Artist-Friendly Level-of-Detail in a Fur-Filled World

The geometric complexity required to create a city filled with furry animals in Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia necessitated a new approach to level-of-detail for our in-house primitive generator, XGen. The characters spanned the breadth of the animal kingdom, from a mouse to an elephant, and each presented challenges with scale and fur quality. Early test scenes proved unmanageable to render with even a few characters and we knew some sequences called for thousands of them. To address this, we updated XGen's underlying pruning algorithm, refreshed the user interface, and developed a new wedge rendering tool designed to help streamline the fine-tuning of level-of-detail settings for optimal efficiency.