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.
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.
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. Below is a comparison of the traditional CG render, and then the show's style applied. The ability to review their work with stylization enabled a lot of departments to make consistent artistic choices with confidence.