DISNEY ANIMATION
DISNEY ANIMATION CAREERS
Technical Directors (TDs) are key to enabling the artistic vision of the show at scale. The TDs develop and support the production pipeline. As liaisons between artistic and technology departments, the TDs create tools and processes that enable artists to interface with proprietary and industry applications effectively to deliver their vision to other departments. Each film has its own artistic and technical challenges, so TD work commonly involves creating inventive solutions to problems in production.
Fur is an integral part of Zootopia 2. It was a collaborative effort to take our furry friends through the production pipeline, and the Technical Director teams were involved throughout the process. For Animation to be able to create a believable performance, the TD team helped with a process to visualize fur in our animation software package, Presto. For characters like Nick and Pawbert, it was essential for animators to be able to pose their whiskers as well as Nick’s tail, and the TD teams partnered with the Rigging team to develop a process for this. TDs helped support the fur motion pipeline developed by Technical Animation and our Hair & Cloth team to add wind motion through the fur. And from a rendering standpoint, fur is heavy – from fur on small characters like mice and shrews to large animals like lions, tigers and giraffes. A lot of work was put into optimizing the fur so that our Lighting team could render it efficiently. Our Look and Lighting teams then took it to the next level, creating the finished frame you see on screen.
The world of Zootopia is an urban metropolis with a lot of hustle and bustle. The chase scene at the beginning of the film was filled with a lot of fun challenges like animals driving cars, large crowds, police car sirens, and more. The Technical Director team helped with many different pipeline processes pertaining to vehicles. The team developed a pipeline to allow animators to easily animate a vehicle driving along a path. They also worked with Rigging to allow for our car wheels to rotate correctly when charging at breakneck speeds. With moving vehicles in a busy road, the TDs collaborated with the Lighting team to build a pipeline to help create believable lighting for the shot for things like sirens in cars, brake lights, head lights, and more. The TD team worked with the Crowds and Rigging teams to help bring our crowds and animals driving various vehicles to life.
A key part of the world of Moana is Maui’s moving tattoos, including a tattoo version of Maui that we call Mini Maui. The tattoos were animated on paper in a traditional hand-drawn process by legendary Disney animator Eric Goldberg and his team, before being scanned into 2D software to create digital images for ink, paint, and clean-up.
To support this workflow, the Technical Director team created a custom pipeline to format the 2D animation into one of twelve tattoo templates that corresponded to different regions of the body, such as his bicep. The TD team developed a user interface to allow 2D artists to select which region of CG Maui’s body they wanted the animation to be applied to. Additionally, the TDs developed preview and render workflows so CG animators and technical animation artists could see the 2D animation on CG Maui as they polished performance. Finally, the Look Development and Lighting teams brought the tattoos to life with a realistic tattoo skin shader and lighting that highlighted Mini Maui’s motion.
Traditional render compared with Wish's style applied.
The visual art direction for Wish called for a highly stylized look, which included linework and watercolor effects like edge pooling. The Lighting department found a way to achieve the desired look in composite, but it was difficult for other departments to visualize the stylization from traditional renders. To help all departments visualize the final stylized look, the TDs worked in conjunction with the artistic departments to create a new system to automatically apply stylization to every render. The ability to review their work with stylization enabled a lot of departments to make consistent artistic choices with confidence.