studios' Versa is a beautifully emotional six minute short, where volumes make up everything across both environments and characters. This talk explores how we enabled new workflows and achieved cross-departmental collaboration with Effects to bring this unique short to life.